less code, more software

an interview with Jerry Weinberg

Jon
If you were stranded on a desert island with five books which books would you choose and why? Please don’t pick more than one of your own!
Jerry

An empty notebook with as many square feet of blank paper possible, for keeping my journal of this desert island adventure.
The complete Oxford English Dictionary, so I can study the English language in depth for the future when I might be rescued.
Frazer's Golden Bough, so I can immerse myself in the vastness of human culture.
Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice (Lewis Carroll's Alice books, annotated by Martin Gardner) so I could read for wisdom and humor at the same time. (I've used this book as a text in s/w development.)
If a Kindle counts as one book, I'd take that. Otherwise, Wilderness Medicine, Beyond First Aid, 5th Edition by William Forgey (I'd like to research this one, because I haven't read this, but I would need the best such book.)

I don't have any computer books on the list because I'm assuming I wouldn't have a computer. If there were such a book, I'd probably want *How to Build a Two-Way Radio Out of Coconut Shells*.

Jon
Which books would you change and to what if you did have a computer?
Jerry

I would not need the empty notebook, as I could keep my journal on-line. Instead, I'd want a complete service manual for the computer equipment.
I would not need the OED, for the same reason — an on-line OED. Instead, I would take Don Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming. I assume we count all published volumes as one "book."

The rest I would keep the same.

Jon
What do you consider your biggest contribution to the software world.
Jerry
That's easy. I answered that some years ago, and my answer hasn't changed. My biggest contribution to the software world is that I never invented yet another programming language.

Jon
What would you still like to achieve?
Jerry
I'd like to persuade more computer people to work on the unsolved problems of our profession, rather than the (pretty much) solved ones such as compiler writing.

Jon
Could you give some examples of what you consider to be the important unsolved problems of our profession
Jerry

requirements: finding out what will really make people happy
doing the things we know we ought to do
not doing things we know we ought not do
conservation of knowledge from one generation to the next
developing some sense of standard practice (can be more than one, but not too many) that will be followed around the world

Jon
You’ve written that you get a lot of inspiration from nature. Could you give some examples - of both the inspiration and nature that inspired it.
Jerry

Systems grow, and when they grow, they change. I've learned a lot about growing systems from natural systems and how they grow. For instance, there's D'Arcy Thomson's book, On Growth and Form, and a lovely little book, The Adaptive Geometry of Trees.
Systems adapt. Way back, I wrote Natural Selection as Applied to Computers and Programs, inspired by such works as Fisher's The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection.
Many of my insights from nature, along with references, can be found in my books on Systems Theory, such as An Introduction to General Systems Theory and General Principles of System Design.

Jon
If you had a one-time-only time machine how would you use it?
Jerry
I wouldn't. I have a rule: Don't mess with time.

Jon
Suppose you used it to visit your younger self what advice would you give yourself?
Jerry
When someone offers advice, you ought to taste it, but you don't have to swallow it.

Jon
In question one you mentioned Martin Gardener’s book, The Annotated Alice. Could you expand on how you used this as a text in s/w development.
Jerry
Alice's trip across the chessboard to become promoted quite nicely parallels a typical development process. It's no coincidence that Lewis Carroll (Dodgson) was a mathematical logician. He was able to do logic, and to make memorable the instances of illogic. For example, the Red Queen's behavior is that of many bad development managers ("Off with their heads.") The students were invited to find other parallels in the book, which hopefully set their minds to work.

Jon
What is the biggest change you'd like to see in the software world?
Jerry
Slowing down in order to do things right.

Jon
What would it take to make this happen?
Jerry
Hell would have to freeze.

Jon
What question would you ask yourself?
Jerry
What question would you ask yourself?

Jon
And what is your answer?
Jerry
What question would you ask yourself? Just kidding. That was a fun recursion.
Jerry
[this is the real question Jerry would ask himself] Why are you writing novels these days?
Jerry
[and this is his real answer] Like any life-changing decision, the switch to fiction has many reasons, all intertwingled. What follows are some of the reasons I have been able to disentangle.

All my life, I've dedicated myself to helping smart, talented people be happy and productive. You can see that theme in my books, I think, and it's the theme I've continued in my novels (see list below).
But not all my work has been through writing. Dani and I have also spent our careers training these smart, talented people through the use of experiential workshops — Problem Solving Leadership Workshop (PSL) Organization Change Shop (OCS), Systems Engineering Management (SEM), and the Amplifying Your Effectiveness Conference (AYE). We use experiential training methods because they are effective. They reach many people, and much more deeply, than your typical lecture class with PowerPoint slides.
In many ways, reading a non-fiction book can be much like one of those PowerPoint lectures, so whenever possible, I have used stories to bring my non-fiction works to life. Stories have always been powerful for learning, going back thousands of years. Why? Because a good story arouses the readers feelings of participating in the experience the story describes.
A great deal of the popularity of my books (and other non-fiction writers like Tom DeMarco) is in the stories. They make for lighter reading, which some people love and some people find objectionable, but overall, I have managed to present lots of hard stuff effectively through these stories.
Some of my books have been directed specifically at Information Technology (IT) people. Some have not. Generally, the ones that have sold best and longest have been the ones not so specifically directed at IT people — books such as
These readers tell me they like the stories, even those that have some technical content. In fact, they often learn technical concepts and details as a byproduct of reading and enjoying the stories. I like that, because it says I have reached many smart, talented people who don't happen to be IT folk. The novels do that even better. I hope more people try them.

Jon
Could you briefly mention some of your favourite music and films.
Jerry
Music: Almost anything Baroque. Any of Mozart (I have the complete recordings of his works, which should tell you something). Most music prior to 1850; almost nothing after that except Sousa, Gilbert & Sullivan, and Scott Joplin.
Films: (I'm probably missing some, but all these are favorites that I can see again at any time, with no hesitation.)

