A metaphor is a figure of speech that refers to one thing by mentioning another. “The world’s a stage”.

A simile is similar to a metaphor but using the words “like” or “as”. “Life is like a box of chocolates”.

An analogy is also similar but more complex because rather than a figure of speech, it is a logical argument: “Finding my keys is like finding a needle in a haystack”.

These resources can be used to explain a point, to simplify understanding. They use previous knowledge from the recipient, a listener or a reader, to describe an object or an action in a way that is not literally true. Metaphors have a stronger effect because they do a direct comparison. We replace one object with the other and we feel clear connections.

When we replace one object with another because they have certain similarities, we obviate their differences. We can focus on the aspects that were conveying the explanation but the differences may still influence us. That extra baggage goes unnoticed and it may affect our relationship with the new object.

Finding the right analogy to explain a complex topic is an art and some people are very good at it. Some metaphors that work for a certain audience don’t work for other people, or may have the opposite effect. And some metaphors are so embedded in our culture that we are not aware of them. How are they influencing us?

We are going to explore the use of metaphors in software, visual facilitation and everyday language. I will use the terms “metaphor” and “analogy” in a loose way, meaning the use of a term without its literal meaning.

In software

Steve McConnell in Code Complete explores the idea of metaphors to better understand software development. He says we can benefit from them to give insight into problems and processes.

McConnell suggests software is “writing” and “farming”, but he prefers “construction” [1, p. 9]. The images of “building”, “scaffolding”, “architects”, “planning”, “blueprints”, “patterns” or “façade” are widespread in our industry (if you allow me the metaphor).

Kent Beck criticises the construction metaphor in Extreme Programming Explained [2, p. 104] arguing that it is extremely difficult to reverse progress in the construction world and discussing the importance of when to design.

Beck also compares Extreme Programming to driving a car [2, p. 12]: customers drive the content of the system and the whole team drives the development process. Alistair Cockburn says software is a cooperative game. Eric Raymond a bazaar.

We use the metaphor of space when talking about the Internet with terms such as “locations”, “communication roads”, “cyberspace”, “visiting”, “finding”, or “the information superhighway”.

Ward Cunningham introduced the financial analogy of the technical debt.

In interaction design, the desktop metaphor has been with us since created in 1970 at Xerox PARC. It uses files, folders, windows, forms, a desk, and a trash can.

The analogy of naming servers after “cattle not pets” used in DevOps also uses previous knowledge and makes its point clear. Like the “coal mine canary” does.

Cybersecurity uses metaphors about burglars and treasures, always talking about protecting a space. Common terms are “attack”, “walls”, “locks”, “keys”, “doors”, or “vaults”. Some have suggested a pest metaphor [3], an immune system or a medical health metaphor [4]. Would we approach cybersecurity in a different way using them?

Map, resource pool, web, queue, stack, index, tree, package, library, object, label, cookie, fork, branch, sandbox, triggers, semaphore, filter, and pipe are other words we use to refer to abstract concepts in software [5]. Probably, the level of abstraction we use makes metaphorical language a necessity.

Can you think of other metaphors used in software?

In graphics and facilitation

When doing visual facilitation or visual recording, metaphors come in handy. Sometimes the actual narrative contains an explicit metaphor that just needs to be visualised. Other times the facilitator or the visual recorder create a metaphor to describe the content. Dave Sibbet in Visual Meetings [6, p. 42] suggests different options, and in The world of visual facilitation [7, p. 294] they also explore their use in multicultural environments.

Some of the metaphors I’ve seen are “the iceberg”, “the journey”, “climbing the mountain”, or “the bridge”. The iceberg is used to describe hidden risks or obstacles. The journey is handy to describe a long story with events and an end goal. The mountain serves a similar purpose but expressing the difficulties or the challenge. The bridge allows us to describe a solution with the previous and future, or current, state.

More creative recorders add more art to their work and invent ad hoc metaphors to every sketchnote or visual recording.

In team retrospectives, there are a few visual metaphors that have been used for a long time, because they help teams discuss events from multiple angles maintaining a certain emotional distance. For instance, the saliboat retrospective allows participants to put post-its on the items they think are giving energy and moving them forward, putting them on the wind or on the sails. They can reflect on things that slow them down putting items on the anchor. They can discuss their past putting notes on the island behind or on their future, with the island on the right. They can comment on risks with the sharks or the rocks. And they can be very creative adding whatever they want to the picture. I’ve seen pirates, cannons, ice cream, UFOs and hammocks!

You get the idea about triggering the conversation thanks to the metaphor and you don’t need a fancy visual to have it started. I’ve seen teams asking “if our last iteration was a football match, who was our goalkeeper? What was the controversial play? Who was our best supporter?” and so on.

