@mhsutton

heart.head.work.life

Author: Mike

  • Breakfast with #TED: The Threat of Agriculture, Less Stuff and Hope for Veterans.

    TED___TED_Playlists___30_minutes_of_TEDTalks_rated_persuasive

    For my TED talks today, I used the nifty tool on ted.com to pick 3 persuasive talks that made up 30 minutes in total. I love this part of ted because it creates my own playlist – no faffing. Each talk is not necessarily on the same theme and this is another thing that delights me – the diversity. The talks can challenge and stimulate different parts of my brain and emotions.

    #1 Jonathan Foley: The other inconvenient truth

    [ted id=1412]

    This talk was loong! I discovered it could have been shorter because Jonathan gave his really compelling talk with strong supporting statistics and imagery and then halfway through, showed an ‘explainer’ video that basically said the same thing again. I thought this was a little overkill.

    The talk was on the threat of our current pace and scale of global agricultural production to  the world’s climate and water sources. It had some really startling statistics – more than 40% of the best land on Earth is used for agriculture and most of the world’s fresh water – 70% – is used to grow stuff. Alot of the agriculture is grow food for livestock – a lot for beef production. This is not  farm land waiting to be cultivated, a lot of it is pristine rainforest that is deforested to create farm land. Basically the land mass used to plant stuff or keep animals is basically the size South America and Africa – combined!

    Food is a huge part of this agriculture, but there is also a growing amount for bio-fuels. And population growth is creating a pressure for more food. Increasingly wealth is changing diets – veggies are out, meats are in.

    With the problem well defined – Jonathan’s call to action is that there must now be collaboration between seemingly competing approaches – organic farming, industrial agriculture and  environment conservation – to come up with a way that we can feed the world without destroying it. Ideas around improving yields, do better with less, but sustainably (so not GMO!).

    This talk also inspired me to look into another aspect of the problem – food waste. Whilst we seek efficiency in production, there is still a fundamental problem with how much food that is produced is wasted. My gut tells me that there are huge problems with waste due to ineffective distribution of the food and this is something I would like to explore more.

    My key learning:  there is power in showing the big picture – for connecting ‘localised’ problems and showing the global picture. Also, ultimately our complex problems need collaboration between competing models to come up with something sustainable. There are no silver bullets and no single answer.

    #2 Graham Hill: Less stuff, more happiness

    [ted id=1238]

    Graham’s talk was about having less stuff because it’s cheaper, takes up less space and generally less stressful. All great reasons in my opinion. As someone who has moved country I definitely value the ‘less stuff’ mantra. Also there is something very liberating from not having stuff. What do they really give us. Do they make us happier?

    I really loved the focus on design – this is, I think, the plug that Graham was pushing. His website – Lifeedited.com – is all about seeking more from less. More money, space, time and ultimately, happiness from having less stuff. He showed off a render of his apartment (in Manhattan!) with elements from a design competition. Fold-into-the-wall beds, moving walls and a coffee table that grew into a dinner table that seats 10! All very impressive.

    My key learning – less is more. Actually the previous talk really connects with this too. I think that seeking to make smaller things is a only part of the message. Many small things are almost as bad as a few big things. Design is awesome, but we must first break this addiction to shiny stuff.

    #3 Jake Wood: A new mission for veterans — disaster relief

    [ted id=1608]

    This talk really gave me an ‘ah-ha’ moment. It is very America focused in its tone and perhaps in the severity of the problem – that young veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan not being successfully reintegrated into society after they have left the military.

    Jake, as a veteran himself, offers a persuasive account of the challenges that veterans face in dealing with a return to civilian life. Even as military loving as America is, once you’re back, you are pretty much left to fend for yourself, the support systems and camaraderie is often absent and veterans face emotional problems as a result.

    The really interesting thing is what Jake and others in his organisation are doing. Deploying ex service personnel to help in disaster areas like Haiti, Chilé and Pakistan for example. This very common-sense pairing of problems presents brilliant solution to both. Veterans often have the skills and the attitudes to make a difference in disasters. Their need to be of service and to derive some self worth from being in service are also met.

    This talk really connected two personal experiences for me. First, my brother Peter who has served in humanitarian relief in Haiti and other places. The challenges and devastation he has witnessed, yet still driven to help. The second is the son of a client – who was deployed as a Marine to Afghanistan and , at 22, is emotionally damaged by his experienced and struggled to reintegrate into civilian life.