Jon
Could you expand a little on your rule "not messing with time"? Does it relate to "Slowing down in order to do things right?"
Jerry
Yes. Things take the time they take, not the time you hope they will take. Pushing for half-time produces half-baked.

Jon
At your Problem Solving Leadership course I noticed you sometimes answered a question "obliquely". For example when discussing cancer treatments you told the story of the Aspen mountain passes and how none of them are really much good. Could you explain why you sometimes choose to answer a question in this manner.
Jerry
What you call oblique, I call powerful. Take your example. Few of my listeners have had cancer, but many of them have the experience of hiking on difficult trails. Thus, the lesson is more likely to stick, as it has with you.

Jon
You’ve said learning a new language (a human language, such as Spanish) really helped your ability to think in a Systems Thinking way. Could you expand on that?
Jerry
In my case, it was French, learned while living in Geneva for a number of years. After a while, I found myself thinking in French when my ordinary thinking wasn't solving a problem. For instance, in English we say things like, "I took an aspirin for my headache." In French, the expression would be "against my headache." To me, that seems to imply something different from the English expression — a different way of thinking about disease and cure.
So, in effect, after learning French, I have a second way of addressing problems — and once I have a second way, it's easy to see that there may be a third way, and a fourth way, and so on. Being able to see a situation in multiple ways is a key concept in systems thinking, and learning a new language favors that concept.
The same phenomenon occurs in so-called programming languages. Someone who can work in only one such "language" cannot truly be considered a real programmer, in my opinion. That's why in school, I always insisted that programming homework be done in at least two languages — along with a written analysis of how each language affected the way the student approached the problem.

Many thanks to Jerry for agreeing to be interviewed by me. Fiona Charles took the excellent photo of me and Jerry. If you're a fan of Jerry you should check out her excellent book The Gift of Time. This interview also appeared in CVu, a publication of the ACCU, an organisation of programmers who care about professionalism in programming and are dedicated to raising the standard of programming.

Quality Software Management
Vol 4. Anticipating Change

is an excellent book by Jerry Weinberg (isbn 0-932633-32-3). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Organization inhibits reorganization (Minot's Law).

Growth is always non-linear.

Stability is the ability to ward off change.

A measurement system helps makes the software product visible.

Things will only get less visible over time.

Measure process not individuals.

Never use loops in a process description.

You need stability in order to make improvements.

Testing to improve, not to prove.

Without constant tending any process will deteriorate.

In a feedback control system it's only our perception that determines which is controller and which is controllee.

A day of deliberate practice

A Day of Deliberate Practice is the name of the JAOO conference tutorial session that Kevlin Henney and I are looking forward to running on Thursday 7th October. We've done some detailed preparation for it and think it's going to be really great. We will be using deliberate practice to try and increase the personal and technical agility of the participants.

You can get a 20% discount on the three conference days. Simply follow either Kevlin or myself on Twitter and then use “JAOOspeakerfollower” as promotion code upon registration: https://secure.trifork.com/aarhus-2010/registration/

Wabi sabi - the japanese art of impermanence

is an excellent book by Andrew Juniper (isbn 0-8048-3482-2). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

As the silence between notes is vital, so the space provided in art is just as expressive, and wabi sabi has used brevity to magnify the intensity of the expression.

There is an expression in Japanese that says that someone who makes things of poor quality is in fact worse than a thief, because he doesn't make things that will last or provide true satisfaction. A thief at least redistributes the wealth of society.

Zen monks believe that our reason is the greatest source of misunderstanding because it actually hinders a student's deeper comprehension of the world that exists beyond words. Humans are slaves to words and the reason they produce.

Translation is treason (part of an Italian proverb)

Unlike many [ceramics] in the West they rarely have handles, as the tactile nature of the pots makes handling them a part of the pleasure.

The minimal expression used in chabana flower arranging is again reinforcing the idea that less is indeed more and in some ways the work of an artist is as much in what they refrain from adding as what they actually put in.

Whereas modern design often uses inorganic materials to defy the natural aging effects of time, wabi sabi embraces them and seeks to use this transformation as an intergral part of the whole.

More than any learned ideas, it was the effort and attitude of the gardener that would decide the outcome of the garden.

The attitude does not come from the art.

Attach your lives to a goal not people or things [Albert Einstein]

The art of war

is an excellent book by Sun Tzu (isbn 0-87773-537-9). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Victory in war is not repetitious, but adapts its form endlessly.

Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found by calculation. it must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.

The condition of a military force is that its essential factor is speed.

When they give out numerous rewards, it means they are at an impasse; when they give out numerous punishments, it means they are worn out.

Let diplomatic relations be established at borders.

Preparedness everywhere means lack everywhere.

Good warriors seek effectiveness in battle from the force of momentum, not from the individual.

Great wisdom is not obvious, great merit is not advertised. When trouble is solved before it forms, who calls that clever? When there is victory without battle, who talks of bravery?

Making yourself invincible means knowing yourself.

...is like going to announce to your superiors that you want to put out a fire - by the time you get back with an order, there is nothing left but ashes.

It takes twenty pounds of provisions to deliver one pound of provisions to a distant army.

The tao of business

is an excellent book by Ansgar Gerstner (isbn 978-988-18154-7-7). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Taoism emphasizes compassion, spontaneity, and respect for nature.

Taoism believes in a kind of self-organizing system, that there are patterns to the world and its affairs, and that it is best to let these patterns operate without interference.

Wuwei is closely linked with this idea. In order to be able to apply wuwei - to "act by not acting" - you need good intuition and instinct and be excellent at sensing what is going on.

You have to be careful to recognize the limitations of your knowledge and not interfere with processes in the false belief that you completely understand a situation and can predict precisely the outcome of a certain action.

The point of karaoke is not singing, which is almost always awful. It is getting to know your partners.

The focus in the Daodejing is not "adding", it is on "reducing".

It is often the fear of losing control that makes people add issues and complexities to a situation.

Keeping things simple is an art. And, as with any art, simplicity needs to be cultivated.

