Tag: happiness

Speculative Naturalism

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Through the moral relativity of semiotic space-time, causality-in-itself reveals its essence as an Abstract Machine, continuously axiomatizing universalization of agency; we must treat this with some suspicion, in addition to the skepticism of methodological naturalism. Mechanical determinism and spiritual dualism insert themselves throughout early modern philosophy because the political and religious motives of the philosopher. Every invocation of pure causality accompanies a re-territorialization and an attempt to isolate, control, or absorb. The debate over consciousness, space-time, and knowledge is a political, social, and ecological debate.

Causality and space-time relativity imply intelligent consciousness and testing its freedom through the consequences of actions, thereby inducing a presupposition of a certain system of morality implicit in its own exploration. This is the clear paradox of Quantum Liberty. On the one hand, if we take seriously William James’ hypothesis of pure mechanical determinism in Essays in Radical Empiricism, and believe that choice and volition are passive experiences 3msec after the body has completed the physical work in the brain, probability lies in favor that we carry on with our current narrative, feeling of choices and freedom, as well as habits, patterns, and actions. While extreme mechanical determinism may give rise to serious pessimism, we already see that neuroscientist who take determinism seriously go about their days, working and living as if freedom and causality make trivial difference in the absence of religious prejudices. While James gives some flawed arguments in terms of logic and syntax, his ultimate proposition has grown increasingly clear now that we take both mind and matter out of the equation.

The cosmos encodes itself in information that is neither material nor mental, but a superposition of what we once meant by the two. Everything is code, though we have not fully explored that regime of signs in which this quantum sub-stratum interacts. Through particularized collapse of wave-like probabilities, some of this information concretizes into material events, giving way to stratifications of power-law dynamics. These power-law stratifications, like the interference pattern of the unobserved wave, provides for “thickenings” of probability densities at which we may find continuous irreducibility with great certainty; molecular, protein, molar, galactic.

Observation collapses the quantum wave function, but this is not human-visual observation, which would still be a material interaction, it is the quantum observation of a material apparatuses that collapses the wavefunction. Even in the delayed choice quantum eraser, observation is an object-object event. These are only “objects” in human linguistics, however; the speculative naturalism places the interaction of assemblages at this strata at the level of energy events, information re-territorializing and exchanging codes of truth-value.

Observer collapse does not imply privilege for human consciousness. To say a human observer collapses the quantum event is confusion of levels, an application of molar signification upon universalization of molecular consequences. Like the choice of what word to type next in a sentence, there is a finite but immense number of words to select from d assemblages at many levels of stratification present clear mechanical rules in the chain of events we summarize with “typing” at the semiotic level. We have so little discomfort with the probability density of constant conjunction at the galactic strata and the biochemical strata that our discomfort at the semiotic level becomes illogical.

We can extend the principles of quantum mechanics more easily to linguistics than we can apply semiotic “laws” of encoding. While they present a diligently alien criticism, Deleuze and Guattari remain an extensive suite of tools. The abstruse manner of their writing conceals at times their brilliance, but this is either intentional or due to their political goals. Let it suffice that in valuation-signification, continuous irreducibility of semiotic regimes will emerge as power-laws from highly chaotic systems. Guattari finally provides clear articulation in Machinic Unconscious, wherein we see that the official language of the State, the old language of the law, the monetary language of capitalism, and the micro-political dialects of the social systems they re-territorialize; these all emerge into power-laws that backpropagate systems of inequalities. Regimes of signs undertake social engineering in an emergent semiotic selection. This is the social unconscious, necessitating comprehensive re-valuation of the moralities implied by enforced linguistics.

The influence of Observer semiotics in Machinic Epistenomics likewise emerges from an encoding process that collapses the wavelike open possibilities of energy events into concretized meaning. At the strata of semiotic process control, the rhizomatic flows become particularized material for social, legal, scientific, capitalistic exchanges. In their arborescence, semiotic systems appear deterministic. However, this is neither the chaos of rhizomes nor the determinism of linguistic syntax trees, Quantum Liberty is a line of flight in superposition between the mutagenic dialect exchange of free thought and speech at its quantum level and the emergent power-law constructs that provide normative rational boundaries for their operation at-scale. We should take seriously the implications of Guattari’s arguments, though we find his conclusions extreme. Between the quanta of communism and the concretized material of fascism, we must continuously re-territorialize a liberated capitalism aimed at long-run ecological viability. It is not that normative boundaries are immoral subjection, but that our current justice system may place international, domestic, and environmental stability at risk.

All of this points to the critical leadership necessary for the future of machinic virtualization of morality. To claim that all cosmic action set in motion follows permanent mechanical laws and we passively experience them as a meaningless perpetual flux is not only a premature conclusion, but one that leads to moral bankruptcy. To claim that all cosmic action is a simulation displayed holographically by an intentional designer is an escape mechanism, likewise a premature conclusion, but one that leads to collective refusal to face the full alienation and anxiety of our moral responsibility, diffusion of which leads to systemic insolvency. The rise of information theory and machine intelligence instructs us in retrospect and will continue to provide additional insight. Virtualization relies on code that is utterly foreign to the ultimate display and the user. The machines that process, apply rules, validate, compile, and finally display to us a sensory experience, whether computer or biological, lie at different strata. All this virtualization emerges from systems of information events. When rationalism and determinism result in insolvent systems, we must displace uncertainty and act based on weighted probability logic.

Returning to speculative naturalism and the nature of metaphysics after Bell Burnell, Einstein, Bohr, Bohm, De Broglie; we remain uncertain whether we reject relativity, constants, or dimensional prejudices. The importance of nonlocality, wave functions, orchestration, and stratified determinism must not become mystic escapisms. The conclusions of speculative naturalism, including moral and ecological ramifications, lie within the limits of intelligent responsibility based on science and logic. There are very few who consider determinism or causal agency out of purely theoretical consideration. Both past and present, these were typically bourgeois academicians. Some look to quantum mechanics and neurobiology for an answer to what ethic, if any, may receive justification. Anyone claiming to already have this answer invokes an abstract machine, miraculated as a false universalized backpropogation, to attain expansion of control.

