3 Reasons You “Should Just” Go to PSL
PSL 2012 is coming up in May this year, I had the pleasure of attending last year and it was a life-changing experience. Here’s 3 reasons why you ‘should just’ go.
- You’ll learn to stop saying “should” and “just”: I worked with a company that had a problem with too many bugs. When a doozy would pop-up the usual all-hands-on-deck emergency meeting happened. The output was “we should do X to make Y not happen again”. Everybody nodded and felt great about this new epiphany! Shame nothing actually got done. When you say “we should do X” you remove all sense of responsibility on you and everybody else. It’s an action-less modal verb. I “just” thought this point would be valuable. Did you feel the power of this paragraph dissipate? ”I just through this point…” means I have no confidence in what I “just” said. Stop saying “should” and “just”. PSL will help you figure out how.
- You’ll become more self-aware: Self-awareness leads to improvement. I had many of my patterns reflected back to me during the week and PSL gave me many tools to figure out how to recognize those patterns and more importantly how to work on fixing them. Other people aren’t the problem, understand how you intake and process information and you’ll be much more self-aware.
- You’ll learn how to spot problems: Well duh, it’s called PROBLEM SOLVING LEADERSHIP, what did you expect? Seriously though, I get criticized for being too negative because I do not, nor will I ever, accept the status quo. PSL taught me how to do this, diplomatically and brutally. I usually prefer the brutal truth yet I realize the need for telling the kinder truth sometimes. If you cannot challenge the status quo and treat every problem as it’s own unique set of circumstances, (which they are, but generally humans use that as an excuse to not dig deeper “oh, it was an anomaly…it won’t happen again”), you’ll struggle with developing a problem solving attitude in your organization and you’ll be doomed to mediocrity.
- You’ll Have Fun!!! PSL was a blast! Intense learning, strong relationships were formed with people I never met before and it was extremely fun! I do have another problem though. The title of this post says ’3 Reasons’, yet I have listed 4. How can I solve this problem? ;-)
PSL will sell out fast, go sign-up now!
You Don’t Need Agile … If…
At Agile 2011 I was offering some advice in Coach’s Corner and a fellow (let’s call him Jack) who had attended my talk wanted to get more help with his problems with work flowing through a support team. He considered himself a beginner and admitted he didn’t know much about ‘Agile’ and the more he described his problems and what they were changing the more I realized that he really got it.
Jack described their ‘work board and stickies’ how they used that to manage their work, how they added daily meetings and how they improved by getting the team and product owner in the same room.
From our conversation I could tell, and he verified, that he didn’t know anything about Kanban and heard that Kanban was more of an advanced practice. While it was a brief conversation, I echoed back that I felt he was on the right track. He was getting the benefits of a continuous improvement mentally without using the A-word.
How refreshing, I remember about 10 years ago working in a company where we were doing the same thing. I had never heard about Agile at the time. Through experimentation we found out what worked for us.
If your organization wants to get started with Agile and Jack’s story sounds familiar to you, you may be on the right track already. You may be better served to get specifically educated on what Agile practice your current process resembles. You can do that by going to local events and talking to people in the community.
The worst thing you can probably do is to consider transforming to Agile because it’ll probably set you back further and erase the great progress you’ve already made.
Learn from Experience, Not Failure
I hear and read a lot of stuff about how teams and people must fail first in order to succeed. I’d agree with that. What I’d prefer to see come out of the Agile community is less of the holier-than-thou “thou shalt fail before succeeding” rhetoric and more of “learn from your experiences” phrasing. No, I’m not Mr. Sensitive, I like to think I’m Mr. Realist. Organizations don’t want to be told they must fail first in order to succeed. I’ve had my share of those discussions. You know the ones where the person (or people) you’re talking to look at you like you have 3 extra heads growing out of your neck.
There was a tweet I saw today that sparked this post. You know the ones, like: ‘learning comes from failure‘ or ‘without failure there is no learning‘. It sure sounds poetic and intellectual, but useless nonetheless. I feel ok to say that because I used to say stuff like that. Maybe I just failed with that messaging and now I have learned. I’d like to think I just have more experience now.
So for those of you preaching “for learning to happen thou shalt must hath doth fail first…” enough already. Work is hard enough without having to be told you have to fail before figuring something out. Experience is the key, try shit out, get feedback and rinse and repeat. That’s all that’s really going to work.