You will not be dealing with the abstract notion of a business, but with real individuals.

What makes water "invincible" is that nothing can change its inherent quality of utmost adaptability and agility.

An effective way to maintain flexibility and with it creativity, is to foster a learning culture in your business.

It is important in all kinds of contexts not to hold on to things too tightly.

The dance of life

is an excellent book by Edward T. Hall (isbn 0-385-19248-7). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

All societies depend for the stability on feedback from the people. Depersonalization reduces feedback to a minimum, contributing to instability and lowering the overall level of congruence in the society.

Some things are not easily bent to simple linear description. Time is one of them.

Symbols should always be viewed as tools and consciously distinguished from the events which they symbolize.

Without environmental change, complex forms of life cannot evolve.

It is clear that our emphasis on saving time, which goes with quantifying time and treating it as a noun, would also lead to a high valuation of speed, which is demonstrated in much of our behaviour.

Nothing can grow in a healthy way unless it is in a time-controlled, uniform manner; for example, it is the unregulated (out-of-phase) growth of cells in the body that characterizes cancer.

"We have everything, but we don't have each other" [Takeo Matsuda]

The Pueblos believe that thoughts have a life of their own and that these live thoughts are an integral part of any man-made structure and will remain with that structure forever.

The more information that is shared... the higher the context.

As context is lost, information must be added if meaning is to remain constant.

If you're not catching...

I love coarse fishing. Float fishing on rivers in particular. Contrary to popular opinion we coarse fishers (and there are an awful lot of us - it's the most popular pastime in the UK by a long way) do not, repeat not, kill the fish we catch. We treat them with care and respect and return them to the water a little bit startled perhaps, but also a little bit fatter. Lots of us follow Uncle Bob's boy scout rule - we collect litter from around the spot where we're fishing. In fact, in a fishing competition you'll be disqualified if there's litter in your fishing spot - regardless of "whose litter it is".

I don't think you'll be too surprised to read that part of the pleasure in coarse fishing is catching fish. And yet, if you actually watch someone fishing, you're quite likely to see them repeating the following actions over and over and over again. For hours.

cast out (to the same spot as last time)
don't get a bite (the same as they didn't last time)
reel the float back in

Contrary to popular opinion, the best fishermen are not patient. If a good fisherman is not catching they don't keep on doing the same thing. They know that if they keep doing the same thing they'll almost certainly keep getting the same outcome. So they change something. They might try:

changing the depth; a bit deeper or a bit shallower - fish like to stay where they like to stay
changing the cast; a bit closer in or a bit further out - fish like to stay where they like to stay
changing the bait - fish have preferences just like people
changing the bait - a big bait won't even fit inside a small fish's mouth. And bigger fish are often attracted by smaller fish feeding
changing the weights - to change the way the bait behaves in the current
changing the line - the thinner the line the less chance the fish will see it, and the more naturally the bait will behave in the current. I once set up my rod with lines of varying strengths and tied the end of the line to the bike shed. It is utterly astonishing how hard you have to pull to snap line with a diameter of 0.10mm. You won't believe it unless you try it for yourself.
changing the hook - the smaller the hook the less chance the fish will see it, and the less it will weigh, so the more naturally the bait will behave in the current. I regularly use a size 22 hook. It's about half the size of my little fingernail. Again it is far far stronger than you'd imagine. There is even a trick to make a maggot swallow air to counteract the weight of the hook!
changing where you hook - throw a maggot into the water and watch carefully how it sinks. It always sinks lying horizontally. If you hook the maggot in the middle you can mimic this.
loose feed - if you're fishing with maggots then throw a dozen loose maggots at the float every cast. Every cast. Every single cast. If you can't throw them far enough then buy a fishing catapult. The best way to catch a fish on a maggot is to catch a fish that's already eaten lots of maggots. This is the most important rule.

There's definitely a skill in knowing what to change, but you've got to walk before you can run. The most important thing is to change something.

If you're part of a team painfully producing poor quality software then I humbly suggest you consider changing something. If you don't it's a fair bet you'll continue not catching.

Notes on the synthesis of form

is an excellent book by Christopher Alexander (isbn 0-674-62751-2). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Poincaré once said: "Sociologists discuss sociological methods; physicists discuss physics." I love this statement. Study of method by itself is always barren.

Culture is changing faster than it has ever changed before...what once took many generations of gradual development is now attempted by a single individual.

Modern mathematics deals at least as much with questions of order and relation as with questions of magnitude.

If the world were totally regular and homogeneous, there would be forces, and no forms. Everything would be amorphous. But an irregular world tries to compensate for its own irregularities by fitting itself to them, and thereby takes on form. D'Arcy Thompson has even called form the "diagram of forces" for the irregularities.

No complex adaptive system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time unless the adaptation can proceed subsystem by subsystem, each subsystem relatively independent of the others.

We define a concept in extension when we specify all the elements of the class it refers to. And we define a concept in intension when we try to explain its meaning analytically in terms of other concepts at the same level.

Design is by nature imaginative and intuitive.

Every form can be described in two ways: from the point of view of what it is, and from the point of view of what it does.

It is the culmination of the designer's task to make every diagram both a pattern and a unit. As a unit it will fit into the hierarchy of larger components that fall above it; as a pattern it will specify the hierarchy of smaller components which it itself is made of.

What is it about the internal structure of any problem that makes it hard to solve? In nine cases out of ten, we cannot solve it, because we cannot grasp it.

Quality Software Management
Vol 3. Congruent Action

is an excellent book by Jerry Weinberg (isbn 0-932633-28-5). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. [Henry David Thoreau]

Incongruence is stereotyped behavior because it is not appropriate for the particular situation.

Busy management is bad management.

One of the functions of a leader is to become a focus for hostility.

Culture makes language, then language makes culture.

Breaking up economic teams is economic nonsense. Why is it so common?

In all Steering organizations the team is the fundamental unit of production.

In Steering organizations, managers rise above the level of product management and begin concentrating on process management.