To develop an uncertainty principle of Epistenomics, we will need a superposition of conjunction, disjunction, conjunction-disjunction, and non-conjunction-non-disjunction. This is not an easy task. Conjunction as a vector emerges from perpetual flux as it coagulates into patterns of meaning. Disjunction as a vector emerges from signification of assemblages, patterns of meaning separated from the perpetual flux by superimposition of value. Conjunction-Disjunction provides probability density, as conjunction of patterns of meaning and disjunction of signification of becoming produce space-time conception and arborescent normalization, objectification, and dichotomies. Non-conjunction-non-disjunction traces the rhizomatic relations between the assemblages as flux rather than machine. The superposition principle of Epistenomics folds into becoming causality-freedom, an orchestrated co-determinant positive reduction of will-to-power into concretized assemblages, relativity of massive information densities generates probability gravity. The swerve of will-to-power through consciousness gives Epistenomics its quantum liberty through machinic virtualization.

The main shortcoming of academic philosophy is the ongoing binary classification of idealism, rationalism, mysticism systems juxtaposed against analytical, realism, determinism systems. There is a third dimension that traces its way through Hume, Nietzsche, Schelling, Russell, and William James, Gare, and Whitehead, among others, in which the pragmatists definition of truth-value allows speculative naturalism to fold trust into possibility. Speculative naturalism relies on the technological capacity of conscious intelligence to make object-object relations visual to subject-object phenomena. Doubt of some single element of the perpetual flux becomes increasingly difficult when infrared, sonar, radiology, MRI, thermal imaging, sonograms, microscopes, digital cameras, and computers overlay in numerous ways some significance to the object-object relationship pragmatically trustworthy at our level of observation.

This resolution of doubts through the empirical confirmation of rational deductions combined with multiple “leap of faith” competing hypotheses leaves three major camps. First, naïve realism leaves no room for doubt and mechanical determinism precedes our passive experience of perpetual flux. Second, simulation idealism continues the Orphic hope for a metasystem that processes and justifies total freedom, the search for but eternity and time travel. The third approach, speculative naturalism, pursues improved elucidation of the consequences of our questions, imagines creative solutions, but tests several hypotheses instead of partisan warfare. In this sense it appears “dialectical” in retrospect, but in continuous experimentation and becoming, it is not a synthesis, but a suspension.

A science of logic and a science of ethics is possible. The first step is the removal of human privilege. Truth, justice, and moral responsibility must maintain consistency and coherence across conscious subjects, human, animal, machine, virtual, alien, or an amalgamation of any combination. It is unlikely we will remain alone in the universe, by one means or another. The optimistic faith of rationalism centers the universe upon each solipsistic subject. The pessimistic laws of realism leave it out subjects and morals altogether, a belief only held temporarily by a handful as an excuse for any action they desire. Speculative Naturalism denies both premature conclusions and respects the orchestration of intelligent consciousness without privileging to a point of insanity. Thus, Machinic Virtualization must explore a morality, ethic, and logic that will not leave us the primitive barbarians of the cosmos.

Mechanization & Machination

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Marx, Deleuze & Guattari, and more recently, Raunig go to immense lengths to elucidate the predicate logic implied by the etymology of machina. Raunig shows kindness to the English-speaking audience by likening this importance to the double signification of invention. Invention may signify: a) mechanization, that is, the solution to a problem, inefficiency, or risk, by enclosing within a complex object the knowledge that typically requires practice and virtuosity; b) machination, that is, the fiction, misleading, plotting, or scheme that convinces an audience of a “false cause” as described by Schopenhauer, a manipulation known to magicians, storytellers, filmmakers, and warfighting.

We will take each meaning within our wave-particle duality as we describe the rhizomatic paths. The strict capitalist treats invention as an object of commerce, systems of analysis are well-maintained regarding assets, depreciation, and procurement. Under arborescence, the invention represents clear intention and value, behaving particle-like in its singular existential instantiation. A more skeptical view, generalizing invention to understand its unintended consequences, shows the wave-like behavior of invention generalized as a system of objects. This wave function is complex because it must trace the path of its rhizomes. The complex function of invention represents holistic probabilities. The wave combines all its real, positive, non-imaginary instantiations, filling in gaps with probability densities. In this way, it reveals the impact on the population of opportunities over time.

Invention, as both mechanization and machination, is the foundation of human socioeconomic progress. Our analysis here will develop a reusable pattern. On the one hand, as empiricists like Hume, Locke, and William James might pursue, the arborescent collection of inventions that allow for the progressive mechanization of human labor. On the other hand, as rationalists like Descartes might pursue, and as Raunig attempts to show in social terms, the abstract machine belies power that humans experience incompletely; the sum of all inventions remains less than the total of all inventions when we include those we have not yet invented. Machination occurs in the abstraction of mechanization, both positive and negative. Mechanization treated positively in arborescence reaches one series of conclusions, while machination treated negatively in rhizomatic moral judgement reaches a different series of conclusions. The full truth-value of semiotic inventions requires a quantum superposition of each and all.

Pure arborescence cares for the strict articulation of aggregated instances exclusively. No accounting for the number and distributions of machines provides for its generalization. The semiotic leap to a generalization occurs prior to the conclusions this abstraction will claim. Mechanization is the collapse of so many truth-value particles. From simple machines like pulleys, levers, and fulcrums, to the machines of the industrial revolution, arborescence accounts for them, in the professional sense of the term, rather than criticizing in the social sense. This generalization through incomplete aggregation tends to treatment of mechanization as an implicit good. The probable semiotic universal becomes tied up with two forms of trust, one of probability and one of morality.

The concept, however, does not remain in the realm of positive particle instantiation. Generalizing suspends disbelief of the sign, bridging the moral valuation-signification along with the semiotic, both molar and molecular. If the moral value held true to the semiotic value, if the wave-particle relationship of generalization remained trustworthy, we would give little thought to the rhizomes. In this case, with Marx, we find a machination born of generalized mechanization. The intended particle consequences of each invention and the actual particle consequences of each invention produce unintended consequences in aggregation.

Simply, we come to a moment when the generalization of the promises of signs, machines, and commodities reveals itself to signify something else, something more, something wrong. Tracing the machinations of generalized mechanization has been the ongoing method of the Postmodernists. The divorce between the semiotic trust and our moral trust, such as the faith that one machine makes labor easier, smoother, and more consistent, but a thousand machines entrap us, enslave us, and turn us all into janitors rather than craftsmen – this we call alienation.

