Over the years, I’ve noticed when I have a stronger response to particular phrases, sentences, doggerel, koans, and so forth. I get a thrill when someone can frame an idea simply and powerfully into a pithy statement. I collect those inspiring or clarifying quotes. I find them in many sources and sometimes in unlikely places, though usually not from compilations.
Today I’ve decided to share five of my favorites:
An Ethiopian proverb:
When spiderwebs unite, they can tie up a lion.
Rudyard Kipling, poet:
All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are...
Last month, Cory Foy sent me an email about a project retrospective that gave his team new insights and direction. He used the subject line, “They got it!” You can find the story of Cory’s recent retrospective experience, along with the thread of additional comments, on the XP list digest archive.
Just because your team members feel shy about expressing (or receiving) appreciations in public, doesn’t mean you should stop doing them. Tami Flowers told me about her solution to making sure team members know what they’ve done that helps their co-workers and to encourage them to keep doing those things. She called it “Card Pass with Appreciations.”
Here’s how it goes:
Arrange chairs so that team members sit in a circle of chairs or around a table. Make sure that every person has a pen. Pass out large index cards, one per team member, and ask each person to write...
I was at a party much too late last night (after the Agile2008 banquet), and it's good I was there. Just as I was getting ready to leave, two people walked over to me and told me a story about their retrospectives.
One of them thanked me for the book and said that it had helped in their retrospectives. Then he told me that the activities in the book had inspired him to create activities on his own. I asked if he would share an example with me.
He described how interpersonal conflicts and friction had plagued his team....
Kevin Kelly, author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World, writes about scenius (a.k.a., "the communal form of genius").
Which made me think about skunk works in general and, inevitably, Agile teams and their open workspaces.