The Human Side of Living

As I go through life I keep noticing stories, ideas and insights into humanity and I sometimes wonder if we are meant to discover these lessons slowly or if there isn't a quicker way to learn them.

Take for example, in high school we had a really weird Religion teacher who was very Zen or meta or something, and no one got him. I mean he would use examples like "take an extension cord and plug it into itself and there you go." Huh? None of us got it. And then there would be times when he would repeatedly say things like "attack the point not the person" and that was a phrase I understood.

From him, I learned that sometimes we can meet real jerks that we can learn interesting things from. Learn to separate your feelings about what you hear and understand from the messenger. It's hard sometimes, but you can get good at this.


Later, I read a story about a samurai warrior. It's short, so here it is:

There was once a samurai who wanted to learn the difference between heaven and hell. He sought until he found a master from whom he thought he could learn. He stood before the Master and asked him what was the difference between heaven and hell. The Master took the samurai’s sword and, turning it to the flat of the blade, struck the samurai on the head. The samurai was surprised at this but chose to ignore it. He thought that the Master had failed to understand his question. He once again asked the Master about the difference between heaven and hell. Again the Master struck the samurai on the head. The samurai staggered back and puzzled over this. He approached with his question for a third time and, before he could utter a word, the Master struck him a third time. The samurai was now so enraged at this behaviour that he grabbed his sword from the Master, raised it over his head and was prepared to bring it down on the Master’s head when the Master raised one finger and the samurai paused.
"That is hell," said the Master.
The samurai was instantly so overcome by the courage of this frail old man - to have risked his life for the sake of a stranger’s question - that he fell to his knees and bowed before the Master.
"That is heaven," said the Master.

This story keeps popping into my head every now and then. What is good and evil? Is it a matter of perspective? Is it a matter of time? How is it related to compassion? Do we need to judge people/situations, or should we learn to see the good and bad in all things? We can choose what we want to make from a situation. We don't always understand the motives of others, so which stance do you initially take - heaven or hell?

On the compassion thread, I learned about HH the (14th) Dalai Lama (of Tibet) when I was in university. It wasn't part of a course, I don't remember what it was. It might have been a movie. He's a really interesting guy and has done some cool things. I pondered his thoughts on compassion and felt that he really has good insights into the human condition so some of those ideas stuck with me. (HHDL is on Twitter by the way.)

When I left school and started working full time, I discovered Jerry Weinberg. Jerry published many technical books up to that point, and started the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference and Problem-Solving Leadership (PSL) workshop. The workshop and conference are based upon applying the work of Virginia Satir, a family therapist, to the workplace. I find some of the models very insightful.

Skipping over many other little opportunities and lessons, I find myself thinking about a recently-published book called "The Human Side of Agile" by a colleague Gil Broza. It's a good book. I like it. It sums up a lot of lessons I learned over the years, and includes new ones I didn't know about. The title really sticks with me though.

When I am at work, I focus on doing things to help others. Help the customers get high quality software of value. Help the team members to learn, grow and become more confident in their abilities. I show patience and temper difficult situations with humour. That's my style. When the going get's tough, I get silly. Sometimes, though, I hear Jerry W's words ringing in my ears "Change your organisation or change your organisation."

I am an agent of change. I am here to help you establish a new norm, a new status quo, one that is better than you were before. I work with people to help them adapt into their new roles, and I often come across people who neither want my help nor anything to do with change.

I can understand when people are afraid of uncertainty or the unknown and I am patient enough to work with them to try and build congruence (Satir) and focus on the point not the person (high school teacher). Then there are times when certain people can very intentionally do malicious things to undermine and attack you through a show of power or superiority. I'm too old for this crap.

From Jerry, I know it is time to change my organisation when this becomes a pattern, because it is my life and I choose how I want to live and enjoy it. I don't want to be miserable at work and then bring that negativity home with me to my family that I love so much.

It's my life. I want to be happy and helping others makes me happy. I'm weird that way. I understand that not everyone gets that. I'm not here to inflict compassion and other zen mumbo-jumbo on you. I really like and appreciate the Lean and Agile values. The focus is on *people* working together to make great things that make your customers happy.

After 25 years of working in the IT sector, I can tell you that I agree with Jerry when he said that "all problems are people problems." (especially the technical ones.) When I truly came to understand that, I discovered that people are at the heart of the answer to "what is Quality?" After almost 20 years in Testing, I also discovered that test techniques are really models to test the interactions between people working on the projects. This is a bit of unique perspective and I haven't heard anyone else describe it that way, but that's how I see it and teach it.

People working with people to make other people happy. Lots of other people actually. There's nothing non-human about software development. It's all about the human side of things. And yet. Schools don't teach this. Some people choose to act in inhuman ways. How do you deal with that? Heaven or Hell?

It's your life, your choice. Change your organisation or change your organisation.

Thank you to all my teachers, past, present and future. There is still more for me to learn.

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Fishing for Wisdom

I just came back from a week at the AYE Conference. My head is full with several new ideas swimming around and stirring up half-baked old ideas - which is a good thing.

One of the thoughts causing my head to spin came from a session one evening where we discussed ideas to improve the conference moving forward. Johanna Rothman led the session and at one point she mentioned that the AYE workshop sessions included pure [Virginia] Satir [ideas, models, etc.] and applied Satir. This got me thinking about some of the subtle differences I had noticed about the sessions and what they meant to me.