We connect through our sameness and grow through our differences. [Virginia Satir]

Intellect is great, but character is more important.

Social skills influence more and more the effectiveness of technical skills.

We blame out of fear, and the blame creates a situation that justifies the fear.

Cleaning this brass is a waste of time...

I did a weeks UML/Agile training/consultancy in Huddersfield recently. Relaxing in a pub one evening, I noticed two of the staff cleaning the brass drip-trays. Then I heard one of them say this

Cleaning this brass is a waste of time. It takes 10 minutes and when you've done it there's no difference.

I was immediately reminded of Jerry Weinberg's Fast Food Fallacy "no difference plus no difference plus no difference plus ... eventually equals a clear difference".

Models and abstraction

My friend Kevlin Henney recently did a in-the-brain-of talk for SkillsMatter. He talked about Models and Modelling. Here's part of Kevlin's definition of a model

A model is an abstraction ... for a purpose.

There is an intimate relationship between a model and its abstraction. I think it was Andrew Koenig who said

Abstraction is selective ignorance.

The word 'ignorance' might mislead you here. It doesn't mean ignorance in the sense of an ignorant person - a person who should know something important but doesn't. It means ignorance in the sense of not being aware of something unimportant. The word 'selective' relates to the word 'purpose'. A clear purpose helps you decide what's important and what's not. Things that aren't important can then be omitted. Modelling is primarily an act of omission. The less clarity of purpose in your mind, the less omission is likely to take place, the more the model will try to say, without clarity.

The London underground tube map as a nice example of modelling. The usefulness of the tube map is directly related to the massive amount of omission in it (or should that be not in it?)

it's not scaled - 5cm on the map does not relate to 5 miles on the ground.
it's not proportional - stations 8cm apart on the map are not twice as far apart (on the ground) as stations 4cm on the map.
it's not relative - stations north/south of each other on the map are not necessarily north/south of each other on the ground.
it doesn't tell you street names.
it doesn't tell you where the bus stops are.
the turns in the River Thames are not all 90 degrees or 45 degrees.
the little nicks on one side of the line don't tell you if the platform will be on the left or right.
...

These things are all omitted because they don't relate to the model's primary purpose - to help you get from one tube station to another tube station.

Things that a model does say should be said consistently. For example, the station names are all written horizontally, in the same font and style. If some were horizontal, some vertical, some slanted, some in black, some in blue, some large, some small, we might start wonder if the differences were significant. The model would be leading us astray. If the tube map was trying to be geographically accurate some parts of the map would get very squashed. The squashed stations might get a smaller font. And some might be angled into the only available space.

There is also at least one act of addition in the tube map. The lines have different colours. The circle line is yellow for example. Kevlin promises me that the steel tracks on the circle line are not yellow! But then again, perhaps the colour refers to the trains running on the track. Are the trains on the circle line noticeably yellow? If so, which had the yellowness first, the tube lines on the map or the actual trains? Or, over time, have they influenced each other?

It's easy to ignore just how much effort went into figuring out what to remove from the tube map. Wikipedia has a nice entry on how the tube map has changed over time. I remember once reading how Harry Beck spent years working on an early version of the tube map which his supervisor rejected because it needed to contain less.

A powerful abstraction helps you create a model of clarity, but the clarity can easily seduce you - you're not aware of all that has been omitted, and the effort needed to omit it. When you look at the tube map you just see the tube map.

Quality Software Management
Vol 1. Systems Thinking

is an excellent book by Jerry Weinberg (isbn 0-932633-22-6). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

There is only one sin, and that's failing to believe you have a choice. [Jean-Paul Sartre]

A culture is a self-sustaining pattern that has remarkable powers of resistance to change.

The essence of a pattern is what it can do consistently.

When trying to introduce change in software engineering practices (or any practices, for that matter), it's often better to work by addition, rather than subtraction. Instead of continually emphasizing what people are doing wrong, emphasize what they are doing right so that they will do more of it.

The Reversible Fallacy: What is done can always be undone.

The Causation Fallacy: Every effect has a cause ... and we can tell which is which.

One of the most important tasks is not merely describing these laws, but in distinguishing which ones are "natural" laws that we'll have to learn to accept and which ones are "human decision" laws that we'll have to learn to control.

People's language often reveals when they believe that they are victims of events, rather than having a choice of reactions to the event. Learn to listen for falsely deterministic key words.

Any time you say, "I can't do that, " you'll always be right.

IQ scores would be a lot more meaningful if you added 10,000 to each score.

An hour of work is not an hour of work if you are interrupted during the hour.

The average defect detection time will keep rising throughout the project.

Poor quality hurts much more than good quality helps.

The software industry tends to focus on tools rather than on people.

The corporation

is an excellent book by Joel Bakan (isbn 1-84529-174-3. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

"The corporation has essentially replaced the church in terms of who you are", says Edison Schools financier Michael Moe.

Indeed, the very notion that there is a public interest, a common good that transcends our individual self-interest, is slipping away. … These are the elements of an emerging order that may prove to be as dangerous as any fundamentalism that history has produced.

Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor, to borrow a phrase from George Bernard Shaw.

Most corporate law statutes include provisions that permit governments to dissolve a corporation, or seek a court order to dissolve it.

Corporations are our creations. They have no lives, no powers, and no capacities beyond what we, through our governments, give them.

We believe that some things are too vulnerable, precious, or important to exploit for profit.

The wisdom of crowds

is an excellent book by James Surowiecki (isbn 0-316-86173-1). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.

The best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.

To be smart at the top, the system has to be smart all the way through.

Adding in a few people who know less, but have different skills, actually improves the group's performance.

We have bad intuitions about averaging.

Keep the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated.

Information isn't in the hands of one person. It's dispersed across many people.

The problem starts when people's decisions are not made all at once, but rather in sequence.

People are more overconfident when facing difficult problems than when facing easy ones.