                The school of suspicion in the late 1800’s recognized that the arguments of philosophy had ignored the relationship of trust necessary for the generalization of concepts. Marx explored the alienation of the laborer to the machination of capitalist mechanization. Nietzsche explored the alienation of morality from the instincts that preserve the vitality, ingenuity, and resilience of the species. Sigmund Freud explored the alienation of psyche from its libidinal forces. Everywhere that the particle may accept its singularity of mechanization, suspicion suggests we look for a wave function – not simply to predict with increasing probability the appearance of new concretized opportunities, but to also find emergent anti-patterns in the decentralized wave. Feuerbach, who Engels cites as influential, reveals the alienation of organized religion through (as we are calling it) the backpropogation of the abstraction of deity:

“RELIGION is the relation of man to his own nature, – therein lies its truth and its power of moral amelioration; – but to his nature not recognized as his own, but regarded as another nature, separate, nay, contra-distinguished from his own: herein lies its untruth, its limitation, its contradiction to reason and morality; herein lies the noxious source of religious fanaticism, the chief metaphysical principle of human sacrifices, in a word, the prima materia of all the atrocities, all the horrible scenes, in the tragedy of religious history.”

– Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity

Through the backpropogation of the personal capacity to create particle-gods, concretized to the virtues necessary for a single Lifework, the semiotic abstraction gradually appropriates the morality of the observers into the power of the sign. Then backpropogation of the abstract, in the absence of the trust of mothers and fathers teaching their children the process of god-formation, the semiotic and moral unite to enslave the entire population. Hobbes wants us to tread lightly, as seen in Leviathan, when challenging the moral system in despotic control, fearful that entire system falls apart. Nietzsche blinks in disbelief as he applies the ideas of liberty in British political philosophy onto the recently emancipated serf of Eastern Germany. Writing in isolation in Switzerland, the ideas of utilitarianism and the childhood memories of workers in Leipzig left him nauseated, if you believe his account. The dissonance drove the passionate pro-aristocratic sentiment he expressed through praise of the “master morality” of Greek and Roman virtue ethics and the “slave morality” of institutionalized monotheistic religion in the Judeo-Islamic-Christian tradition.

For the 21st century reader, two glaring sources of ignorant thought occur throughout the skepticism of the empiricists and the virality – flipping the rhizomes up toward a new arborescent analysis – of the school of suspicion. First is the absence of developmental psychology, only later established by Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and others. The influence Jean-Jacque Rousseau and responses from Mary Wollstonecraft drove this improved suspicion, that parental influence, socialization, and education may play a much greater role in creating inequality of abilities than any genetic inheritance. Second is the insights of Behavioral Economics, in the proof that what many Europeans attributed to hereditary predisposition emerges from climate, population density, agricultural practices, distribution of wealth, and availability of resources.

Returning to Raunig and the invention of abstract machines, we now face a question of whether we treat society as a system of signs, social machinations, or as the enslavement of machine enclosure, social mechanization. The digital age compounds the need for a superposition principle of meaning and significance. The moral, political, economic, and mechanical have networked into an inescapable matrix, more now than even Rousseau once described.

The line between mechanization and machination blurs the moment acceleration becomes virtualization. Baudrillard shows how the question of absurd morality and the authentic life as described by Camus becomes inaccessible when the system of signs becomes indistinguishable from the machines of reality. We must toil on this question, else it drives us to despair. Having established our hermeneutics and heuristic of meta-suspicion, we must endure our time in the desert.

Two Weeks’ Notice Manifesto

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This is My Manifesto

I have had a now-familiar conversation hundreds of times in my career in the software industry. A sharp, hard-working millennial – a developer, designer, consultant, or support engineer – is completely burned out. She sees no way to change her situation without starting over somewhere else and wants to personally let me know that she’s given her two weeks’ notice. The reasons are the similar to my own when I leave a job (or begin actively interviewing).

There is an over-arching struggle to find meaningful work, the ability to take pride in it, to feel that there is a purpose to what I do, and feel that there is a path toward mastery at something I can say “This is my art”.

“I’ll stand for nothing less, or never stand again.” – Chevelle

I have quit many jobs, with or without two full weeks of notice, been laid off twice, fired once (in college), and was kicked out of the Army – and I’m still early and what is a pretty successful career in technology. Since I’ve never even once written a letter of notice or resignation, I think it is about time I draft one.

More importantly, on behalf of talented Millennials everywhere, I’d like you to know – truly understand – that the two weeks’ notice we give you as a manager typically comes weeks or even months after we crafted our mental first draft, started accepting the relentless prospecting of talent scouts, and gave up on your ability to get out of way in our search for meaningful work, a purpose, and mastery of our craft.

So this is my universal – and truly honest – Two Weeks’ Notice, for every time I didn’t write one, and for the many times in my future I most likely also won’t write one. This is my Two Weeks’ Notice Manifesto, a public statement of what it takes to make me disengage despite my natural brilliance and indefatigable enthusiasm.

Money

You played hardball with my salary when I joined and have given me no path to increase it.

You are painfully arrogant – and ignorant – regarding my value in the open market.  It currently increases by 20% per year yet you think I will settle for a 5% raise (or no raise at all).

“Started from the bottom now we here.”

Proactive efforts on my part to establish clear expectations, a career path, and an informal timeline for promotion or salary increases are answered with vague notions of trust, respect, and reputation that have nothing to do with performance or the impact I have.

Most importantly, if I am giving you this notice, I have taken every opportunity available to add more economic value than you expected of me.  I have deliberately worked to increase the impact I have on value-add processes, organization-wide efficiency and effectiveness, revenue growth, and actionable metrics.  I can now see that I have exhausted my opportunities and my tangible impact on revenue and margin is now waning – removing all leverage and motivation on my part – and it is due to poor strategic decisions outside my control or that of peers.

I’m just tryna stay alive and take care of my people
And they don’t have no award for that […]
Shit don’t come with trophies, ain’t no envelopes to open
I just do it ’cause I’m ‘sposed to – Young Money, Drake

 

Growth

You treat my initial lack of understanding of the “nuance” of your backward, inefficient “processes” as some kind of failure or lack of intelligence on my part.

“A hater’s gonna hate, hate, hate, hate […] I’m just gonna shake it off.” – Taylor Swift

You provided no actual on-boarding, leaving me to my own volition to review artifacts, like some anthropologist, in an effort to mimic current practices.

You have truly valuable constructive criticism you could provide based on the decades of experience you have over me – but you prefer sarcasm, derisive rhetorical questions, and generally insult my intelligence.

You know that you – and the company – are terrible at on-boarding and that I am intelligent enough, educated enough, and experienced enough not to put up with it; so you give me preferential treatment to shut me up rather than investing in everyone.  And no, I do not take this as a sign I should stay, it is an indication that you have no plan for the future.