In everyday language

Future is ahead or behind? Probably you will think that the future is ahead of you and your past is behind you, but there is no real relationship between time and direction. For the speakers of Aymara (spoken in Peru), looking ahead is looking at the past [8]. You have already experienced the past, it is known, you can see it as anything you see, in front of you. Mandarin Chinese speakers use up and down gestures to refer to time. Up is the past, down is the future.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, researchers of cognitive science and linguistics, state in Metaphors we live by [9] that the way we create concepts is metaphorical in nature. The way we think is based on metaphors: we try to understand and experience in terms of another thing we know. They add that some metaphors are completely arbitrary and part of our culture, and they shape the way we think.

Take the following conceptual metaphor: an argument is a war. With that idea these expressions come naturally:

• He attacked every weak point in my argument.
• Your claims are indefensible.
• She shot down all my arguments.

What if we had a culture where an argument is a dance? Imagine we expect participants as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasant way. We would see arguments in a very different way.

There are many ingrained metaphors, some of them shared across languages.

• Happy is up; sad is down (I am feeling down)
• More is up; less is down (His income fell last year)
• High status is up; low status is down (He’s climbing the ladder)
• The mind is a machine (He broke down)
• Love is a journey (We are at a crossroads)
• Understanding is seeing (It is clear now)

As these metaphorical constructions are coherent, metaphors make us fit new events into their explanation, reinforcing its power and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Consequences

Replacing an already existing and accepted metaphor may be nearly impossible, but we can start paying attention to them, and assessing if they are affecting our underlying beliefs. When we create an analogy, we can pay attention to the extra impact it can add.

Take “maturity”, for instance. When we consider the assessment of the way we work under the lens of “maturity” we escape from the possibility of reducing the rate because things don’t “unmature”: there is only one direction, never going back.

Is there any other metaphor conditioning you?

Toni Tassani — 10 Mar 2026

This article was originally published on 17 May 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

By the end of 2020 I felt the urge to write, and I started a small blog visible only from the company intranet. In 2022 I decided to publish some of those articles on the internet, and I translated them into Spanish, so that my mum could read them.

Writing in the age of AI

I am motivated again to share what I am learning, or to collect it so I don’t forget. And in an age when AI tools can summarise a book in seconds and can generate high quality text, why bother writing?

I gave myself two reasons.

On one hand, writing, as the action, makes me reflect, finding the right words and articulating my thoughts. It is a good exercise for me to improve my thinking.

On the other hand, the product, the posts I produce, may be useful to me to revisit what I thought, may be useful to others, and even to AI tools that only regurgitate content written by humans.

About what?

I am not going to be short on topics. I still read a lot, experiment with AI and code, and I am back to study at the University. I have a few posts already drafted and I don’t understand writing as a routine or a challenge that I have to do with certain cadence, but as an opportunity.

Choosing a language

Considering that I am the only audience I expect (and maybe my mother), I have to pick one language from the three I, more or less, can use: Catalan, Spanish and English. Should I choose? I’ve decided to configure the website in a way that there is going to be content in each of these languages and I will allow myself to write in the language I feel is convenient. I’ve configured the website with buttons to choose content in only one language or all content mixed together.

However, this explanation is going to be available in the three languages and we’ll see what else happens.

Toni Tassani - 28 February 2026

The Inuit live in the Arctic regions of Alaska, Greenland and Canada, always in freezing temperatures, and that’s why they have more than one hundred words to refer to snow. We don’t have as many words in English, so we cannot be as precise as they are when talking about it. Their world has influenced their language and now their language influences how they perceive and think.

As intuitive as this story sounds, it is not true. It comes from a misunderstanding from Benjamin Lee Whorf of how these people construct words but many people consider it to be true [1].

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativity, suggests that the structure of a language affects the way people think and perceive their world. Named after Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, American anthropologists and linguists, this idea has been criticised and refuted.

For instance, there are languages that don’t have different words for the colours green and blue, named grue languages, but speakers of these languages have no problem distinguishing the two colours [2]. The same thing happens to the Zuñi people in New Mexico, that don’t have different words for orange and yellow [3]. The constraints in their language do not affect their perception.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

― Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

Influencing cognition

The linguist Lera Boroditsky provided very interesting examples about how language influences our thinking in her 2017 TED Talk, How language shapes the way we think [4].

There are languages that cannot express quantities, they don’t have numbers so they cannot use arithmetic as we know it.

She has studied an Aboriginal community in Pormpuraaw, Australia. They don’t have the words for “left” and “right” but they describe the location of objects by compass directions: north, south, east and west. They are used to knowing at every moment where the north is. They will refer to their “east foot” and they will not get confused talking about “your right, not my right”. They are not biologically equipped differently, but they have included this skill in their language and culture. Their usual greeting, instead of “hello”, is an exchange like “where are you going?”, “south-southeast”.