    My key learning: some problems are their own solution when combined. The sense of service and the need for self worth are powerful human factors and we disregard them at our peril.

     

    What did you learn from these talks? What have any of the talks persuaded you to do or explore? I’d love to hear your opinions, comment below or tweet!

  • Breakfast with TED: Trust, Memory and Gladwell on David vs Goliath

    For a while now I have developed the ritual of TEDTuesday – taking time each Tuesday to watch and learn something on TED.com.

    If you are new to TED.com – it is a platform for some of the most amazing explorers of knowledge and witnesses of humanity to share their knowledge, insights and experiences. Based on themed conferences and an annual general conference, TEDTalks are videos of public talks. I love TED for its purpose and for its diversity. If you have never watched a TEDTalk, I beg you – please – do so now!

    So today I decided – over breakfast – to watch as many TEDTalks as I could during my breakfast time (about 30 minutes). I got out my Galaxy Note and launched the TED app and off I went. Without much thought about what I wanted to watch I just picked topics that vaguely interested me and something from Malcolm Gladwell – an author I really like learning from. So here goes…

    #1 -Onora O’Neill: What we don’t understand about trust

    [ted id=1829]

    This talk seemed a little laboured, however Onora brought a lot of focus to the issue of trust and the misguided populism of some of the soundbytes that are regularly banded about by buzzwordists and politicians, for example ‘Gain trust’, ‘Rebuild trust’.
    Trust is a big deal for me in my life and being worthy of the trust of people I am interested in having mutually positive relationships with is something I spend a lot of time and thought exploring. How do I communicate my trustworthiness to my wife, my kids , friends and my clients? Truth is, they each have their own set of operating rules to determine whether I have earned it.

    I think Onora falls into the same trap of offering simple templates and more – though different – sound bytes. For example, she proposes that establishing trustworthiness is based on 3 things – ‘Competence, honesty and reliability’. It may do for certain people in certain contexts but not as a general rule. They are reasonable examples but not absolutes. My son who is nearly 5 years old might consider me trustworthy because I demonstrate sacrifice – that I forego other things to make time for him.

    I enjoyed the talk but it was perfectly timed at 7 minutes – any more and I think she may have totally lost me. It left me with a lingering learning that asking people how you might earn their trust i.e. how you might be worthy of their trust – is the first activity one might do and then go from there.

    My key learning: Trustworthiness is a more effective goal than trust. It is subjective and trying to understand what constitutes it in every relationship is a great place to start from.

    #2 -Elizabeth Loftus: The fiction of memory

    [ted id=1826]

    This impassioned and fascinating talk really opened my eyes and mind to the power of suggestibility – especially in when it is sustained and deliberate. The lessons Elizabeth shares and glimpses of what is possible throws up huge questions in my mind about the quality of our legal systems.

    My imagination is pretty vivid and I often find myself questioning a memory that flashes in my head – did I dream it, imagine it or did it really happen? This is a conscious act. So far I have deliberately developed mental tools to cross validate my memories with other things to rule out whether that event was real or imagined. For example, I often ‘remember’ that I replied to someone’s email when in fact I haven’t. Typically I retrospect on this and find that I mentally composed the reply and did so visually – as though I typed it out. At some level, my brain registers this as a memory. Then I seek evidence (like checking my ‘Sent’ box to see whether it was right.

    As a student of NLP and very keen on the way the mind works, I know how easy it is to affect someone’s behaviour through some pretty easy ‘tricks’ and although it is not something I  do for ethical reasons, I know of practitioners that use these techniques in personal coaching work. The insight that the use of some of these techniques, like hypnosis and subliminal messaging, could tamper with people’s memories and unleash a chain of events that have lifelong consequences was very interesting.

    It raises other questions in my mind – about film and fantasy work and advertising. Do they really understand the long term effects of such realism in film. I know there is research now into the effects of pornography on the brain and behaviour – how much of this effect is on memory? Perhaps certain content needs regulation – like dosage!

    My key learning: Memory is far too open to suggestion to be reliable on its own. Even collectively it is dangerously unreliable (due to anchoring and suggestion). So finding evidence based thinking tools to cross validate it is both essential and offers a whole new world of potential innovation.