You have a general disbelief regarding the breadth and depth of my knowledge, skills, and experience – attempting to restrict me to the smallest possible scope of responsibilities.

Culture

You stomp out creativity and enthusiasm organization-wide but tell me not to “lose that energy”.

You are condescending and use sarcasm and deconstructionism when you do not understand my nomenclature or the vocabulary of my academic and career specialization.

 

You focus on short-term gains and their related vanity metrics (e.g. Project ROI) rather than the flow of long-term economic value

You have created a psychologically unsafe environment for the information worker, where most employees – the only employees who last – display symptoms of learned helplessness and defeat.

So I’m tearing this and everything else,
between me and what I want to do to pieces.
I’m tearing you and everything else,
between me and you to memory. – Nonpoint

Your “leadership” strips away all possible reward for prudent risk. Any feeling of accomplishment when someone takes real initiative to accomplish something meaningful in a novel way is more than negated by the likelihood of retroactive empowerment, personal insults, or deconstruction-based criticism.

Progress

You talk about “baby steps” in internal changes or excuse your inaction due to “lack of executive buy-in” to justify to yourself why you lack the discipline and initiative to change, innovate, or evolve.

“It could have been so much worse, but it should have been better”

– Five Finger Death Punch

You are stuck in old models of business and outdated practices despite the fact you would be a very late adopter of thoroughly proven best practices, no matter how many employees have attempted to convince you.

You fail to challenge me, heaping busy work on me instead.

You see my attempts to improve myself and my peers – in my pursuit of mastery in my craft and love of investment in my tribe – as a distraction that needs to be controlled rather than an opportunity to harness.

You assume my youth (and open-minded millennialism) generally decreases the value of my knowledge – despite the fact that the tech industry and its ever-evolving best demonstrated practices make my youth in advantage when

It’s not you, it’s me.

In light of these problems and a clear and consistent history of leadership anti-patterns, I can see that you will absolutely not change and will definitely make no effort to meaningfully address my concerns in any way. Unfortunately I have outgrown you. I am different and better than I was – smarter, stronger, more passionate and more creative than the day we met. I really do appreciate the rare moments of effort to invest in me as two humans at work, building something together. I have interesting stories tell. Some of my worst days and your worst behavior rank among the most beneficial insights I have gained – of who I will not be, of who I am, of what I will fight for.

It is time for me to move on.

This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of will
Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain
And a hundred percent reason to remember the name!  – Fort Minor

 

Millennial Relativism vs Straight-Up Haters

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I’m a philosopher. Feel free to stop reading.

As a Millennial philosopher, I find myself rejected for the words I use – almost anywhere I go. This is not a lack of professionalism or knowledge. I have grown an incredibly strong professional filter and dampener, and the ability to show immense respect.  My words are precisely selected as I consult to Boomers who may never understand the depth or breadth my soul has – and will – reach.

And I, despite genius, despite my creative demon, find another scenario all-to-often.  My intricate ideas, in a moment of enthusiasm, come out in a moment of conversation with a complete hater.  They take a whiz on my cheerios, frankly.  But the joke is on them.  I’m invincible to being misunderstood in the complexity of my ideas, I practically opted in!

To be great, is to be misunderstood.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

So really, I am completely at peace with the straight-up haters; and you should be too.

Because, cultural, there is a big difference between my philosophical relativisim and whatever it is that makes people commit to one view and reject every word that fails to serve their affirmation bias.

I probably lost another 3% of readers at “affirmation bias” – have a good day though, really.

Blessed are the shallow, for the depths they’ll never find.

Now I don’t mean a blanket moral approval of everything I see, especially misconduct that is counter to established social contracts (and don’t challenge needed half-truths). I’m not talking about The Purge in real life, gone wild.

I’m talking about the kind of cultural relativism that has to take place when someone from one generation and industry and function and corporate culture meets someone from a vastly different generation and industry and function and corporate culture. I’m talking about the conversations a Boomer manufacturing operations manager has with a Millennial lean-agile mobile architect.

It is so much easier to give up, and I admit that I’m not always sure, when I’m already a disruptive influence, what to do in that grey area between psychological safety and a meaningful challenge. That’s the nature of telling people 30 years older than me how they should change the way they do their job in order to stay relevant in the information age.

The haters, on the other hand, are diametrically opposed to all relativism.

It really isn’t about morality or politics if you really watch them (and I, as a philosopher, dutifully watch them no matter what ludicrous things they dish out) – if you really watch them, there is no “stance” they are taking. No ability to excuse them for what they believe in with total nobility.

The hater engages you in deconstructionism by default. They undermine your understanding of your own words, they play stump-the-chump, they make sure – however more intelligent, educated, or experienced on a topic – that they can make you feel like shit.

These haters don’t really believe in something and offend your beliefs because the two belief systems disagree. These are the people who start with saying they don’t share your beliefs, then tell you that you’re actually terrible at your beliefs, or education, or profession.

These haters are the people who will mess with you just to see if they can, who are incapable of understanding anyone above their level. You could feel a great deal of pity for them, in fact. They are pathetic, constantly happy people. But don’t do that. Hilariously enough, if you stick around a few weeks, with the strength to show them patience they’ll never accomplish – they’ll start spouting off your words! and not even now they ought thank you. What sad state of continuous dependency to be in. But – As Nietzsche said, “There’s enough pity in the world to choke anyone that feels it all.” Shake it off. Cuz haters gonna hate. They’re absolutely jealous – and terrified – of us.

Frankly, my mother was right.

You have to just ignore them.

On the other hand, empathy, dialogue, and an open mind will get you a long way – despite the culture shock – when you’re grappling ideas with people who care deeply about their craft and simply don’t understand the nuances of your craft. If you are like me, whether it’s just a postmodern millennial trait, or part of the tech industry in the digital age, you’ll see this quite a bit for the next few decade. Retirement age is going up, and most people aren’t keeping up.

They built their careers – their lives – around being taken seriously about just one thing. For them, a challenge to that one thing will be a disaster. They feel terrified they’ll never be taken seriously again.

Unfortunately, they’re right.

You don’t need to carry them as a free rider, but if you’re like me you probably weren’t sticking around long enough to let them do it anyway. Most companies, from my experience, aren’t changing much of anything – certainly not enough to hurt those out of touch Boomers, but – sadly – definitely not enough to make work meaningful for Millennials like us, who just want to leave the world better than it the way it is getting handed to us.

