My Ignite Sydney presentation on YouTube

Leaders as social contagions

"Researchers at the University of Michigan found that when business leaders were in a good mood, their team members experienced more positive and fewer negative moods. Additionally, if the boss is in a good mood, the team finds it much easier to accomplish their tasks."

 Manage Your Team's Energy, Not Just the Work at Positive Psychology News Daily.

Some thoughts on the purpose of an architecture team... if you happen to have one

The first thing is to think about What is Success?

At a minimum, having architects meet to provide visibility into what everyone is doing is a good idea.  Reduces the likelihood of surprises... and assuming a degree of autonomy between groups, it creates selection pressure to adopt better technologies and approaches.   From there we can talk about standardisation and its counterpart, innovation.  But at the end of the day, we need to actually improve effectiveness, which is a combination of productivity, cost, quality, and the oft missed morale.

What's the scope of the problem?

We are dealing with socio-technical systems.  To paraphrase Conway's Law , the structure of the technology must reflect the structure of the business to avoid friction.  Which means that an architecture team must know and discuss more than just technology.  The capabilities and development of teams is just as important as the capabilities and development of technology.

Do we want to act like advisers or entrepreneurs?

Do we suggest technologies and approaches?  Or do we sell them?  It's actually more likely that we have to inhabit both roles.  The important thing to remember is to rely on influence and persuasion rather than mandates.  At no point is commanding and telling people what to do the appropriate role to be taking.

What is a "standard" anyway?

A standard should be a target for growth rather than a lowest common denominator guideline.  We don't want to be dragging down our best teams for the sake of consistency.  We want the best teams to pull the others forward.

We should prefer de facto standards (what actually happens in practice) rather than de jure standards (what a committee decides should happen).  That's how we ensure standards stay connected with reality.

Standard might not even be the best word.  Recommendation may be better.

There should be an expectation that the recommendation should be changing over time.  As Ohno said, last month's standard should be out of date .  After all, if we've actually been paying attention, 30 days is more than enough time to figure out how to improve.

If we visualise the level at which recommendations are followed, we can investigate and learn from the variation.  There is always a reason why a recommendation is not followed, many times they are good reasons due to a particular context.  By investigating, we learn how to improve our model of reality and our recommendations.  We actually learn the most from the variation since the situations where the recommendations are effective are presumably the situations we already know well.

Alistair Cockburn on the question "When does Agile fail?"

The answer would have to look like:

• When does it work better to focus on process and tools, because focusing on individuals and interactions would fail?
  

• When does it work better to focus on comprehensive documentation, because focusing on working software would fail?
  

• When does it work better to focus on contract negotiation, because focusing on customer collaboration would fail?
  

• When does it work better to focus on following a plan, because focusing on responding to change would fail?
  

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/agile-usability/message/5513

An example of problem solving from the Team Fortress 2 team

Theme/Goal: "improve the player experience around finding a server to play on"

Current Condition: "master servers need to ask a game server for its details, and that server can lie to us if it wants to"

Analysis:

• "scoring system had to penalize lying without penalizing custom game rules, because some players like custom game rules"
  
• "system needed to work entirely from data that didn't come from the servers themselves, so they couldn't lie to us in any way to affect it"
  

Solution...

http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=2338

Peter Block on vision

"Management vision is not only not the point, but it is not immortal.  Everyone needs to struggle with the question of what kind of future we want to create, and that vision is something that is alive and open to change.  Vision is more a dialogue than a declaration.  It is an important conversation, a significant stretch of the imagination, and it needs to emerge as a collective work-in-progress from each unit.  Once a vision is laminated, it loses its life.

In practical terms, if a group needs a clearer vision for themselves, by all means help them create one.  But don't make any videos of leaders calling for transformation.  Don't hold some large meeting for the purpose of clarifying the vision of top management.  If implementation requires that people know the state of the union and where we are headed, don't have those in charge declare it.  Bring people together to define the state of their own union and pool their knowledge of what the future might bring."

Peter Block, Flawless Consulting

I'm still not sure whether I prefer Flawless Consulting or Weinberg's Secrets of Consulting as the first book to suggest to learn about consulting.  I do like Block's emphasis on authenticity.

How many people out there actually believe in involvement and democracy?  How many people still believe in waiting for the elite to save us all by telling us what to do?