Alistair Cockburn - Designing Quality of Life
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The interview is a long one, but is filled with volumes of advice and wisdom on how to build a professional life that supports the level of quality you want to achieve in your personal life. The information will be especially valuable for anyone working on consulting. For those who are pressed for time, I’ve created detailed show notes below so you can jump to a specific portion if you need to and you can find them here: (because they exceed the text limit for a Soundcloud podcast).
If you would like to learn more about Alistair Cockburn, check out http://alistair.cockburn.us If you’d like to follow Alistair on Twitter, you can find him at https://twitter.com/TotherAlistair If you’d like to learn more about Heart of Agile, check out http://heartofagile.com If you’d like to check out the Facebook Live conversation between Alistair and Nic Sementa, try http://bit.ly/2cESM57
Show Notes 00:08 Interview Starts 01:10 Topic Introduction - Designing your life with intention to create quality of life 02:27 Overview of the trajectory of Alistair’s professional life and consulting background 02:58 Alistair’s advice for maintaining quality of life as a consultant 03:44 The jobs you can’t take if you want to maintain quality of life (especially if your focus is family) 05:11 How do you become an old married consultant? If consulting is so great, why do people quit? 05:41 Rule #1 Limiting your travel / Manage your budget 06:40 Resigning from the full time travel gig and making sure they can’t make an example of you 09:10 The smart way to look for a new job 09:44 How much you need to have saved to look for a new consulting gig 10:56 Why you need to pace yourself during the job search 11:22 Getting published and planning to be in the rejection business 13:28 Coping with the ego blow of getting your soul rejected 14:24 Applying this advice to getting new clients 15:14 Landing the first consulting gig teaching about Object Oriented Design 16:08 How do you survive the first days as a consultant? 16:53 Driving for lifestyle 17:43 Consciously making choices for the lifestyle you want to achieve 18:22 Asking yourself “Does this enhance the quality of my life or not?” and applying it to all aspects of your life 19:27 Celebrating the things you do choose to do 19:50 The infinite potential workload vs. the finite number of plates you can juggle 21:22 The number of things you can’t get around to is infinite (no matter how much you do) 22:31 Do less to get more joy/quality/everything 22:45 Bookshelves, kids and divorce 23:10 18 years of being a married consultant 23:55 Do five things with job instead of 15 things with less joy - and learning to be conscious of your choices. 24:15 Going to the buffet 25:25 “The amount of food I did not touch was infinite” 25:48 Practicing “I would have everything, but if I just have this, I can have the best of the best 26:00 Budgets - Figuring out how much you need to put food on the table, how much for gravy and how much you need to declare greed and quit for the rest of the year. 28:15 Setting an upper limit for how much you want to make and staging work with financial goals 28:45 Knowing when “anything else in my life is more important than the next job” 29:25 What you need to live - take your base number, multiply by 2.5 and find your greed limit 30:10 When you hit the greed limit, do you actually have to stop (even if you don’t want to)? 31:05 Not operating from fear - if you are getting on the plane… why? 32:00 Teaching yourself to say no, limiting travel and limiting conferences 32:40 When they call, and they want ONLY you, and they offer gobs of money… 34:05 Saying “Yes” when you should say “No” 34:35 Establishing a writing practice 35:10 A question about maintaining routine while traveling 36:00 Alistair’s life/phase changes 36:50 More advice on how to maintain a healthy life/marriage when you are a traveling consultant - set up a rhythm 38:40 Self-care while traveling (Alistair and Nic Sementa on FB live) 39:10 Life in the hotel 39:50 Air BnB so you can cook and maintain a healthy diet while traveling 41:17 Recap on maintaining diet while traveling 41:40 Alistair’s phase change - moving to France to practice his French 42:45 A brand new life in Brisbane playing volleyball for Christmas 44:14 In case you are thinking “My life can’t do that…” 44:57 How to get a job working in Zurich at IBM Research… but taking a chance and applying 47:31 Writing the Agile Manifesto in Snowbird, why it worked and why it was different than many other attempts to try and write something that would change the world 48:43 What made the running of the workshop in Snowbird so good? Generous Listening 49:10 Seventeen Alpha-types who all chose to be quiet and listen 50:18 “I’m Steve Mellor, I’m a spy” 52:46 Recap of Alistair’s tips in the interview so far
