Failing Well from Jabe Bloom on Vimeo.
Failing Well from Jabe Bloom on Vimeo.
Xavier is another person that Xavier Quesada brought me in contact with. Yes Mr Visual Management is not in the book yet, but we have already too many Europeans and with his wife already in the book and a second baby on it’s way, I assume he has a little more patience … 😉 I love meeting new people, but writing their introduction is really hard. In this case, I just love Xavier. He dresses up at agile courses, uses agile games, played in a rockband and is not afraid to say he has to reread a book multiple times… On top of that Xavier is part of the Board of Directors of Agile Spain and has helped organizing International agile conferences like Agile Open Spain 2009, Conferencia Agile Spain 2010 and XP2011.
What is something people usually don’t know about you but has influenced you in who you are?
Not many people know that I dress up in my Agile courses. I also like the attendees to play games I have invented. Definitely, what has most influenced me were the creative moments I experienced in my childhood. For example, I made very imaginative drawings and I played in rock bands.
If you would not have been in IT, what would have become of you?
I think I would have worked in something related to ecology, to help nature or save wild animals. In fact, several years ago I applied to be part of the Rainbow Warrior crew but it was very difficult to be accepted. You must know how to climb, scuba dive, etc.
What is your biggest challenge and why is it a good thing for you?
My biggest challenge is to improve my empathy and listening more so as to understand people’s needs and to assume that people need to get dirty so that they learn. Each person has his or her own speed to change. I feel lucky for having worked with really good managers that mentored me. Anyway, some of my best teachers right now are my daughters; they teach me to be kind, patient and coherent.
What drives you?
I like to help people with their jobs so they can enjoy work more (it is like a drug for me) and even improve their personal lives. (Agile is about understanding people, so it can even help you to enhance the way you manage relationships with people you love).
What is your biggest achievement?
I feel lucky of being part of the teams that re-loaded Agile Spain and launched Agile Barcelona, that nowadays is a really energetic and hyperactive community with activities almost every week. I’m also honored of counting with some of the best [Spanish speakers] Agile practitioners for teaching in the first worldwide Postgraduate in Agile Methods, a fantastic experience we have held this year in Barcelona. Thinking on IT projects, I have an achievement every time I help a team to solve a difficult situation. Usually it is not a technical problem but related to human interactions. I remember when I started on a project that was more than a year late. It consisted of the integration of the work of 8 suppliers. I had to put 450 issues on a huge Kanban. I held several workshops so that everyone would work together as a team in order to launch the system in 4 months.
What is the last book you have read?
I’m stuck on Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development (Larman & Vodde). I’ve been reading and re-reading it for months.
What question do you think I should also ask and what is the answer?
What is Agile for me? 🙂 Every time, I think it is more about Individuals and interactions over processes and tools than about any other statement.
Whom do you think I should ask next?
Angel Medinilla: Angel has a huge knowledge and experience on Agile, Lean, Kanban, Management, Aikido, etc. He is incredible giving powerful and funny speeches. You must see him in action!. He also has de ability to shake your world with deep, thought questions that lead you to reflect, react and not be resigned to the impediments and conflicts you need to resolve.
Barcelona, Spain
If you like these answers. You might want to check out our book: who is agile
This week was my birthday (According to my 5 year old daughter I turned 14…)
As all of you, I received ton’s of messages on my Facebook wall.
If I look at twitter, I received about half of that on my twitter account. Which is remarkable as I have about 5 times as much “friends” on twitter.
I received 2 google+ messages, which is not surprising as I hardly use that channel.
Yet one of them was one of the nicest message I received. A youtube message from Marcin
I received a (scheduled) digital card from Plaxo. Ah, I get a few plaxo reminders every day. I prefer to send a personal message on the day itself. Looks like I’m not alone.
Another nice surprise was a card (yes a physical card) from the people of 10to1
I have lots of twitter interactions/conversations/chats (can we call that twats from now on?) with both Tom & Koen. Although I think I only met them one or twice, it feels like I know them for a long time, with all these digital interactions.
Receiving the card impressed me. They went all the way to figure out my adress, figure out my birthday and then schedule the card. Nothing extremely difficult, yet a lot of dedication.
I received also 20 Skype chats. Which I all used to connect deeper with the people.
My reply was always along the lines of :
Thank you.
And how is live for you?
With some that resulted in a polite short answer, with others (typically) people in a team I am currently coaching] that ended in an interesting conversation.
In the company I was today I brought pastries . And put them on the
desk next to me. That resulted in some interesting and even very personal talks.
A college remarked that this was better then the usual candy, as with candy people take a one and leave, with patries, they say hi.
This time, at least 3 problems were solved quicker because of that. Well worth buying the pastries.
The most personal chat I had with my mother congratulating me by -big surprise-, by phone .