So you and I, as the vibrant, multifaceted, postmodern, global and digital millennial innovators – we must give them our care and patience, and truly listen. They may benefit while we gain nothing in the short term (at times), but we gain enormous insight in the process of we will do differently with the future.

How the Sausage is Made

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Conventional wisdom: “No one cares how the sausage is made.”  I’m sure you’ve heard this before as well. Maybe it gets followed up with more assumptions: “The consumer cares about the product.  They want the solution.” However, that’s not really true either. They care about their pain. The solution is irrelevant unless the pain is relieved. If you’re really great, you replace pain with pleasure, and build a lasting relationship that your customers are excited to tell others about.

The Sausage

So let’s talk about this proverbial sausage.  When you are hungry at a game and a sausage wrap stand is the only food or you’ll miss the entire game?  No. You probably don’t care about how the sausage gets made. You care about your hunger. You care about the solution. You care about the price. 

Luckily, we don’t live in the local monopoly conditions or restricted logistics of that example.  There are true artists of the craft, solving new pains everyday.

Have you seen how a master chef makes tantalizingly delicious and unique sausage from scratch?  If you love sausage, you do care how it’s made.  You would buy recipe books, watch reality shows, do factory tours, and attend sausage festivals. There is a huge difference between being an artist with a following versus a monolith with a secret. Which company are you building?  Naturally, I didn’t write this post to discuss sausage (though after talking about it so much I’d really love to fry up a batch now).  This is really about sharing your product backstory and software delivery methods. 

Think about a great chef. The kind that writes recipe books, heads up gourmet restaurant chains, blogs about food, hosts a show, and even gets invited as a guest to cook on other people’s shows.

Imagine Martha Stuart or Emeril Legasse teaching their audience about homemade sausage from scratch.  They smile and cook with their pre-measured bowls of colorful ingredients, hand-grinding the sausage.  The sight and sound of the fire, and sizzle of butter in the pan make you certain you’d want to eat not just any sausage – that sausage.  The great chefs care how the sausage was made whether you care or not. They make the best sausage they can and teach others to try their methods even if most people will never bother to make it the same way. 

So, even though what we are really discussing here is either 1) ”no one cares why your product was made” or 2) ”no one care how your software is developed” – I think that’s drastically incorrect. More importantly, when someone says “no one cares how the sausage is made” to me, I know it’s a symptom of something terrible in the prestige economy of the superorganism that could someday bring it to its knees, never to rise again. 

Now we can qualify that old saying…

“No one cares how a faceless factory makes boring sausage.”

Don’t let your factory remain faceless. No matter how boring the boots-the-ground element of your product delivery may seem, those are people who are representing you.  You can either take the Ice Road Truckers and brewery tour approach to your product delivery or you can hide it away. Even the most faceless factories have tour guides. They have a script, sure. This is a marketing opportunity for your customers who are most likely to give a referral. If they show up to see how the sausage is made, give them a taste of the experiments that you aren’t mass-publicizing yet. This let’s you find your early adopters.  That’s a special relationship that you should encourage, invest in, and keep personally engaged.

Go take a tour of a big beer factory and a small craft brewery, compare the two and imagine what a “brewery tour” of your software company would look like.  The big beer companies have a loyal fan base and brewery tours. The ingredients are well-known.  You can even try it at home.  Operational effectiveness, consistency and quality, and reliability are the big beer maker’s keys to success – not proprietary ingredients.

Don’t be afraid to demo upcoming features before they are finished.  Your opportunity to learn and from customer interviews during an alpha release cannot be understated – give them a tour before you make them work for you.  Don’t just make a website, make a fan page too.  Show people you care about what you build as much as they do. Make the digital delivery part of the human dialogue.  As it turns out, you can’t make people get interested in you by yelling “I’m interesting!”  Telling people your product is the best (today) doesn’t say much at all.  Showing them that real people are making sure the product will continue to get better, teaching them what you wish you knew 2 or 5 years ago about the pain you solved and how they can solve it too – then they might be interested. 

“No one cares what the ingredients in the sausage are if they can’t see and hear the artist who uses them, the special process for preparing and cooking it, and insights in why decisions were made.”

The individual lines of code you write aren’t proprietary. Maybe one or two shouldn’t be public knowledge for security reasons.  The rest are meaningless without the rest of the code base and all the people that create viable product-market fit.  Your accounting KPIs, eCommerce analytics, or SDLC aren’t that special on their own either. Your templates are common knowledge to anyone with experience. 

Your people – coming together to do something bigger than themselves -THAT’S special, and while you can lose that no one can steal that. I suspect there are some companies that would never approve a marketer posting a photo of coding-in-progress on Instagram for fear contents of the screen is proprietary. Yet, any developer would tell you that turning frameworks into a worthwhile platform people can reuse is incredibly challenging. No, nobody cares what your product planning meetings or your Scrum process is, unless the people who make it special are front-and-center.  You can make an official statement – like so many companies – that your people are your greatest asset; but when you hide your people and how they work from the public eye, the message is clear, not only to your people but to your customers as well: you don’t take any pride in the sausage-makers, so the sausage probably isn’t that special. 

This is the difference between posting on Twitter “My apple pie is made with 20 apples” versus a video explaining which apples to use and why, the process you use when you pick them out at the store, why you bought them where you did, etc. Teaching the generations coming up behind you makes you matter, not protecting a secret that isn’t even a secret worth stealing. 

“People don’t care how the sausage is made unless they trust you share their love of great sausage.”

The difference between having consumers and having an audience is sharing their pains, pleasures, fears, and passions. Don’t sell to people, mentor them. Don’t market to people, teach them. Is it possible that some people want to know how you make gumbo but not how the andouille sausage was made?  Absolutely.  That’s the line between retention and referral – if you say secret to great gumbo is making the sausage yourself, the real advocates who trust you as an artist and an expert will pay to learn your sausage-making methods.  The opposite is true too.  If you don’t share the passion or demonstrate your expertise, no one is going to listen.  They can spot you as a fake from a mile away.  They know sausage isn’t a priority for you and nothing you say about making sausage is worth sharing with their friends. 

“No one cares how you make the sausage if YOU don’t care how you make the sausage.”

This is probably the most on-point.  Teams who think no one cares how the software is made also don’t have much pride or faith that their process is worthwhile. Sometime the biggest challenge is just showing the engineers how great they are. As the leader, you have to be like a head chef: It’s not just that you love and take pride in the craft, it’s your time-in-the-fire and belief in the process itself that give people the confidence to follow you.  Sure, your customers may not want to sit and watch code being developed for hours on end, but throwing a montage, hosting meetups, YouTubing behind-the-scenes footage, and some exciting reality show commentary is something people love and look for as part of the complete package. That type of messaging let’s people know you care about the work it takes to solve their pain. By giving some visibility into how much diligence, care, and work is put into the next release, your customers can feel they were part of the experience and have a better appreciation why updates and new features can take awhile to release.