Encouraging people to make incorrect guesses actually made the group as a whole smarter.

Growing a business

is an excellent book by Paul Hawken (isbn 0-413-19340-3). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Be careful, you may succeed.

Gregory Bateson once defined the most elementary unit of information as the 'difference that makes a difference'. … The ability to create differences in manufacturing and delivery of goods and services will be the key to success.

Don't start two businesses.

Take a product and reduce it to its essence.

If employees, customers, and vendors don't laugh and have a good time at your company, something is wrong.

You don't ever manage people - you work with them.

Enterprises fail more often because of the sum total of seemingly inconsequential events acting upon them than because of a sudden disaster or discontinuity.

In the beginning, survival is more important than success.

Nothing in nature tells us that rapid growth is good, and certainly nothing in human biology. In our own bodies, the most rapid growth of all is cancer.

Businesses that grow too fast or in the wrong way overwhelm the adaptive capacity of the people who work there.

Responsibility is participation.

If a village in Europe or China wanted to censure and remove a member of its society, the townspeople went to the offender's home and burned it to the ground, along with all the possessions inside. That's how they fired someone.

Hire the person, not the position.

Linked

is an excellent book by Albert-László Barabási (isbn 0-7382-0667-9). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Mathematicians call this phenomenon the emergence of a giant component, one that includes a large fraction of all nodes. Physicists call it percolation and will tell you that we just witnessed a phase transition, similar to the moment in which water freezes.

What is the structure of the network encoding how the crickets, or people influence each other?

Power laws rarely emerge in systems completely dominated by a roll of the dice. Physicists have learned that most often they signal a transition from disorder to order.

Trapped between order and chaos, water molecules participate in a majestic dance in which some molecules come together, form small and somewhat ordered groups, move together, and in no time break apart to join other molecules forming yet other groups.

In the vicinity of the critical point we need to stop viewing atoms separately.

The theory of phase transition told us loud and clear that the road from disorder to order is maintained by the powerful forces of self-organization.

Errors and failures typically corrupt all human designs.

Computer simulations we performed on networks generated by the scale-free model indicated that a significant fraction of nodes can be randomly removed from any scale-free network without its breaking apart.

Innovations spread from innovators to hubs.

We need to understand living systems in their integrity.

Real networks are not static, as all graph theoretical models were until recently. Instead, growth plays a key role in shaping their topology.

Time wounds all heels

When I was a boy I was taught ITA spelling. ITA stands for Initial Teaching Alphabet. The idea was to teach phonetic spelling. As a consequence, despite years of ongoing effort and practice I still find myself misspelling homonyms - words pronounced the same but spelled differently. Words such as they're, their, and there. There (have to check it now...) are loads of them in English. I mentioned this to a friend on an email list a while back and he replied "What were they thinking?"
Quite.

Here's an example of how it can affect me - an anonymous quote I've read in two of Jerry Weinberg's books:

Time wounds all heels.

When I read this I just didn't get it. I knew I didn't understand it and I kept trying to. But to no avail. Why couldn't I understand it? Answer: because I was reading it as:

Time wounds all heals.

The word wounds was nudging my ITA brain to see/hear the word heel as heal. They naturally fit together as opposites after all! And of course in reverse it is heal - Time heals all wounds.

How did time suddenly heal my wound and reveal the true meaning to me? It was while I was attending Jerry Weinberg's Problem Solving Leadership course. Jerry was talking about "Time wounds all heels" and he simply said the words "Achilles" and "heel" one after the other. And in that moment I understood! Heel. Heel. Not Heal. Time wounds all heals. Damn. I did it again. I really did. Time wounds all heels. Your (that's one I've learned I have to check... no it's not you're) Achilles heel is your (again) weak (not week) spot.

Switch - how to change things when change is hard

is an excellent book (isbn 978-1-84-794031-5). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

Psychologists have discovered that self-control is an exhaustible resource... What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.

What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

TBU - true but useless.

Knowledge does not change behaviour. We have all encountered crazy shrinks and obese doctors and divorced marriage counsellors.

To be clear, it's not so much that you're a brilliant predictor; it's that he's a lousy self-evaluator. We're all lousy self-evaluators.

When milestones seemed to distant, they should look for "inch pebbles".

Coaches are masters of shrinking the change.

Stanford psychologist Lee Ross... noted that people have a systematic tendency to ignore the situational forces that shape other people's behaviour. he called this deep-rooted tendency the "Fundamental Attribution Error."

With hard goals, action triggers almost tripled the chance of success.

We are not nouns, we are verbs

Stephen Fry was interviewed in this weeks Radio Times. The following snippet caught my attention:

Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it - that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

When things start to think

by Neil Gershenfeld is an excellent book (isbn 0-340-75039-1). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

The fibres that make up a sheet are actually translucent. Light striking the paper gets bent as it passes through a fiber, and since there are so many fibres this happens many times in many directions. The result of all this scattering is that the light spreads through the paper much like the spread of a drop of ink, eventually leaking back out. ... This phenomenon, called optical weak localization, is what makes the paper (or a glass of milk) appear to be white.

There are deep reasons why the old technologies in a book work so well... What jumps out the first time you see a Gutenberg Bible is the glossiness of the ink. It turns out that Gutenberg made his inks by cooking a stew of oil and copper and lead that precipitated out little platelets that act like tiny mirrors, paradoxically reflecting light from a black background.

Freed from the constraint of duplicating manuscripts, Aldus Manutius in Venice around 1500 then settled on the dimensions of the modern book. It was designed to fit in the saddlebags of traveling scholars, and his Press developed the italics font, to fill the pages more efficiently than did fonts that imitated handwriting.

If you're offered a better computer program, it's not possible to peer inside and judge how it works.

It requires great discipline to put just enough of the right kind of information in the right place to communicate the desired message rather than a printer demo.

Like all good scientific discoveries, the seeds of Lorenz's observation can be found much earlier.

Good help is as hard to find in the digital world as it is in the real one.

