Kallokain

Erik Lundh of Compelcon held a workshop on Anatomy-Based planning. Erik was kind enough to invite me. I jumped on an early morning train from Gothenburg, just barely made it off the train at the station in Lund, and found my way to the Lund Institute of Technology where the workshop was held. The workshop was well worth getting up early for. Anatomy-based planning offers a neat way of coordinating large projects involving several agile teams. The method is designed to get all stakeholders onboard with an overall plan before going into detailed iteration planning. It is a very fast planning method. All stakeholders are brought together, write the desired capabilities, or "money-making features" on Post-It notes, and build a network diagram showing "in order to have Y, we must first have X" type dependencies between the features. Anatomies are an implementation of the Blackboard Strategy pattern, an approach to collaborative problem solving. Because it is a ve...

Callisto Utriainen I was at a very interesting talk last Thursday. Callisto Utriainen , a creativity coach, talked about creativity, how it works, and how to find creative solutions to irksome problems. Callisto started off by talking about a great creativity killer: Too deeply rooted habits. Habits are not bad per sé. Habits free brain capacity up to do new things, like finding creative solutions to problems, but there is a flip side. When we get too deeply entrenched in following the same patterns every day, we may lose the most important habit of all, the habit of thinking and doing new things. When we get creative, we physically change the brain by creating new connections between neurons. Callisto also talked about what habits look like from a neurological perspective: Pathways in the brain where synapses (junctions between neurons) have grown strong because they are used a lot. She talked about how we can induce the brain to create new pathways by deliberately expos...