    #3 –Malcolm Gladwell: The unheard story of David and Goliath

    [ted id=1831]

    I like Malcolm – he is a fantastic story teller and I value his ability to get to the essence of something. Usually it is an essence no one else sees! Many ah-ha moments with his books.
    Anyway, Malcolm retells the story of David vs Goliath really beautifully, taking us through the geography of the times and the geopolitical forces at play.

    Then he shares his opinions – some backed up by various bits of research – about how David was really not an underdog and simply fought Goliath on his own terms. In the end all of it was circumstantial and personally I thought it was reasonable. For example, Goliath could have been suffering from acromegaly – which many people suffering from gigantism also tend to suffer. This could have caused him to be visually impaired and may have contributed to David’s victory.

    My key learning: Aside from all the biblical blah blah, I took from the subtexts some really powerful messages about adversity and some of the challenges of competition and some lessons that I can directly apply to my startup journey. For example – focus on my strengths. Also to play by my rules – not the rules of my opponent or competition. Also, weirdly, in place of competition, collaborate. Work with the weakness of my partner for my gain. This is also something that resonates really strongly from my Aikido practice.

     

    What have you learnt from these TED talks? I really would love to know and share. Go ahead, drop me a comment or tweet me your thoughts.

  • Unlock the power in your old blog posts with 3 awesome tools

    I have been blogging off and on for about nine or ten years and I seem to have accumulated quite a few posts in that time.

    In the early days, I focused on human rights issues, military interventions and the games governments play. In recent times – with the Syrian crisis – I wondered how  I might get some of my older but still very relevant posts out on my twitter timeline for my followers to read. More importantly, how to do this without flooding my timeline or creating more work for myself. More work is bad, mmmkay. I have 3 tools I want to share with you that made this problem go away and best of all are easy to use and free!

    Tweetily – something to tweet old posts

    Tweetily by Flavio MartinsSo I searched the WordPress plugin world and found Tweetily by Flavio Martins (who you may know as the totally awesome customer experience guru). I don’t know whether Flavio actually wrote the plugin but it has his name on it. Anyway, I installed it and it worked great. With very little effort – less than 10 minutes – I was able to get all my old posts tweeted on a basic schedule  – yay!

    Basically you tell Tweetily which posts to exclude by category, the minimum age of posts to include and how often to tweet and away you go. It also has a nifty little feature that lets you prefix the tweets with some free flow text. This is the critical feature that makes this whole setup work.

    Buffer – something to spread out your tweeting

    Buffer by Buffer.But hang on – I also use the super-easy Buffer app to schedule my tweets, this could pose a problem. Buffer – for those not in the know – is a super-easy app that lets you schedule your tweets so that you don’t flood your timeline, but more importantly , you can optimise when you send tweets for maximum reach. Buffer also does Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and app.net.

    I don’t really want another thing posting to Twitter – that might flood my timeline or need more management!

    BufferDM – the bridge between Buffer and Tweetily

    BufferDM by @mhsuttonThen I remembered BufferDM – a happy little utility app I wrote to help me add to my buffer account by a twitter DM. Let me explain.

    My ideas for tweets come to me in floods, before Buffer I just let that flood flow – not good! I pissed a few people off and they unfollowed me. That sort of tweet-diarrhea stinks.

    Buffer made a huge difference for me, but it was still tedious to go to the website or even the mobile app. Typically I just use the Twitter for Mac client. So I wrote a little app that I could tweet a DM to and it would put it into my buffer on BufferApp. I didn’t need to use any other clients and the only decision I have to make was whether to prefix my tweet with a ‘d bufferdm’  or not – I could keep my flow without the flooding. Happy!!

    Back to Tweetily. After a few days of using Tweetily I was a little dissatisfied with the timing conflicts of old blog posts and my other tweets from Buffer, but by getting Tweetily to tweet my post as a DM to BufferDM which then puts it nicely into my Buffer queue.

    I did this simply by setting my prefix text to ‘d bufferdm’ in  the Tweetily config.

    Now Tweetily handles the figuring out of which old posts to tweet and Buffer does what it does best and sends them out in a very optimised way. BufferDM is the pipe that makes it all sing.