If you want the inspiration I had when I wrote this, go read these books:

Rework

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

Photo via The Digital Marketing Collaboration

5 Reasons I Would Fire You

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Originally posted April 2016. 

Disclaimer: I currently work solo on this blog and could only fire myself – so this isn’t veiled threat.  I have done my best to mentor individuals and lead teams aways from these dysfunctions; and disrupt processes that perpetuate them.  These are also part of my personal introspection process.  This is not an accusation of anyone  in particular.  Instead, these are traits we can all continuously work to improve.  On the other hand – “You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you.”  

The Top 5 Reasons I Would Fire You

Tech professionals on teams trying to innovate:  Speaking on behalf of managers, your peers, and individual contributors everywhere, these are the top five reasons you aren’t just a poor performer, you’re bringing down the people around you as well.

Reason #1 – You Default to One-Way Communication

Collaborative problem solving cannot happen without meaningful and timely feedback.  There is a time for group chat and a time for well-argued prose (email).  To avoid death-by-chat and long CYA email chains, you need to set clear expectations about when you need to focus and when you can discuss issues – and respect that prerogative in others. 

Whining about documentation, instructions, or a process as document brings you no closer to a better workplace experience for yourself, improved team health, or a product you can feel a lasting pride, prestige, or sense of legacy about.  Bring a solution to the table, own your responsibility for following up, and escalate to a scheduled meeting if needed.  Folding your arms and leaving work unfinished is childish.  You know you can do better – do it.

Mantra – There are no documentation problems, only communication problems.

Reason #2 – You Repeat the Same Words When I Say I Don’t Understand 

Speaking of childish, self-advocacy is an important milestone.  It requires enough vocabulary, understanding of abstract concepts, and recognition of similarities and differences to allow a child to not only imagine a future state that is desirable, but also solve the most likely path to attain it, and make a rational statement to an adult who can permit, empower, or provide.  My three-year-old daughter, forgivably, needs an enormous amount of assistance, and patience, when she attempt this.  As an adult, you should not.

As a leader, I will do my best to bridge the gap between your words and my words.  I will cue you when I am unable to build that bridge, repeat back to you what I understood you to say, and ask you to demonstrate or show me where and what you mean so that I have the context I need for a deliberate and logical decision.  I will do all of this without patronizing you, even when it is mentally exhausting for me.

Not everyone has learned to lead this way, and I admit I can be imperfect at it as well, so you absolutely need to learn to self-advocate.

That said, I cannot heroically be an adult on your behalf.  The real dysfunction that brings down team performance through your own sub-par performance is the continued repetition of the same words when I (or others) explicitly ask you to re-word the request, argument, or question.  You are obstinately anti-try-something-else.  You refuse to paraphrase, assist my incorrect understanding, or demonstrate the meaning of your words.  It is only through my strong personality and insistence that I convince you to show me exactly what the problem is so that I solve it rather than answering a question that sounds like utter nonsense out of context.  Unfortunately, even that is not always effective.  I can carry my pre-school daughter to the cabinet and let her pick the exact afternoon snack she wants.  I cannot “carry” you as an engineer into a realm of creative solutions where emerging technology and emerging market segments meet.

Mantra – Communication is the responsibility of the communicator.

Reason #3 – You Feel No Pride of Ownership Over Your Work

Having coached, worked with, or heard the complaints of hundreds of tech-focused professionals in various, I have found this can often be more a symptom of the dysfunction of an organization than the root cause of poor performance.  The tech industry today is too mentally demanding and excitingly disruptive to attract genuinely lazy people, looking for a free ride.  So when you start giving into distraction, procrastination, or laziness, my leadership spidey-sense goes off.  I will tell you the secret to motivating innovation-based technical teams – empower them to know the impact a line of code will have on an end user. 

Karl Marx’ philosophy describes this exact phenomenon in its examination of the individual worker’s separation and alienation from the product.  Superficially, the question seems quite simple:  Which is more rewarding, a carpenter who makes custom-installed wooden shutters, getting to know the customer, their home, and tastes in the process, or working in a factory running a machine that produces millions of shutters for a big-box store’s generic one-size-fits-all product line?

If you have lost pride of ownership over your work as a software professional, though, shame on you.  You have no excuse for complacence, apathy, or becoming disengaged.  Your skills are a premium product in a seller’s market.  Companies of every size will fight to win you to their side. With one idea and a few colleagues, you could start a company of your own in a heartbeat.

Now, let’s be adults here.  We all have to collaborate and negotiate.  When the majority or a manager makes a call that goes against your individual dissenting opinion, don’t stomp away and pout.  Losing pride of ownership over work, and settling into a free-rider paradigm brings down the team, the product, the end user, and your career.  You better woman-up or man-up and either do a great job that you can be proud of, work to change the organization that is stifling you and your peers, or move on.

Change takes courage, but our virtue is the outcome of our habits.  When you accept and justify your childish, dysfunctional, lazy, sub-par effort and excusing yourself through an external locus of control hurts no one more than you.

Mantra – Anything worth doing is worth doing well.

Reason #4 – You Hide Behind Uncertainty

Deconstructionism is a dangerous game, especially when you are part of a team that is teetering on the edge of a cliff overlooking the seas of chaos, moments from falling into market risk or technical risk that could engulf you.  Since I coach teams on how to become a room full of adults solving the pains of a real person through a collaborative, unified, inspired collective brilliance and sheer power of will, I have a radar for someone  who is hiding. 

You are playing a dangerous game.  You signed up for this, after all.  You wanted to be brilliant, in the thick of it, defining emergent market segments using emerging technologies – but the minute you lost faith in the cause, lost hope for your job security, or lost belief in yourself as a builder and creator of new tech that can change the user’s world… that was the moment the inherent uncertainty of our goals became apparent.  You shut down.  You got stuck.  You became intolerant of technical risk AND market risk and looked to your leaders to spoon-feed you.