Naming the solution is not the same as obtaining it.

It's all too easy to defer thinking to a seductive computer program.

The brain's internal representation is not designed for external consumption.

The world is the next interface.

It's often a situation problem

In a previous blog post I commented on a recurring theme in several software classics - the idea that it's always a people problem. I was reminded of that sound-byte today while reading Switch - How to change things when change is hard by Chip and Dan Heath. Their surprising-thing-about-change number 1 (of 3) is

What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

I prefer this version, partly because it uses the word often rather than always and so it follows Bill Bailey's Law. But mostly I prefer it because saying "it's always a people problem" feels demotivating because we are all people and you get drawn into thinking you're the problem. As Deming made clear, the root cause of most problems is not the people but the system. But the word "situation" is simpler and somehow easier to grasp than "system". It's clear your always in the situation that you're in.

A related quote from Switch is

to change someone's behavior you've got to change their situation.

I like this a lot and it reminds me of the various quotes about acting your way into thinking differently being easier than thinking your way into acting differently...

Sometimes it’s easier to act your self into a new way of thinking, than it is to think your self into a new way of acting. (Jo Berry)

You cannot change how someone thinks, but you can give them a tool, the use of which leads them to think differently. (R. Buckminster Fuller - quoted in The Fifth Discpline by Peter Senge)

Adults are much more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking than to think their way into a new way of acting. (Richard Pascale's in Surfing the Edge of Chaos)

Or, to say it in reverse

Knowledge does not change behavior.

So instead of saying "it's always a people problem" perhaps it is better to say "it's rarely a people problem"

Gandhi an autobiography

is an excellent book (isbn 978-0-141-03273-3). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

All his life he held to two fundamental principles, a belief in Ahimsa, or non-violence, and the concept of Satya, or truth; as he said: 'My uniform experience has convinced me that there is no other God than Truth.'

Renunciation of objects, without the renunciation of desires, is short-lived, however hard you may try.

Jealousy does not wait for reasons.

I had been advised to collect certificates of my having abstained from meat, and I asked the English friend to give me one. He gladly gave it and I treasured it for some time. But when I saw later that one could get such a certificate in spite of being a meat-eater, it lost all its charm for me.

Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth.

Great men never look at a person's exterior. They think of his heart.

Rest assured it takes no unusual skill to be an ordinary lawyer. Common honesty and industry are enough to enable him to make a living. All cases are not complicated.

I scrupulously avoided hurting their feelings.

It went against the grain with me to do a thing in secret that I would not do in public.

The heart's earnest and pure desire is always fulfilled.

Service can have no meaning unless one takes pleasure in it.

Long Walk to Freedom

is an excellent book (isbn 978-0-349-10653-3). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

I maintain that nurture, rather than nature, is the primary moulder of personality.

I did well in school not so much through cleverness as through doggedness.

These [meetings] were not scheduled, but were called as needed... Everyone who wanted to speak did so... People spoke without interruption...

Majority rule was a foreign notion. A minority was not to be crushed by a majority.

This metal wire, he said, pointing above, is an example of Western manufacturing, which is skilful but cold, clever but soulless.

I could compensate for lack of natural aptitude with diligence and discipline. I applied this to everything I did.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have changed.

Gaur believed in finding solutions rather than spouting theory.

I was far more certain in those days of what I was against than what I was for.

If fine bodies and impressive physiques were essential to being a leader, I saw that few among us would have qualified.

If you wait for textbook conditions, they will never occur.

Class, Nyerere always insisted, was alien to Africa; socialism indigenous.

I did not think this view [always rejecting bail] should be universally applied and believed we should examine the issue on a case-by-case basis.

Any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose because I will not part with it at any price or under any pressure.

cyber-dojo server is up

The first cyber-dojo server is up, at http://www.cyber-dojo.org Please note the hyphen - the url without the hyphen was not available. The infrastructure is very very very rudimentary, but it's a start. Something to learn from and build on. Any feedback always welcome.

Have you got any strawberries?

I was driving along the A303 towards Gatwick last week and passed several stalls selling strawberries. It reminded me of an incident many years ago, before the kids were born, on the same road when Natalie and I stopped to buy some. We approached the stall. The only thing it sold was strawberries. It was a strawberry stall. Everywhere you looked here were open punnets of strawberries. With a twinkle in my eye I looked at the two young lads manning the stall and watched their puzzled faces as I asked "Have you got any strawberries?"

The World's Least Favourite Airline?

I had a great family cruise on NCL's Norwegian Gem visiting Venice, Dubrovnik, Izmir, Athens, and Nafplion. I particularly liked Dubrovnik and the ruins at Ephesus are truly spectacular and were well worth the long taxi ride from Izmir. NCL was faultless in all respects and I have no hesitation wholeheartedly recommending NCL, it's cruises and its staff.

But not British Airways…the BA flight home from Venice to Gatwick was a joke. There were numerous check in desks at the airport and the only one with a sizeable queue was BA's. In fact the BA queue was so long it blocked one side of the building from the other. I looked (and asked) for some self-service check-in desks and found quite a few from many airline companies but none from BA. The day's first flight from Venice to Gatwick was so late we got to see the end of that fiasco too. It was over-booked and several people queued for two and half hours in sweltering heat only to fail to get a boarding pass. These people naturally joined the queue for the next flight so that flight was overbooked too. But did anyone walk along the queue offering cash to anyone willing to take a later flight? No. So once again some people at the end of the queue were going to fail to get a ticket after queuing for several hours. While the first flight's queue was queueing security had to be called because everything was so badly organised. As usual one of the check-in desks was reserved for Club-something-or-other and so sat mostly idle while the queue lengthened and people grew more and more irate.