    I am also noticing a generally increasing readership and a lot more conversations (that I love) on Twitter. When I have the data to prove this, I’ll share.

    So if you have some old posts you want to tweet without killing your timeline, try this setup and let me know how it goes.

  • I really suck at finding early customers.

    By: Stewart Chambers – CC BY 2.0

    I meet many people who struggle with ideas for a startup – at least for one they would be ready to take a risk to explore.

    Thankfully this is not a problem I have. There is no shortage of ideas nor of the capability to generate ideas. Neither do I have a huge aversion to risk – I try to fail cheaply and try to learn as fast as I can.

    My biggest problem is finding customers. Not customers to buy a finished product that I have spent thousands of pounds and countless hours building – I don’t often get that far. What I struggle to find are early adopters to test the ideas on for real – meaning that they actually have the problem I am trying to solve and would be willing to pay for the solution.

    Early customers may not stick with your product all the way through, but the early feedback they can give is invaluable – at least this is what I hope. Without early customers helping to validate my assumptions, my real risk aversion kicks in and I will stop working on the idea. The lack of feedback may, itself, be valuable feedback!

    There may be lots of reasons why early customers are hard to find, but some reasons are more reasonable indicators of the viability of the idea than others. My main reason is fear of what I perceive selling to be, crossed with impatience.

    My Definition of Selling (and marketing)

    My operating definition of ‘selling’ is this:

    Selling is the art of persuading someone to exchange  something they have  – that you want –  for something you have.

    Interestingly, my definition of ‘marketing’ is:

    Marketing is the art of persuading someone to want what you have to sell.

    In my mind, selling and marketing share the same process – persuasion- and differ only by goal.

    To me customer development is a form of selling. One where I’m trying to persuade someone with valuable insight into how their business works and real world needs to exchange their insight, time and money with me for the chance to have those needs met through my development of a product/service. Once I ‘sell’ them on the idea – then I can do surveys, usability testing, A/B testing blah, blah, blah. But if they don’t ‘buy’ – I got nothing!

    My Name is Mike and I’m Afraid of Selling

    I love people, I love talking with people and listening. I love hearing about the problems they have and I have learnt to not jump in with solutions. However, when I think that what I need to do is ‘sell’, my brain goes into lockdown. I find every possible reason not to ‘sell’. I procrastinate, dive into distractions and otherwise avoid this activity.

    My perception is that selling is a black art that I am unqualified to do and this ‘inferiority’ complex haunts me. This means I constantly second guess myself in a way I don’t do when I code or when I coach. It also means I over-analyse what possible response to my approaches will be (and overwhelmingly I conclude they will be negative, hostile or both). Inevitably I never do anything.

    To make matters worse, the people I want to contact are busy people. They aren’t sitting around waiting for my call. So, often their responses are delayed and this plays into my fears.

    Frankly I’m stuck at this point. I think I understand where my current problem lies. Once I can get to speak with a potential early customer, I’m fine. All my skills kick in and mostly I can persuade them to try what I am offering  – if they have a glimmer of the problem I am trying to solve.

    My problem – when I zoom into it, is in generating leads. Getting folk interested enough to get to speak with them. This is where the art is the blackest for me. This is where I need help.

    Do I have to be good at the approach?

    My gut answer is that early customers are key to building businesses – at least using a lean startup/customer development approach. So generating leads would seem a fundamental skill that every founder should have. So now, I am operating on the basis that I have to go from ‘crap’ to ‘good enough’.

    When I have wanted to improve at things in the past, I have often hired someone with the skills I wanted to improve and I then paired with them doing some real work. It was slow for me and them, but the learning was incredible. It cut out a lot of the noise and the outcome was awesome.

    That is what I intend to do this time. This worked for understanding SEO and learning Ruby on Rails. So I am exploring hiring someone to help with customer development who I can pair with. More on this soon – in the meantime if you know someone I should be talking to , ping me!

    Do you have a fear of selling? I’d love to hear your experiences – maybe something you have learnt can help me, maybe vice versa. Either way – let’s not suffer in alone.

  • Why I Live In Pinos del Valle

    8am in my sleepy village of Pinos del Valle, nestled in the mountains overlooking the Lecrin Valley opposite the amazing Las Alpujarras in Andalusia, Spain.

    ps. Turn your speakers on.