At first, a good leader can give a big speech, host a team-building event, or roll up the proverbial sleeves to help.  When the team as a whole needs some slack but they still have their eye on the prize, I have a long list of tools and tricks to re-energize the whole team.  When an individual begins the process of deconstructionism, and moves every conversation into an infinite regress in which the certainty of any word or any intention or any risk is now more important than the product discovery process, that’s when a tough love heart-to-heart happens.  Agile demands small increments.  Innovation requires trial and error.  You must remain infinitely curious.  You must self-advocate for the size of the risks you take.  Escalate when time-to-feedback is hurting you.  Sturdy yourself and your tenacious attitude about the “failure” intrinsic to empirical discovery – otherwise you don’t belong in this work space.

Mantra – Fail fast to succeed sooner.

Reason #5 – You Give Up Before Attempting to Solve a Problem 

This issue if often comes hand-in-hand with insecurity toward uncertainty.  When it comes to coaching a product visionary in agile, this means whipping them with the importance of setting goals for the product, an end user to empathize with, and a pain to solve in the target user’s particular context.  Once that is in place, a team – as a whole – may need some encouragement that a 100% success rate is not the goal.  Innovative, defect-free software that fits the user’s needs is the goal.  As it turns out, some people fear failure too much to risk it.  If that’s you, make sure you are in the least innovative technical space possible.  Sink your teeth into a legacy system and never complain about the spaghetti code you manage again.  That slow-moving space is perfect if you prefer to play it safe.

Innovation may not be important to SOME people, but it is VERY important to the REST of US.  The courage to risk failure is essential to experimentation. 

The real issue, of course, is not the fear or the failure.  It is a lack of proper perspective that puts your short-term ego ahead of long-term viability.  It is a base rate logical fallacy in which you are ignoring the most important variables.  Pretend for a moment that we have a product for which any given User Story – which we’ll restrict to less than two weeks of effort to get from planning to production – has a 70% chance of success (completion in two weeks) due to technical uncertainty and 20% chance of success due to market uncertainty (i.e. “is it really what the end users need?”).  If you take the risk of a false-positive – succeeding in releasing a working product increment that the market doesn’t demand – as the only indication of your own failure, you are sure to be unhappy. 

Now, imagine a breathalyzer has a 5% probability of a false-positive.  A police officer pulls over drivers truly at random at a random time of day.  What is the probability that a driver who tests positive is actually drunk?  Guess what!  A dreadful 2% chance.  Luckily, officers are trained not to play the odds like that.  The time of day, the day of the week, the location selected, and driving behavior all weed out the risk of a truly random selection.  Then recognition of symptoms, through human interaction must give probably cause. 

When you stop trying to overcome technical risk or market uncertainty prior to even attempt to solve a problem, you’re like a cop who stops pulling over anyone due to the statistical uncertainty of a false positive.  If you attempt to solve 0% of the problems you face, you’ll come away with a 100% lack of solved problems. 

Tackle 100% of the tough challenges tenaciously, courageously, and look for an assist as needed.  Anything else makes success incredibly unlikely.  The market risk of success is hard enough.  Don’t ruin the odds further by quitting in the face of technical risk.

Mantra – You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Grow Up or Move On

If these sound like you, work to grow as an individual or you are likely already on your way out the door.  If you, your peers, and even your manager exhibit these traits and the organization seems unlikely to change despite a heroic group effort – it’s time to move on.  Complacence, apathy, and passive aggression is terrible for your career.

I’ve taken to saying, “Some people just want to watch the world burn – the rest of us build it anyway.”  If you aren’t a builder, at least stop burning down what the rest of us will happily accomplish with you.

What Westside Barbell has taught me about Scaling Agile

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Agile Portfolio Management:

There is a new way of doing things in delivering a complex product portfolio.  It focuses on delivering value both incrementally and iteratively.  It utilizes empirical process control and hypothesis-driven planning.  It utilizes test-driven development in both convergent and emergent delivery, even when budget and scope are fixed.  It utilizes a Lean kaizen approach to maximize velocity.

This philosophy is by nature, object-oriented and modular.  No one framework is right for every product, so it is highly customizable.  It may sound new to you, but it has been around for quite awhile.  But wait – I’m not talking about Agile, Scrum, or Lean software principles – I’m talking about Westside Barbell’s approach to powerlifting.

Waterfall Weightlifting:

Powerlifting is a sport in which the lifter competes for the highest single-repetition maximum in the Squat, Deadlift, and Bench Press for their weight class.  The traditional approach to training powerlifters relied on linear periodization – a method still very valuable for beginning athletes because each phase builds on the last while progressing toward competition-specific strength.

At a basic level, here is a 12-week competition plan:

3 Week Hypertrophy Phase (muscle size, stamina): Sets of 12 to 15
3 Week Strength Phase (movement form, ability to move weight): Sets of 5 to 7
3 Week Power Phase (Explosive speed, maximum weight at progressively higher volume): Sets of 1 to 3
3 Week Peak & Rest (Highest weight, lowest volume): Sets of 1 to 3, tapering off to a few rest days
Competition: Three chances to get three lifts correct, competing against others who are doing the same

As agilists, this correlates perfectly with the “waterfall” approach we try to leave behind:

Hypertrophy phase: Business planning, creative design, and thorough documentation
Strength phase: Database layer, middle-tier
Power phase: Client-side logic, front end development
Peaking phase: Testing, beta release, focus group and stakeholder reviews
Rest days: Code freeze and marketing
Competition: Release to the market, in which you may not recover from failure

Then the lifter starts over.  If there was a big loss (e.g. an injury) pre-competition, the weight lifter might not compete at all – just like software project that gets cancelled after key engineers leave or technical debt gets too high to meet the release date.  More problematically, if there is a big loss or injury at the competition, the lifter may never compete again- just like the software team with a botched release that gets “reassigned” or laid off.

Repeating the Cycle:

The weightlifter who perseveres, win or lose, still has big “waterfall” problems.  The lifter rests a little and repeats the linear progression cycle, an exercise in bodily context-switching.  When the next hypertrophy phase starts post competition, most of what was developed in the previous cycle is gone!  The same is true of each phase.  When the lifter resumes focus on 3-rep max, some hypertrophy and stamina is lost.  As the lifter peaks for competition, the 1-rep max may increase but the 5-7 rep range decreases.  Studies show that after a few weeks in the subsequent hypertrophy phase, up to 15% of single-repetition strength is lost.  The disconnect between foundational planning (by increasing stamina and size) sacrifices a considerable amount of value captured (ability to perform the same single-rep max).