In particular, some of the ideas and models I learned from the AYE sessions appear to dwell longer in my mind and apply to a broader spectrum of situations while others seem to be more specific - i.e. an application of a model in a particular context. Don't get me wrong, whether you choose to attend a pure Satir or applied Satir workshop at AYE (and the sessions aren't labelled as such because it doesn't really matter), it's a win-win scenario. :) Sure, different hosts have different styles, but each session is different every time so you sometimes see people attend the same session again to see what new insights they get.

So, what's the big deal here? Why did I get stuck on a small point like this? Well, it reminded me of the time when I was in Teacher's College in the mid-90's, preparing to become a High School Science teacher.

I had 2 main professors in Teacher's College - one for each of my 'teachable' subjects of Physics and Chemistry. Their styles were very different. One professor seemed to keep me busy while the other made me think a lot.

I'll be honest, coming from a university environment to Teacher's College, I expected to be told what I needed to do to be a teacher. You know - I expected a lecture-style learning environment like most of my previous undergraduate courses. What I got didn't match that expectation so I was a bit frustrated at first until I discovered the secret that no one clearly explains to you.

What's the secret? Okay, I'll tell you. The secret is that when you go to Teacher's College, *you* are the teacher, not the student. So, by going there acting like a student expecting to be taught, I had the perspective all wrong.

I don't recall when the paradigm shift happened for me but I'm glad it did. After that point, I didn't consider my professors to be the ones teaching me to be a teacher; I saw them as guides to help me learn the things I needed to be a better teacher.

The real teacher here is experience. And that you can't get unless you are doing what you want to be doing, not sitting in a classroom somewhere talking about what you want to be doing. So what did I get from the Teacher's College experience? I got access to many different 'teachers' to help me deconstruct my experiences so that I could learn from them.

I need to pause for a second and think about that last sentence again. That sounds suspiciously a lot like the AYE conference experience to me. Hmm.

So what was different between my two main professor/guides? I think (now) it was something similar to the difference between the 'pure Satir' and 'applied Satir' AYE sessions. One professor offered tips and ideas that applied in a certain situations - the ones we said mattered to us - while the other discussed models and ideas to help us learn from our own experiences in more broader situations. Looking back, those things weren't clearly stated in that way at the time. I think I understand a bit more now about how they were trying to help us, in different ways, to become better teachers. Of course, both professors provided us with lots of opportunities to practice demos and teaching short topics in an environment where we could safely receive feedback from our peers. (hmm, more AYE conference and PSL familiarity here.)

I recall that someone once mentioned the old Chinese proverb while were at Teacher's College:

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

To me, the quote makes me think of the difference between information and knowledge. I think both professors were trying to teach us to fish (i.e. give us knowledge), just in different ways. They both wanted us to leave the college more confident with knowledge that we could use to help ourselves become better teachers moving forward.

Back to AYE and present day. Reflecting upon the learnings from this past week, I learned new models and ideas that I can apply in many ways - some apply at work and some apply to life beyond the workplace. I think I left with a few fish and a few new fishing techniques.

The old proverb bugs me though. I don't think it completely captures the full experience and feeling of what happened. There's something missing, something meta.

And then it came to me today. It's not the fish. It's not learning to fish either. It's the fishing.

If you pay attention to what you are doing while you are fishing, I think that leads to something other than information or knowledge; it leads to wisdom.

Continuing with this proverb as an analogy, if I learn deep-sea fishing while on vacation, I don't think that will help me very much if I decide to go fly-fishing at a local river. There are many different ways to fish - for the different kinds of fish, the environments in which they live, and the purpose of fishing (e.g. food vs sport).  If we pay attention to more than just the types of fish, their environments and techniques to catch them, we can learn something more, something bigger.  I find it hard to think in broad ideas like that sometimes.  I also find those are the most rewarding moments though.

Attending the AYE conference (and PSL this past Spring) was like that for me.  My head doesn't stop thinking about ways to apply the models and ideas we experience at AYE.  Meeting wonderful, intelligent, kind practitioners from all over the world helps enrich the shared experiences in ways that bring us closer together.  We talk about fish (individual experiences) and techniques to help find solutions to problems we think we see.  And then the hosts/speakers go and show us things that help us solve problems we didn't even think about or see!

For me, attending AYE is an opportunity to meet old friends, learn about myself, learn about how to interact better with others (both at work and in personal life), share experiences and knowledge with colleagues, learn some new problem-solving techniques, make new friends, and pause for a moment to reflect upon where I am in life and where I'd like to be.  It's a moment to notice that I'm fishing - I'm learning and growing.  And that others are fishing too.  And while some are fishing for similar things and others for different things, we all recognise that we are fishing so we have that in common.

It's going to take me a bit of time to unpack all of the ideas I was exposed to this past week because learning happened on many different levels.  I could post some notes, and I plan to, but I don't believe the notes alone can convey the experience of learning that happened there.  Much learning happened between conference sessions too.  You meet so many people with similar or related interests and different experiences that once you start talking in the hallways, over dinner or lounging about somewhere, you can't help but continue to learn and think about things in new ways.

If you want, that is.  If you're into that sort of thing.  If learning, growing, and working better with other human beings isn't your cup of tea, then this conference is definitely *not* for you.

To everyone else, I highly recommend the experience.  This conference, and the PSL workshop, are opportunities that shouldn't be passed up.  It might even change the way you think about things.  It has for me.

To the AYE and PSL hosts, Jerry, Don, Esther, Johanna and Steve, to my Teacher's College professors, Peter and Tom, and to my family, friends, and colleagues who have all provided me with helpful feedback and information to help me grow and be a better person, I thank you.

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