2023 Appreciations
As 2023 comes to an end, I’m thinking about what happened and what I’m grateful for. Today my head was feeling a bit full yet I still found myself pushing forward, trying to be productive, yet wondering, “how can I be kind to myself?” Do you ever ask yourself that question? I used to ask myself this question when running down to the beach at Ellwood in Goleta, California. I’d ask myself that, and then I would walk a bit, and then I would start running again. So in the spirit of that, I’m attempting to take myself out of productivity “beast mode” and into the mode of appreciation and reflection.
I appreciate that people I didn’t know spent time with me this past year. When writing my book Context Switch, I interviewed 60 amazing engineering and product leaders. These people each devoted an hour of their time to me, and in some cases more time. They helped to propel my learning forward on the topic of being a senior engineering and product leader. This entire project was a quest to understand my past experience as a VP of Engineering and to figure out how to enable aspiring and newly minted VPs and CTOs to succeed in the people side of their roles. I learned so much, and feel grateful to have heard and witnessed the experiences of these leaders. (If you’d like to read the book in progress, you can find it on leanpub).
Honestly, I failed at my goal of finishing Context Switch in 2023, though. So visualize me taking a “failure bow” in this moment. If you don’t try to push yourself, you can’t fail. I’m glad I tried to finish this. I didn’t try hard enough though. The new goal is to complete it in 2024. So yeah, the book is “moving to the next sprint” for all of the Scrum people out there. And for my Kanban friends, yes, my WIP is too high and yeah, “stop starting, start finishing.” Such a simple phrase, that is, yet hard to execute on when you’re in the thick of spinning multiple plates. I choose to be kind to myself about this and all of the plates that I choose to spin.
How about you? Have you failed at any of your personal goals this year as well? How do you let yourself off the hook about it?
I’m also grateful to have been a guest on various podcasts as well as a speaker at several conferences online and in Chicago, Budapest, Vilnius, London, Berlin and Nelson, New Zealand. Interacting with real humans felt almost retro, and I liked it. The energy of being up on a stage in front of hundreds of people felt like filling up a Monsters Inc. bank of scream energy-positivity. What’s more is that two of these events were Open Space. Have you been to an Open Space conference before? The participants who are there make up the program. In the cases of these two events, they also had keynotes and I was happy to invent and deliver “Dynamic Reteaming Interactive,” which is a way of exploring the five patterns of Dynamic Reteaming using movement and chanting. Sounds strange to write that, but it was certainly fun. The chanting emerged in New Zealand by those participants and a similar, evolved structure was done again in Vilnius. We took the time in Vilnius to send over thanks and appreciation for the folks at Agile on the Beach New Zealand during the event with cheering and applause for them. That was a highlight for me. Keynotes can be interactive if we want them to be.
I stretched myself a bit this year and taught an online cohort course on Dynamic Reteaming through Maven. I got so much great feedback - positive as well as highly constructive, that has enabled me to get clearer on what I want my future online course to be like. So I’m still in the pursuit of course market fit to come up with the ultimate experience that will add value for people in 2024. Since that is what it’s about..helping others through the teaching, and not a regurgitation of Dynamic Reteaming that you can get from the books and online videos that are plentiful. This is going to be something totally awesome. If you’d like to get on the waitlist for my 2024 online course, please take a moment and fill out this brief form. That will add you to my mailing list about that course so you’ll be the first to know about it.
I appreciate O’Reilly for releasing the Audible version of Dynamic Reteaming, the Second Edition in April. So there is an Audible version that I had created for my self-published first edition, an O’Reilly-created audio version in their online learning portal and this new second edition created by one of their partners is on Audible as well.
The last set of appreciations goes out to the wonderful people at Artium with whom I spent some time with this year as part of their client services team. Artium builds custom software for a wide variety of businesses and also upskills teams to develop better software. I like how they practice pair programming and TDD in the context of building real software with teams. With Artium I focused on evangelism and top of the funnel lead generation, skills that I’ll have in my toolbox from now on, and frankly that energize me a bunch. I had a great experience with the team there and wish them the best! Thanks to my colleague and friend of many years Ross Hale for that opportunity and to Chris Coughlan who taught me so much about hospitality and kindness.
Speaking of that, I will recommend a couple of books on hospitality that I learned about from Chris. Setting the Table by Daniel Meyer and Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. Both of these books are about the restaurant industry and are interesting to think about and apply to your day to day working relationships. Unreasonable Hospitality also made a cameo in the FX series The Bear, which shows you some actual examples of how some of these ideas are applied. Loved that series.
The book I’m finishing now, by the way, is The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. This book focuses on cross cultural communication and provides an interesting lens to apply on teams. I suspect I will be digging into this more in 2024 and applying it to my work. Many of the concepts in this book bring me back to the days when I studied applied linguistics at university, specifically pragmatics.
How about you? Any books you recommend for readers of this newsletter? Feel free to leave a comment!
Thanks for reading my newsletter. If you’ve gotten this far, here are some of the ways I can help you out in 2024!
Book me to run an in person workshop for your teams or to speak at your event. I’m booking into 2024, starting out with a keynote at Scrum Tokyo in January. I hope you will consider getting your teams in person at least quarterly in 2024! I can help you make your event meaningful and can even bring along facilitators. I offer a custom workshop as well as my flagship Dynamic Reteaming workshop that you can read about on my web site. I’d also love to work with a company to run an event like this one we did at Procore years ago.
Sign up for the waitlist for my 2024 online course here
Hire me to work with your teams. I like to work on a retainer basis with a number of hours per month and I always love to join fast-changing companies as an employee. If your company is growing, shrinking, getting acquired, or acquiring other companies, Reach out to learn how I can help.
Curious about my next book, Context Switch? You can read the book in progress here, and get updates as I continue writing it.
Have a great rest of 2023 and a Happy New Year!