One of the benefits of commuting across the top of Toronto on North America’s busiest highway is I have lots of time to listen to my favorite podcasts.

One series I follow is called Revisionist History, a podcast hosted by Malcolm Gladwell, an author known for writing about research in social sciences, often presented alongside observations and stories. This season has started with a discussion between Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant, where, among a number of topics, they talked about the impact of teams on individual contributions and outcomes.

A co-worker recently came back from training, and shared some of the techniques that were presented.

One that sounded interesting was, in planning, try swapping roles to elicit different ideas. For example, have a developer act as product owner, and speak to priorities, and have a product owner speak to effort and commitment. Role playing is more common when identifying personas to help define user stories, but I hadn’t heard of anyone doing this within a scrum team - we typically go into a planning session as our assigned roles. This is also similar to the ideas presented in Edward de Bono in Six Thinking Hats, where he suggests you try to place yourself in a specific mode of thinking (eg: emotional, creative) to approach problems from a different perspective.

Although not related to IT, there are ideas worth considering as we think about our systems in the following book:
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.”

I spent a good portion of my childhood in front of a Commodore Amiga 500, an amazing home computer for the late 1980s. I purchased mine used, after having saved months of hard-earned income delivering newspapers.

When author Brian Bagnall created a Kickstarter campaign to fund Commodore: The Amiga Years, a book about the history of the Amiga in 2015, I backed it. As Kickstarter projects go, 2 years later, I received it (now you can buy it on Amazon).

Here’s an OLD story about famous scientist Richard Feynman, who had fun cracking the safes of all his fellow scientists working on the Manhattan project in WW2:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/cs588/safecracker.pdf (this is a long read best left for an evening at home).

What’s interesting is how easily you can draw parallels to the security issues we face today.  You could almost swap the word “safe” with “web application”, and “atom bomb design” with “financial data”, and the story almost carries over to today. These safes/filing cabinets contained documents relating to the atomic bomb (ie: something worth protecting).

In Product Development, we sometimes speak of “hiding the Sausage Factory”, meaning “hiding the complexities of software development and release” from our users. We want our users to enjoy using our products - they don’t need to know all the trials and tribulations it takes to get there.

In our Product Development Factory, we define standard processes and workflows, to bring some efficiency, consistency, and predictability to our work. However, we’re human - we’re not interchangeable cogs. Someone goes on vacation, people change roles, people move on - the successor may not do the same things in exactly the same way. There is an unwritten first step in every process: “Think”.