Situated Geekery

Remember Archimedes and his (apocryphal) quote about the lever? “Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth.”

I have felt for some time now that I had no good place to stand.

I’ve been an “XP coach” forever, since the earliest months of that movement. Over the years, the rigor of the XP concept faded into the misty vagueness of “agile”, through the efforts of many proselytes, including myself, to make it seem palatable.

The results have generally not pleased me.

Bob Martin pointed out the other day (via tweet), that the Agile Conference this year contained fewer than 10% technical presentations. I shot him a rude remark about it having been true for some time, but after apologies (Bob’s pretty strong on code, after all), the spurring fact is the same.

I may not know what the exact right mix is, but I surely know it’s more than 10%.

XP Is About The Balance
Lose The Balance, Lose The Movement.

Upon a time, once, I heard a critique of XP that said “It’s too code-centric.” Then and now, I visualize the guys at the Road-Building Universe conference being busted for being too “asphalt-centric”.

Meanwhile, setting aside cheap shots (temporarily), I soldiered on.

I’ve been talking for the last year about braiding together geek joy and business value as an approach towards excellence.

But you can’t really call it braiding when it’s just two strands. Braiding two things together is twisting, not braiding (Props to Tracy Kaleidic for reminding me of that again.) I needed that all-important 3rd strand.

Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch…

I kept inserting little articles  about, well, you know, humans and how they are conditioned by both their species history (evolution) and their development (ontogeny). You know, blah-blah-blah. I knew it was important, so I kept (unconsciously) trying to sneak the idea into the door.

Not so, anymore.

Towards Excellence: A Three-Stranded Braid

My belief is that success in the world of software development — excellence, if you will — is a matter of braiding three strands together: geek joy, business value, thrown agency. (Eh? What was that third one again?)

If all that comes at you a little fast, no sweat. I have a *lot* to say about this, and I’ll be saying it here for the foreseeable future. Just to get the mind wandering, let’s do some one-liners and call it a day:

• Geek Joy means finding ways to maximize that sweet spot where technical workers can frequently experience that awesome pleasure that brought them to their trade in the first place.
• Business Value means finding ways to be constantly aiming at the things our surrounding corporation needs from us the most.
• Thrown Agency means working in full awareness that we’re constantly bound by being real humans in a real universe.

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Gotcha on that last one, didn’t I?

No matter, there’s plenty of time going forward to explore thrown agency at length.

That’s it for today, except I have one more definition to throw at you:

Braided Means We Need Three Strands:

Geek Joy, Business Value, And Thrown Agency.

Miss One, Miss Excellence.

Tags: agile, agile coaching, agile principles, agile transition, braided excellence, business value, coaching, geek joy, thrown agency