Making Lives More Wonderful
Evangelism Is Violence A colleague of mine adopted a note-taking system a couple of years ago. Within about six weeks, he had become insufferable. Not because he was using it — I was pleased for him, honestly — but because every conversation now had a trapdoor in the floor that led directly to atomic notes Read More
AI Amplifies Your Discipline (Or More Often the Lack of It) Following on from my previous post (Marshall, 2026). Every deck I see now makes the same three promises in a single breath. Cheaper. Faster. Better. All three. At once. The argument is never stated out loud, because stating it out loud would expose it. Read More
Truly Modern Software Engineering Means Not Focusing on Software, and Not Calling It Engineering Nobody that has ever asked me how to build great software has been pleased with the answer. The answer is: build a great team and have them build the software. What people want is a practice — a framework to adopt, Read More
How Educated Are You? Ask most people how educated they are and they ll answer with a noun. A degree. A field. A university. Sometimes a number – years spent, books read, courses finished. It s a comfortable question because it has a comfortable answer, one you can put on a CV and stop thinking about. Socrates Read More
From Shepherds to Therapists: A Digest of Posts 171 Through 180 This is the eighteenth in a series of digests, each covering ten posts from this blog, in chronological order. The seventeenth digest covered posts 161 through 170, ending on 28 October 2012 with All-time Top Posts – the roundup that turned the archive round Read More
The Cost of Seeing It Coming Every disaster has a paper trail. Somewhere in the archive there is a memo, a risk register, a slightly too-blunt email from an engineer, a report commissioned three years earlier and read by nobody. Afterwards, the memo gets quoted in the inquiry. Everyone shakes their head at how obvious Read More
From Voltage to Vantage: A Digest of Posts 161 Through 170 This is the seventeenth in a series of digests, each covering ten posts from this blog, in chronological order. The sixteenth digest covered posts 151 through 160, ending on 14 October 2012 with Wanna See me Juggle? – the observation that our means of Read More
Who Changes the Paradigm? On AI and Systems Thinking There is a particular kind of frustration that anyone who has practised systems thinking will recognise. You can see the loops. You can feel the delays, the accumulating stocks, the way a well-meaning intervention will ripple out and produce the opposite of what everyone intended. And Read More
Assumptions Don t Need Believers Collective assumptions and beliefs in tech businesses, seen through the people who studied them. Every technology company runs on a set of beliefs that nobody has written down, nobody voted for, and nobody can remember agreeing to: That the platform team is a cost centre. That enterprise customers won t buy self-serve. Read More
From Feedback to Jugglers: A Digest of Posts 151 Through 160 This is the sixteenth in a series of digests, each covering ten posts from this blog, in chronological order. The fifteenth digest covered posts 141 through 150, ending on 26 September 2012 with Discipline – the reconception of discipline as internal and collaborative rather Read More
Let s NOT Improve Philip Crosby s Case Against Continuous Improvement, and Tom Gilb s Answer to It Walk into almost any organisation and you will find the machinery of improvement humming along quietly in the background: retrospectives, kaizen boards, improvement backlogs, maturity assessments, a slide with an upward arrow on it. Nobody asks why. Improvement has become Read More
The Misplaced Pride of the Scrum Master Everybody claps for the Scrum Master — the Scrum Master most of all. The developer ships the code. The product owner reads the market. The designer runs the tests. And somewhere in the room is a person who did none of those things, taking quiet satisfaction in having Read More
Everyone s Diagnosing. Nobody s Treating Imagine a branch of medicine that had perfected diagnosis and never quite got round to treatment. Scanners of extraordinary resolution. Blood panels measuring four hundred markers. Consultants who could tell you, to two decimal places, exactly what was wrong with you – and who then handed you a beautifully typeset report Read More
People Just Do Not See the Systems They re Trapped Within Every home has a smell. Yours does too — a particular blend of cooking, laundry, carpet, wood and life that guests notice the instant they cross your threshold. You, however, cannot smell it at all. Your nose filtered it out years ago as background information, Read More
From Cars to Giraffes: A Digest of Posts 141 Through 150 This is the fifteenth in a series of digests, each covering ten posts from this blog, in chronological order. The fourteenth digest covered posts 131 through 140, ending on 5 September 2012 with ‘Sticky Change’ – the question of why hard-won change so rarely Read More
Education and Training Isn t a Waste of Time. Its Assumptions Are. Ask whether formal education is a waste of time and you ll usually get an argument about content. One side lists the things you forgot the day after the exam – the quadratic formula, the date of some treaty, the parts of a cell. The Read More
The Litmus Test for People-Centric Everyone is people-centric now. It s on the careers page and the values poster. It s in the LinkedIn headline, the keynote, the CVs, the reorg announcement, the leadership book. We put people first. We re a people business. Human-centred. The phrase has been repeated so often, by so many, that it has Read More
Are Your Assumptions Destroying Your Employer – and Your Job? Your organisation runs on a set of collective assumptions and beliefs. I call them memes – the interlocking, mostly implicit convictions everyone holds in common about how work should work. Together they form a memeplex: the collective mindset that, more than any process, tool or Read More
From Squirrel to Stickiness: A Digest of Posts 131 Through 140 This is the fourteenth in a series of digests, each covering ten posts from this blog, in chronological order. The thirteenth digest covered posts 121 through 130, ending on 16 August 2012 with ‘Why Does Agile Work?’ – the plain admission that nobody, the Read More
Intellectual Prostitution in the Tech Industries There is an old and ugly metaphor for the sale of judgment. Marx reached for it constantly – he called wage labour itself the general prostitution of the labourer , and in the Manifesto he described how the bourgeoisie had stripped the halo from every honoured occupation, converting the physician, Read More