We were on the second BA flight out. Having seen the problems from earlier in the day we joined the queue very early. It was a wise move as the queueing was just as badly organised. Eventually we got to the check-in desk and just after we had got our boarding passes I happened to see a not-so-easy-to-see note offering €250 if you took a flight the next day. And just after we had got our boarding passes the check-in lady told us the flight was delayed for an hour - which of course meant it would be delayed for more than one hour - why do they always underestimate the delay? If we had been told the flight had been delayed before we started checking in we might well have taken the offer. We certainly would have given it some serious consideration. And why if they know it's an hour late don't they show that information on the departure boards?

It would have been so easy for BA to do the little things that showed they cared about their customers. Something as simple as providing some kind of cool drink for people while they queued in the heat. It wouldn't be much, but it would be something and it would change the situation so completely. But no.

Over and over you felt BA simply didn't care about you.

I fly quite a lot and from now on if I have a choice - and on several routes I do - I'm not going to fly BA.

The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

is an excellent book (isbn 0-451-53038-1). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

In an incautious moment my parents had promised that I should never be sent to school until I asked leave to go. This promise I afterward learned began to give them considerable uneasiness because as I grew up I showed no disposition to ask.

He is a bold man who calls anything a trifle.

The fundamental advantage of a library is that it gives you nothing for nothing. Youths must acquire knowledge themselves.

The celebrated maxim of Confucius: To perform the duties of this life well, troubling not about another, is prime wisdom.

Whenever one learns to do anything he has never to wait long for an opportunity of putting his knowledge to use.

How reserved the Scot is! Where he feels most he expresses least. Silence is more eloquent than words.

Slight attention or a kind word to the humble often bring back reward as great as it is unlooked for. No kind action is ever lost.

Even in these days of the fiercest competition, when everything would seem to be matter of price, there lies still at the root of great business success the very much more important factor of quality.

No sound judgement can remain with the man whose mind is disturbed by the mercurial changes of the Stock Exchange. It places him under an influence akin to intoxication. What is not, he sees, and what he sees, is not.

Mr Pullman replied: "Yes, my friends, all that you say is true. I have had a long, long life full of troubles, but there is one curious fact about them - nine tenths of them never happened."

Trondheim XP Agile cyber-dojo

Anders Hammervold and Jonas Follesø organized a cyber-dojo for the Trondheim XP Agile group yesterday. Anders tells me great fun was had by all.

Managing the design factory

is an excellent book by Don Reinertsen (isbn 0-684-83991-1). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Best practices are only "best" in certain contexts and to achieve certain objectives. A change in either the context or the objective can quickly transform a "best practice" into a stupid approach.

We must constantly remember that the simplification [of the abstraction] is a veil between us and the reality of the process.

Manufacturing is an inherently repetitive process and therefore more likely to produce learning than a non-repetitive process, like product development.

In the design process we can only add value when we do something differently. If we change nothing, then we add no value.

We will see much more variability in the design process than we see in repetitive manufacturing process. This variability is an indicator that we are doing something new in the design process, and thus that we are adding value.

Risk and the variability associated with it, are inherent and desirable characteristics of design processes. They are at the heart of a design process's capacity to generate information.

The design factory needs variability, so it needs tools that allow us to coexist with variability.

When you dig below the surface you discover that most change programs are motivated by two forces: imitation and obedience.

Events that are less probable contain more information.

Our testing processes need to have an adequate failure rate to generate sufficient information.

Each iteration starts on the base of the quality of the previous pass.

A process is a way of preserving learning that occurs when doing an activity.

A whirlwind at Reading station in 1840

As well as the super statue of the World War I soldier at Paddington by my namesake I also spotted this at Reading station last week. It's on platform 4 but you have to look quite hard to find it.

Faulty LiveScribe pen

I bought a 4GB LiveScribe pen from Amazon uk on May 11th. The first time I used it worked but repeatedly refused to allow me to register online. The second time I tried to use it refused to record audio and it continues to refuse. I phoned the LiveScribe support number on June 22nd and after navigating my way through several "press 1 for this, press 2 for that" menus I spoke to a human being. I was asked to send details of the pen, my computer (a bog standard MacBook Pro), and a log file. I did this immediately.

It's now June 29th, seven days later and I have heard nothing. Not even an email acknowledging receipt of the details I sent. So I rang again today. I spoke to the same lady in technical support. She explained that she had forwarded the information I sent to technical support but that they were backed up with work which was why no one had got back to me yet. This doesn't sound promising - John Seddon would call that Failure Demand.

She said she would escalate the case and promised someone would contact me tomorrow. We will see. Stay tuned!

Thinking ahead - I'm wondering how long should I give them to fix it. And if they can't whether I'll ask for a replacement or a refund...

Update. They called back as promised. They talked me through doing a firmware upgrade (which I had already tried to run and fortunately still had in my download cache). Part way through I got a message saying "your pen is not recognised". Despite appearances I was told this was not a message from the firmware upgrade, but from livescribe desktop which was also open. And on a manual firmware upgrade the livescribe desktop can apparently interfere with the firmware upgrade (which is no doubt what happened to me the first time). So I closed livescribe desktop and restarted the firmware upgrade. And this time it worked! Hoorah. I have audio recording back. So less than top marks for it not working first time, but nearly top marks for helpful support.

Charles Sargeant Jagger

I was at Paddington station a few days ago and I stopped to look at this superb statue (it's at the edge of platform 1). I noticed it was by Charles Sargeant Jagger!

The Hávamál

translated from the original by Björn Jónasson ISBN 9979-9070-0-2. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

The ethics of the Hávamál are above all rooted in the belief in the value of the individual.

Attending a feast: No man should call himself clever but manage his mind. A sage visitor is a silent guest. The cautious evades evil. Never a friend more faithful, nor greater wealth, than wisdom.

Happiness: He is unhappy and ill-tempered who meets all with mockery. What he doesn't know, but needs to, are his own familiar faults.

Financial sense: Become not a beggar to the money you make. What's saved for a friend a foe may take. Good plans often go awry.

Moderation and prosperity: Moderately wise a man should be not too crafty or clever. The best of lives is led by those who know the measure of many things.