  • Do you want to feel less isolated working on your own?

    By: Hendrik Dacquin – CC BY 2.0

    I’m a solo founder. I’m working on the startups to the right —>

    I work from home in Pinos del Valle in Andalusia, Spain. There are 2 bars and almost no other tech entrepreneurs and most of my time is spent online – coding, research, emailing, reading, twitter or customer development – pretty much all online.

    Isolation Sucks!

    I love many things about being a solo founder – having my ideas and running with them and the freedom that comes with only having my own feelings to contend with.

    I hate the isolation I sometimes feel, not having people in the same situation as me to have conversations with, share ideas and otherwise be sociable.

    Let’s Lounge!

    Are you a solo founder or solo worker, freelancer, sole proprietor or generally work without the comfort of a team?

    Do you feel the same sense of isolation? Let’s do something about it. Here is a little experiment to see if it makes things better.

    I’ll set up a team room on Sqwiggle for 10 days – a lounge of sorts. In the lounge:

    • Video is always on – you’ll see everyone else.
    • You can set your mode to ‘Busy’ – you’ll still be seen but no one will disturb you.
    • We can talk to each other, chat and share stuff. We can talk about anything – tech/sport/politics/religion around as though we were around the coffee machine/water cooler/pub!
    • Generally get on with whatever we are doing.

    Interested?

    Fill out the form below and I’ll check you out. If you meet my very simple criteria, I’ll send you a free invite to the  ‘lounge’. I’ll only be sending out 10 invites a day, so please let me know if you have any preferences on days. I will not share your email or other details with anyone else. Ever.

    My simple criteria:

    1. You should be an independent solo professional (startups, freelancer or some kind of sole proprietor). You’ll need to have a link to your startup, website or LinkedIn page that I can go check out.
    2. Please tell me something about yourself – so we can have stuff to talk about. I’m not knowingly going to choose people who don’t want to be sociable!

    That’s it! Let’s lounge!!

    ———————– Experiment Closed ——————————–

  • Why Are Women Not Paid The Same As Men?

    By: lisa cee (Lisa Campeau) – CC BY 2.0

    I have been tip toeing around this in my head. I thought I knew why, but actually I think I’m as much a victim of my own preconceptions as anyone! So basically I’m zeroing what I know. Please help me understand.

    So here is my question. I am saddened by this situation and angry too. Mostly I am curious.

    Why are women paid less than their male counterparts doing the same work?

    There is lots written on this here, here and here.

    I want to understand it and then I want to help destroy the system that supports it. I have two daughters and the thought that they may be discriminated against because of their gender – or any reason really – boils my blood.

     

  • Love in action… sweet 🙂

    I rarely publish the feel-good emails that circulate amongst family members, but this one was a gem. Who doesn’t love cute baby chimps!?

    A mother chimpanzee who lived in a Zoo died recently and one of the Zoo employees took her baby chimp home to care for it. It never crossed his mind that his dog, who had recently given birth would adopt the chimp and raise it with her pups. Judging by the look on her face at times, she is not quite sure why this particular offspring has hands to grab her with, but all the same, this strange little “pup” which has joined her litter has brought out in her – AND her real family – for all the world to see – a portrait of exactly what unconditional love is all about.

     

  • A Poem: I Wonder

    By: zoetnet – CC BY 2.0

    Even as you sit in judgement of my colour, my clothing, the way I walk,  how I talk, of my tattoos and my piercings. I wonder.

    Even as you deny my humanness and create for me a false history of menace and incivility from your dim view of something I said or didn’t say. I wonder.

    I wonder why your world is so small when your mind is capable of endless curiosity

    Even as you condemn me for loving someone just like me, or for not loving someone just like you. I wonder.

    Even as you deny my freedoms when recognising them makes you no less free. I wonder.

    Even as you commit crimes against my person, my name and against truth. I wonder.

    I wonder what crime was committed against you to turn your heart so cold when it seeks only to dance in the beautiful warmth of fellowship.

    I wonder who judged you the way you judge me. Who didn’t love you the way I want you to love me?

     

    I wonder all these things and and I am sad.

     

    I wrote this in a moment of deep empathy for all of those who are the victims of the judgement of others – from Oprah to emos. From muslims to orthodox jews.