This all reminded me of what my friend Jim Mccarthy said at ALE2012: “You agile people have it all wrong about the need of F2F.” He added: “you are right that we need large bandwidth communication. You are right that so far the best know way is F2F. Yet I’m convinced it’s not the only way.”(he of course said that with much smarter words, then what I remember.)
Yes, I feel very connected to many people that send me a message, even if some live halve a planet away. Twitter, FB, YouTube, Instagram, Foursquare, tell me so much more then what I heard from my friends in the pub. Combine that with the debt of Checkin …
For me in the future the companies that use this kind of open communication best, will have it easier to scale beyond the normal team boundaries.
What channels do you use to connect?
PS And while I was writing this article I received this HB video . This was a great message, because in the last conversation I had with Leen, I had mentioned vegetables. So she linked my birthday with vegetables and hup a video that reminded me of our conversation. That’s how deeper connections happen.
I have been following Guy for a while on twitter. A funny thing happened when I proposed him to be in the book. First he thought he did not deserve it, then when I convinced him, we also got into a conversation about blogging and in the end, he started helping out on the book. This makes him the first team member to be in the book. I love the team role he invented for the book WTT: Weekend Typo Terminator.
What is something people usually don’t know about you but has influenced you in who you are?
For a long time I was not interested in management, and I suspect it has to do with being a really poor leader in a youth group when I was seventeen, and from a later experience with being assigned authority over others during my military service. I didn’t like telling others what to do, and in the case of the youth group, I didn’t like that they didn’t bother doing what I did tell them to do…
I happily held on to being a developer for a good number of years, while younger, more ambitious teammates got promoted. Eventually, I did take a team lead role, and later started managing the lab – and it sort of grew on me. I found there are things I could do to help others be more effective. Next, I came across the servant-leader concept, which is about helping people grow rather than forcing work out of them. It made immediate and perfect sense to me, and helped me define my role to myself in terms that had nothing to do with my early negative experience with “leadership”.
If you would not have been in IT, what would have become of you?
Hmmm… I love doing creative stuff – I studied art in high school, and used to paint a lot. Recently I have been doing crafts with my son on weekends, and occasional simple computer graphics design work. Sometimes people (who probably don’t think of software development as being a creative craft) tell me I’m wasting my talent. There’s a good chance I’d have become an animator – I did some hand-drawn animation (color pencils on many hundreds of pages) and really liked doing it.
What is your biggest challenge and why is it a good thing for you?
It is my nature to try to avoid confrontation. This is a problem if you want to be effective in general, and specifically if you hold a management position or want to coach others. Being aware of it, I challenge myself to confront more, to avoid bypassing conflicts or accepting things as they are.
What drives you?
In the past few years I discovered that I draw joy from being just outside my comfort zone. Does it mean my new comfort zone is outside my comfort zone? 😉
What is your biggest achievement?
I’ll focus on the professional achievements, I can’t compare those to the pride I take in my family and the home we’ve built. I work for Software AG, in a very distributed R&D organization. I manage the lab in Israel, and in the past few years I have an additional role in helping the whole R&D organization go Agile. I’m very proud of the speed and depth of Agile adoption in my “home team”. I think the team is doing great – it is creative and energetic – and inspires others throughout the company (and elsewhere). I enjoy sharing this experience with others, and seeing a ripple effect – things we do suddenly make sense to another team, and then someone else picks it up, and so forth. This good experience my team has with Agile is a great support for my global role, because when I coach other teams and individuals, the practical examples often come in handy to complement and validate the theory. Especially in areas where we struggled, and tried a number of different ways to do something. However, I don’t see this as “sharing best practices” – it’s never “one Shu fits all”.
What is the last book you have read?
I was always a bookworm, and sometimes have too many in progress, such as now:
What question do you think I should also ask and what is the answer?
What do you like about Agile?
I’ve been in different types of R&D organizations before becoming aware of Agile – from big, heavily documented projects, to fresh, energized startup (that magnificently crashed when it ran out of money). Looking back, most of my personal experience was lacking an explicit R&D process, and I think it worked (in a sub-optimal way) mainly due to the sense of ownership people had for their work. So Agile (and Scrum was the first manifestation of it that I learned of) was a very attractive balance between too much process and chaos. Agile introduced a new type of flexibility and a concept of “sustainability first” that I had not encountered before.
The first thing that caught me was the project management aspects. But after a few years of practicing it and reading more professional literature than I have ever dreamt of reading, it suddenly dawned on me (and largely thanks to reading Lyssa Adkins) that it is not just an efficient management approach – it has ethics to it. Values. Giving people tools to make their work life better now, and wherever they choose to go next.
Whom do you think I should ask next?
June 2012
Givat Brenner, Israel
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