55:16 living below the poverty line and being okay with your quality of life 55:43 The three income levels according to Alistair Cockburn and understanding how much you need to feel survive or feel wealthy 59:46 Radical Simplification 60:38 The Heart of Agile, Shu Ha Ri and Kokoro 62:20 Living an improvised lifestyle 62:55 Agile has become over decorated 63:05 Scrum has become Shu level and it was designed at Ri level 63:32 The Heart of Agile - Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect and Improve 64:40 Kokoro - Heart of Essence 65:20 The top of performance is Ri, transitioning to teaching is Kokoro or Radical Simplification 66:25 The new lifestyle - looking for radical simplification in everything 67:08 Maximizing your freedom through simplification 71:34 Do you need someone at Ri or Kokoro to be guided towards simplification? 72:30 Can you transform to Heart of Agile at the organizational level? 73:20 Questioning collaboration across the organization to set a baseline you can use for transformation to Heart of Agile 74:44 If you move the needle on the collaboration, everything improves 75:31 Going back to the basics of being able to deliver incrementally 76:28 You don’t need a specialist, just people who are open 76:42 The next Heart of Agile Conference - Pittsburgh in April 2017 77:47 Wrapping up |
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Writing the introduction to a podcast interview with Dr. Alistair Cockburn is not a simple thing. He is the co-author of the Agile Manifesto and the author of numerous books on Agile, Use Cases and Object Oriented Programming. There is also his work with Crystal and now with the Heart of Agile. He’s contributed a significant body of material around the topic of how we work. While this interview touches on most of the above, the primary focus of the interview is around a simple question with a complex answer: How can you design a lifestyle that is based on continually examining and enhancing the quality of your life.How to Write a User Story for Marketing w/ Nic Sementa and Alistair Cockburn
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Nic Sementa from the Agile Marketing Academy joins me in this podcast to share his thoughts on how to craft User Stories that will work for marketing. Nic's thoughts and opinions on this topic are heavily influenced by his marketing background, which, as he points out in the interview, is a little unique since most of the conversations on the topic are led by agile practitioners. During the interview Alistair Cockburn joined in the conversation to offer his expert advice and guidance on the subject. Alistair is one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, the creator of the Crystal methods, leading voice on Use Cases and the man behind the Heart of Agile. (There is lots more - you can find it all here.) Click here to go directly to the podcast Show Notes: 00:38 Nic’s background and the challenges faced by Marketing that Agile could help with 4:27 Putting Agile together with Marketing 5:52 User Stories from a Marketers perspective 6:52 The historical challenges involved with “marketing” to the customer as opposed to engaging directly with the customer to find out what they need 8:00 How coercing your customer to buy leads to the marketing equivalent of technical debt 8:50 Googling Agile Marketing 9:20 The corporate world is high school with ashtrays 10:00 Why marketing needs a new language framework for Agile 10:57 Apology to the Band Geeks (which Dave is) 11:30 Revenue impact of implementing Agile Marketing Techniques 11:52 How User Stories change in Agile Marketing 12:33 Personas and more 13:33 Developing a deeper understanding of the User and his/her pain points 14:03 MadMen in Reverse is not going to help you understand the “ideal customer” 15:14 Marketing Research 16:10 There is no such thing as offline marketing 17:52 Recap of the Marketing User Story Guidance 18:57 Let’s get al Skynet with this thing! 20:00 Special Guest Alistair Cockburn on Agile Marketing User Stories 25:55 Abstract thinkers vs. concrete thinkers 28:05 Alistair’s visual grammar version of User Stories 35:33 Where to learn more about the Agile Marketing Academy and how to reach Nic Some Links: For more on the Agile Marketing Academy you can go to their Certification site or send them an email. You can reach Nic on Twitter @nicsementa
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