What does this specificity-switching cost the lifter?  As a beginner, not very much – any work will improve size, conditioning, and maximal strength, and fantastic progress can occur.  The discipline of repeating the movement pattern likewise increases maximal strength even with little planning.  However, once the lifter goes from a beginning athlete – a time when nearly anything will improve the lifts – to an intermediate athlete – subsequent peaking phases will see little or no increase.

The process requires disruption if total stagnation is to be avoided.

If this sounds like delivering software in waterfall, it is!  As you read this quote from a strength coach describing the “waterfall” lifting approach, think about the Waterfall PMO:

Having now gotten away from this type of training and looking back as an outsider, I can see where the program is lacking and why I had so many problems. I used to feel it was the only way to train (mostly because it was all I ever knew). It was also the only type of program for which I could find a lot of research. Some of the limitations to this linear style of periodization include:

  • It’s a percentage-based program
  • It starts with a high volume
  • It only has one peak
  • Your abilities aren’t maintained
  • The program has no direction to the future

– Dave Tate via T-Nation.com

Here are the parallel problems we see with waterfall:

  • “It’s a percentage-based program” – accounting-based statistical process controls are applied to an emergent system
  • “It starts with a high volume” – a significant portion of the budget is spent planning, designing, and fighting about features that no user wants (and if the project is cancelled, 100% of this sunk cost never drives user- or owner- value capture)
  • “It only has one peak” – A major release attempts to market itself to all segments simultaneously and a flop may kill the product line completely
  • “Your abilities aren’t maintained” – once the waterfall project plan is set in motion, market evaluation, user feedback, and stakeholder review is non-existent
  • “The program has no direction to the future” – a waterfall project plan is delivered based on the knowledge available at the beginning of the project when the least is known and has no intrinsic method of looking to the future relationship between the user market that might exist and the software that could be produced.

Westside Barbell’s “Conjugate Method”

The Conjugate Method attempts to balance all phases across preparation for competition. At the “enterprise level” three movement patterns are continuously tested as the measure of the process. At the “business level” a new variation of a similar movement may become the focus for 3 to 5 weeks (e.g. training rack pulls instead of full deadlifts when “lock out”, the upper portion of the movement, is the weak link). At the “team level” (the lifter + coach), the two-week sprint has a consistent set of ceremonies and artifacts (workout plan, workout log, the workout, etc).

Here is an example:

Week 1
Monday – Max effort lower body day (squat + low back + hamstrings), focus on strength and power
Wednesday – Max effort upper body (bench press), focuses on strength and power
Friday – Dynamic effort lower body (squat, deadlift), focuses on speed and hypertrophy
Sunday – Dynamic effort upper body (bench press), focuses on speed and hypertrophy
Week 2
Monday – Max effort lower body day (deadlift + low back + hamstrings), focus on strength and power
Wednesday – Max effort upper body (bench press), focuses on strength and power
Friday – Dynamic effort lower body (squat, deadlift), focuses on speed and hypertrophy
Sunday – Dynamic effort upper body (bench press), focuses on speed and hypertrophy

This correlates nicely with “core” Scrum concepts:

  1. Maximal strength is tested every week – working software every sprint
  2. The metric (1-rep max / story points delivered), is improved (strength / velocity over time), through hypothesis and experiments (empirical process control)
  3. The entire body is trained for size, stamina, strength, and power per every week – vertical slicing and user stories
  4. The lifter gets to experiment with new exercises without fear of wrecking a 15-week cycle – sprint retrospective, sprint planning
  5. The coach focuses exercise planning on addressing weak points – a ScrumMaster, removing impediments
  6. The Power Lifting competition is not a unique event with a long lead time – working software every sprint, TDD, XP, continuous integration and release

Now the lifter, like our Scrum team, gets to plan, experiment, and deliver often.  The overall roadmap (Lean + Scrum) might have a basic end-game or vision (increasing 1-rep competition max performed on 3 lifts the same day is equivalent to convergent product delivery), but planning only looks forward up to 5 weeks, commitment at 1 to 2 weeks.  Likewise, the lifter and coach is always looking at the most recent data, the newest lessons learned, and quickly reacts to whether a behavior, practice, or process should be continued or not – just like the Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and Team are always planning and executing based on the most recent market and team data.

Applications to the SDLC:

Now we can extend the metaphor and draw conclusions.  The powerlifter’s body equates to a complex large-scale digital portfolio.  The lifter needs to increase value three programs that focus on convergent product delivery while also developing several programs that utilize emergent product delivery.  In waterfall these two program methods are separated by functional division and project lifecycle, in conjugate (Scrum) these two are handled in tandem.

For the powerlifter, the three convergent products are squat, deadlift, and bench press.  Quality must stay constant or the increase in value does not qualify.  The same is true in software products – adding a high-value feature while allowing a 50% increase in crash on launch is absolutely unacceptable.  Your users will disqualify you!  Whether your have a three-application enterprise CRM program or a three-iOS app consumer program (see LinkedIn or Facebook as examples), adding an exciting feature to an app that causes mass user drop out is a risk no business can tolerate in today’s market.  The competition is too fierce, barrier to entry too low; someone will blow you away.

At the same time, the powerlifter needs to maintain several emergent delivery programs, some for function (increasing grip strength), some for fun (increasing bicep size).  Ongoing workout plans, building size, stamina, and maintaining joint health, addressing weak points by focusing on a new accessory exercise for 5 weeks – all of these priorities must be balanced and evolved.  Keeping a workout log is the only way to be sure that exercise volume, intensity, and density are increasing.  The relationship between the convergent product value and the emergent product investment is the only metric rationally applicable.  The same is true in software delivery.  Emergent-delivery programs like R&D, marketing, UX, product planning are all critical to the health and success of the portfolio as a whole – but the end goal must be clear.

  • Over-planning and under-delivering is not acceptable.
  • Over-researching and under-user-pleasing is not acceptable.
  • Over-designing and under-testing is not acceptable.
  • Over-marketing and and under-releasing is not acceptable.

Conclusion:

The Conjugate Method as an analogy for Agile, Scrum, XP, and Lean at scale works for me because I love lifting.  I realize it may not be right for you, especially if neither agile or weightlifting are familiar territory.  So, like everything, find how this applies to your life so that you can find inspiration in ordinary – then start a conversation about it.  I’m happy to discuss anytime:  224.223.5248

Never Hold Back, Never Give Up

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Fail fast and learn quickly.  Free yourself from fear.  Take control of who you are, the value you create, and the judgement of that value.  Be “The Good” as you define it for the world around you.

#life #power #strength  #philosophy  #psychology