Shyness: A log's flame leaps to another fire kindles fire. A man listens thus he learns. The shy stays shallow.

Foresight: A man should know how many logs stubs and strips of bark to collect in summer to keep in stock wood for his winter fires.

The use of power: A prudent man wields power in modest measure. With brave men he finds that none is foremost or excels in all things.

Everyone has his use: The lame rides a horse the maimed drives the herd the deaf is brave in battle. A man is better blind than buried. A dead man is deft at nothing.

Winner or loser?

As well as running an evening CyberDojo at the NDC 2010 conference in Oslo last week I also attended an excellent morning workshop run by Matthias Skarin. He used several experiential exercises one of which was a simple rally-car driving simulation. In the game everyone stands in a circle and has to choose "Hi" or "Lo". Then you find out what the person to your left and to your right chose and look up your score. For example, Left=Hi, Me=Lo, Right=Lo, check the sheet, Hi-Lo-Lo = 2 points. Then repeat 15 times, each time adding your points to your running total, and rearranging the circle lowest-score to highest-score, slowest driver to fastest driver.

The points table was cleverly structured so there was a tension between working for yourself or for the whole circle. After a few rounds I had an idea. I decided to play the game by trying to maximise the score of the person to my left even if it meant coming last. I have to admit part of the reason for this was I was only half awake, (I hadn't had enough coffee), and figured I wasn't going to do very well anyway. Each round I simply explained what I was doing to the person to my left and asked whether they would like me to pick a Hi or a Lo.. The effect was dramatic - I rapidly became the slowest car as people overtook me. And because we were standing in a circle, in no time at all, the person to my left was the fastest car. Then there was another dramatic effect - since the person to my left was gaining a significant advantage from me each round they rapidly accelerated ahead of the second placed car. At the end of the game two cars had noticeable scores; mine because it was so low, and Paul's (the person to my left) because it was so high.

Afterwards someone pointed out that I had been the driver of the slowest car. I explained how I had played the game and suggested that maybe I had been the navigator in the fastest car!?

The soul would have no rainbow if the eyes had no tears and other native american proverbs

is an excellent book by Guy A Zona (isbn 0-671-79730-1). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

I seek strength no to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy - myself. [Tribe unknown]

The more you give, the more good things come to you. [Crow]

The song is very short because we understand so much. [Navajo]

If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies in yourself. [Minquass]

You are never justified in arguing. [Hopi]

No answer is also an answer. [Hopi]

Every fire is the same size when it starts. [Seneca]

The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives. [Sioux]

Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future. [Lumbee]

Force, no matter how concealed, begets resistance. [Lakota]

Everything has a beginning. [Kiowa]

God teaches the birds to make nests, yet the nests of all birds are not alike. [Duwamish]

Macbook plug design flaw? No

I was on a train recently and I tried to plug my macbook plug into the socket. Nope. The depth of the plug was too great. As it happened I had a 4 way adapter in my backpack so I was able to get power anyway!

Update! Thanks to Phil's suggestion I checked my cable drawer and found the other cable :-) I popped it into my laptop bag and found myself on a GWR train again yesterday. No need for a 4 way adapter this time (which I didn't have anyway - I only carry that when I'm running a CyberDojo).

What Did You Say?

is an excellent book (subtitled The Art of Giving and Receiving Feedback) by Charles and Edith Seashore and Jerry Weinberg (isbn 0-924771-33-X). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

If you're not absolutely sure they want your feedback it's best not to offer it.

When the data and their model don't match, most people discard the data.

We structure our world so we will not receive feedback that threatens our view.

We don't even wait to ignore feedback, but actively take steps to prevent such feedback from ever happening in the first place.

We tend to learn only in new situations. In new contexts.

The more we try to control, the less influence we are likely to have.

Don't concentrate on giving feedback; concentrate on being congruent - responding to the other person, to yourself, and to the here-and-now situation.

The less investment you have in changing the other person, the greater the likelihood that each of you may grow.

Improving a relationship doesn't always mean making it closer.

Viking Ship Museum

I went to the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo a few weeks ago. As I arrived a group arrived on a bus. They were led round the museum by a man who talked about the exhibits and viking life in general. I quietly attached myself to the group and listened to what he had to say. It was really fascinating stuff. For example, at one point he mentioned that Norway has the highest incidence of multiple sclerosis in the world. And that the countries with very high incidence seem to be the countries the Vikings invaded!

Implementing Lean Software Development

is an excellent book by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

If you focus on driving utilization up, things will slow down.

We've watched CMM and ISO 9000 as their focus changed from quality improvement to certification.

Toyota believes that consistent excellence in product development starts with "towering technical competence in all engineers". At Toyota "Developing people is fundamental to the managers job."

If you expect teams to meet aggressive deadlines you must limit work to capacity.

The behaviours that ranking systems encourage are competition, hiding information so as to look good, and hiding problems so as not to look bad.

There is at least as much knowledge created by experiments that fail as is created by finding a solution to the problem.

Western companies think of knowledge as something that is written down. Japanese companies think of written knowledge as only the tip of the iceberg; most knowledge is contained in subjective insights, intuitions, hunches, and mental models. This tacit knowledge does not come from studying, it comes from experience.

Probably the biggest mistake we can make is to regard refactoring as a failure to "Do it right the first time".

The mark of an excellent organization is not that they are without problems; it is that they are without systemic problems.

In The Living Company, Arie de Geus points out that the average life expectancy of a multinational corporation is between 40 and 50 years. People live for an average of 75 years, so they can expect to outlast perhaps three quarters of the companies that existed when they were born.

If the learner hasn't learned the teacher hasn't taught.

The hole isn't in my part of the boat

After the XP2010 conference in Trondheim its nice to back home and walking Patrick to school each morning. I collect rubbish on the walk back. A whole carrier bag full after one week away. It's a four minute walk. And I live in the country. People must actually be winding their car windows down just to throw out rubbish! :(

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