Last year I wrote about how we are doing planning all wrong, or rather, how we seem to focus on the wrong things when we do planning. We obsess about stories and story points and estimation, because that’s what we’ve been taught to do.
Next week I’m doing a new talk at the Better Software Conference in Las Vegas about learning models, where I was planning to talk about various learning styles and about how ineffective and systemically flawed most school systems are. Then I read up on Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats model (I’ve linked to Liz Keogh’s write up because it was her who introduced me to it), which I’ve subsequently used to facilitate a workshop, and was amazed to say the least. So much so that it caused me to turn the Learning to Learn talk on its head.
A discussion unfolded recently on an internal mailing list that tied together two of my favourite topics, namely learning theory and Lean.
Next week I’ll be talking about Best Practices, a current favourite topic, at the ExpertZone Developer Summit in Stockholm. Last year I ran a half-day workshop about SOA and gave a keynote with Erik Dörnenburg about simplicity in software, and this year I wanted to do something a little different. So when I heard there was a track called called “People Matters Too” I was keen to get involved.
Last October I was privileged to give a keynote talk at the Øredev conference in Malmö, Sweden. It was a late substitution. The original speaker, testing guru James Bach, had to cancel at the last minute for personal reasons. I felt pretty intimidated stepping into his shoes, especially since the other keynote presenters were Joel Spolsky and Andy Hunt, but I figured since no-one had heard of me I’d probably slip under the radar.
I was going to write about the various ways that people learn, and then my colleague Jeremy Stell-Smith wrote an excellent article describing one of my favourite learning models, so go and read that and I’ll see you back here shortly. Jeremy also alludes to Shu-Ha-Ri, another learning model based on repeating “cycles” of learning, found in Japanese martial arts (I haven’t linked to a single definition because there are a few subtly different ones around).