  • 5 Steps to Becoming a More Effective Scrum Team

    I often get to work with teams trying to ‘do’ Scrum and after about 100+ teams, I can confidently say one fundamental issue comes up again and again as a key stumbling block to how effective these teams are. In this post I’ll tell you what it is and 5 steps to addressing it. The rest is up to you.

    So the fundamental issue is this:

    The Scrum team does not understand the nature and type of work they are doing and so are not self-organising around it effectively.

    This post might help your team if you suffer any or all of the following symptoms.

    • You don’t have a product backlog
    • You have a product backlog full of much more than items adding direct value to the product
    • You have a Product Owner who is struggling to navigating the crap that found its way into their backlog
    • Your development team is screaming that they often do not have enough work to keep some of their members busy during a sprint
    • You are delaying sprint starts and/or extending sprints to absorb the impact of hidden work and compromised capability
    • Your team is having Sprint Zeros like they were 2-for-1 at the supermarket
    • You are doing analysis sprints, design sprints… and so on

    If you have these problems here is what I suggest you do:

    #1. Understand the work you are doing:

    Specifically, understand the work in terms of time and value.

    First and foremost, let’s look at value:

    • Direct value – work to implement features or fixes that people will pay for or have paid for. I group non-critical bugs and enhancements and such like under ‘fixes’.
    • Capability value –  work to add things that increase your capability to deliver or remove/refactor the things that are reducing your capability to deliver.

    That is it. If any work does not fall into either value type, it is waste – do not do it.

    This product elaboration picture illustrates this a little better:

    product_elaboration_funnel

    Direct value are the green and reddish-orange items (basically that stack is your product backlog on its side) and the capability value items are the things you know you did,  that narrow ‘your development team capability’ aperture or the things you know you can do, that will widen it.

    Next, consider time:

    • Past – this is usually work to improve capability value by addressing stuff you put on the never-never. This includes known hacks, fudges, crappy code you added that “TODO” on, shoddy design, smelly tests, no tests , all those outdated comments that everyone spends an hour wading through only to find they aren’t relevant, those manual tasks you thought you would only ever have to do that one time and then you actually do them several times a day and they are long and boring. Basically anything that affects your ability to sprint effectively.  This is not an exhaustive list.
    • Present – the ‘READY’ items that your team comprehensively knows enough about to be confident enough to commit to deliver in a sprint. Deliver as in ‘DONE” – meeting a Definition of Done that your team and your Product Owner agree is a consistently achieved level of goodness. For example it meets the conditions of acceptance, it hasn’t broken any existing value , the code is clean and generally efficient etc.
    • Near Future – items from the backlog for upcoming sprints that you need to create knowledge for now – basically the next reddish-orange items. If you don’t know why you should be doing this, allow me to elucidate.
      See the product elaboration picture above? Basically if you don’t do work on elaboration now, your team will arrive at a future sprint planning with big reddish-orange items that won’t fit. Except you will need to commit because your management will be screaming at you and you will be too chicken shit to say no. So you’ll pretend they are green and ‘ready’  and ‘commit’ to them knowing fully well there is little hope of them getting ‘DONE’. Of course you’ll try your best, you’ll work hard when you should have worked smart. You’ll cut corners and more than likely build crap and increase your tech debt., further reducing the capability of your team.

    FYI: Typically most ‘past’ work affects capability and most ‘present’ and ‘near future’ work is around direct value. Also the Product Owner owns the Product Backlog and the development team owns the Capability list.

    So now that you know what to look for, you’re ready for the next step.

    #2. Make work visible

    Now go gather work. People are clearly busy – raid the backlog, declare a ‘hidden work’ amnesty, collate it all and make it big and visible. I prefer using post-its in the first instance. Put it all on a big wall.

    Bring stuff from the product backlog, get the programmers to ante up their secret side projects, encourage testers to confess all the work they end up doing that no one gives them any credit for. Ask the rest of the organisation what others are doing that you secretly depend on every sprint but no one acknowledges.

    Take the view that any work that isn’t on the list doesn’t get done – simple as that.

    Invite ideas for capability work (you might need to first talk about what capabilities you need though – so do that). It might be training or having a consultant in to give an injection of skills, it might be building up specific expert knowledge. Whatever it is, get it , write it down and make it visible.

    None of the lists of items is locked down – that would be denying emergence and is a recipe for undoing your improvements. Resist the temptation to get Gestapo on it. Instead, consider just making it absolutely visible and develop a cadence of reviewing it regularly.

    product_elaboration_funnel

    One thing though – when you have your capability value items list up – go round and make everyone swear on the life of something precious to them that they won’t knowingly add anything that constitutes any kind of debt without stopping the line and getting everyone to agree to it. That is not to say you are going never have any more, only that you all knowingly accept to do so.

    With all the work visible and normalised – you’ve removed all the duplicates and everyone is clear what each post it represents, you can move on to the next step.

    #3. Prioritise the work

    The Product Owner should already have the backlog items prioritised by business value anyway – if not – they need to do that. Everyone can help with that, but ultimately it is their call. The immediate goal for this is to have a backlog is at least prioritised for the next 2 sprints. At this point, you need to make a clear distinction about what is ‘ready’ and what is ‘not ready’ for a sprint.

    Next, prioritise the  capability value items based on how much you all generally believe they might enhance your ability to deliver over time – the stuff that will speed it up now at the top and the less impactful stuff further down the list. Crappy code that rarely gets touched – whilst crappy – might hold little value for tackling now. But don’t worry, they are on the list and will get done.

    So now, all the work is in an ordered state, you are ready for step 4 – making time to do it.

    #4. Make time to do the work every sprint

    Now you need to figure out how you’re going to spend the time to do each type of valuable work. I recommend you do some of each type every sprint. The basic idea is, every sprint, to do a combination of now work (ready items off the backlog), elaboration (non ready , near future items , again from the product backlog) and capability improvement work.  FYI – only the ‘now’ work – ready items off the product backlog count as your sprint commitment.

    Without this you are going to get screwed. One or both of the following things will happen:

    1. You will run out of ready items to work on for later sprints and return to that place where your sprints are crap, nothing gets delivered, you work long hours just to create the knowledge you needed to have to even consider committing to anything.
    2. You keep delaying the capabilities improvements until everyone would rather drink arsenic than touch the code and you are delivering far less that you ever did. Frustration and mistrust is growing and most likely your team is shrinking because people just got fed up and found a different job.

    Without getting bogged down in numbers, I suggest you start with 70/20/10 and adapt.  This means figure out the time you have for the sprint and then:

    • Spend 70% of it working on the items you committed to get DONE in the sprint. Clearly you will need to adjust your sprint commitment too – so DO NOT commit to items based on 100% of your time and then work like the clappers to get them done in 70% of the time. That is just nuts.
    • Spend 20% of it working on elaborating near future ‘not ready’ work (this covers every knowledge creating task that enables your team to be able to commit to doing the near future work in sprints like UX analysis, exploring test cases, reviewing with customers, tech spikes and all that kind of stuff).
    • Spend 10% of it working on the capability improvements. You might only get to start them – when you are in sprint planning try to find ways to dissect the large capability improvement items into things that you can complete in a sprint to minimise branching issues and gates in the code to separate large refactoring.

    The fact of the matter is, with the type of work you have to, you have to invest to do it. You will end up paying one way or another.

    #5. Retrospect

    The preceding 4 steps are hard to do and sustain, but are essential. At your retrospectives remember to acknowledge that you got this far and celebrate too. Then seek ways to improve. Check your percentages  – are they still working for you? Evaluate your capability now, are you getting the benefit you expected to get? How are people feeling about being more open with the work they previously had as covert ops?

    Pay attention to what the ways the work is requiring you to self organise. Are you learning and amplifying that learning? Is everyone helping out the best way they can?

    The larger the development team capability grows, that more strain on your Product Owner to make enough backlog to sustain the development team. Is it time to slow the elaboration? Or maybe the team needs to help by doing more.

    Lots of ideas – but the key is to retrospect effectively. Please do so with care, respect and openness.

    Great you got this far – well done! Now go do it for real and let me know how you get on.

    Gratitude

    I am profoundly grateful to all the teams I have worked with who been the experimental jets for this learning. Also all the wonderful agile practitioners who I have known and whose ideas have mingled with mine. The product elaboration funnel is inspired by the work of Jeff Patton– who rocks in so many ways. Please check out his site and say I said ‘Hi’.