Some languages like Chinese don’t have grammatical forms to talk about present and future. Keith Chen, a professor of economics at UCLA, has found that Chinese people are more likely to save money than people who use languages that can express the future. It seems that if you can’t depict in your language your future-self it’s less likely you think about them as a different person, and you will make more considerate decisions.

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.

― Desmond Tutu

The way our language uses to report events also influences how we remember them. Imagine a case where a vase was accidentally broken. It is natural for English speakers to report who broke it as in, “Veronica broke the vase”. Saying “the vase has been broken” would be perceived as trying to conceal the author. However, in Spanish the natural thing to do would be to omit the subject and this affects how we remember the event.

Left to right and right to left

In the film Arrival, Amy Adams plays a linguist who is deciphering an alien language, and by understanding better their language her perception of time changes. That is fiction, but Boroditsky reports other ways perception of time and space is influenced by language. In an experiment [5] she asked people to sort people pictures chronologically. People who are used to languages that are written left to right used that direction. People from Pormpuraaw, mentioned before, first had to determine where they were facing, and then organised the pictures from east to west. And people writing right to left, like in Hebrew, positioned the pictures in that order.

About right to left language. Long ago I saw a picture of a kanban board that seemed to have the columns in the “wrong” order, having done items on the left. I found the cover of the Hebrew version of Agile kids - Who’s the boss of me? with the sticky notes on the right, instead of on the left, so I asked the author, Shirly Ronen-Harel. She said that in Hebrew they write right to left, except numbers, that are left to right. In professional environments, a visualisation board would use left to right like in English because they are used to it, but for kids she suggested right to left to be less confusing. I found it really interesting!

The gender case

There are different ways a language can represent gender. Some languages have natural gender, with the capacity to differentiate living male things, such as boys, fathers, and uncles, from living female things such as girls, mothers, and aunts. In English there is “he” and “she” to make this kind of distinction, but “they” can be used to refer to a singular third person if the gender doesn’t have to be specified.

Other languages have grammatical gender, so that all nouns have an assigned gender, regardless whether they are naturally masculine or feminine. Instead of using an equivalent to the neutral “it” they use the equivalent to “he” or “she” to refer to every noun. Pronouns, adjectives, possessives and so on, also have masculine and feminine declination.

The gender is completely arbitrary and it causes confusion when learning these languages. For instance, “sun” is masculine in Spanish and feminine in German, and “moon” is feminine in Spanish and masculine in German.

To have a second language is to possess a second soul.

― Charlemagne

Does the arbitrary gender influence how the speaker thinks? It turns out that Lera Boroditsky asked subjects to describe certain words and participants chose adjectives that were usually attributed to the grammatical gender of the word. For example, the word “key”, is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. For German speakers it was “hard”, “heavy” and “useful”, and for Spanish speakers it was “little”, “lovely” and “tiny”. A “bridge”, feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, for German speakers was “beautiful” and “elegant”, and for Spanish speakers was “dangerous” and “strong” [5].

How do these languages handle non-binary people? Do they have to be referred with the binary articles, determinants and adjectives? In English, not having a prevalent grammatical gender, it is easier, but words like “actor” and “actress”, “prince” and “princess” or “waiter” and “waitress” have to be adapted. For other languages, there are some initiatives trying to promote gender neutral language in German, Spanish, Polish and others, even though it is not widely accepted.

The value of diversity

There are more than 7,000 languages in the world. Each language creates a filter for their speakers that, somehow, seems to affect the way they perceive and think. The more ways of thinking we add to solve problems, the more options we’ll have to solve them.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

― George Bernard Shaw

Toni Tassani — 24 Oct 2022

This article was originally published on 10 May 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

Working as a group is not always easy. Knowing how others prefer to interact and knowing a little bit about yourself may help. That’s the reason why many trainers, facilitators, managers, and Human Resources departments promote the use of psychometric reports.

There are many tools that, after answering between 10 and 100 questions, give your “personality type”, your “interaction style” or your “behavioural preferences”. Usually, when the tool is used in a group, people are asked to share their results, so everybody knows how to interact with the rest.

For some companies, like GitLab, personality assessments are also a tool to build trust.

I am no expert on any of these tools and models but I have used a few. We are going to review some and check what is useful.

Testing systems

The ancient Greeks of medicine and philosophy distinguished four temperaments: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. They were a source for Carl Jung’s work on understanding personality around 1920. Most of the well-known theories, models and tests are based on his work.

MBTI

Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers were inspired by Carl Jung’s work and wanted it to have a wider audience, making it more accessible for people to know their personality type. They published the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators around 1960.

MBTI uses four dichotomies:

• How do you prefer to be energised?
  Extraversion vs. Introversion (letters E or I)
• What kind of information do you prefer to pay attention to?
  Sensing vs. iNtuition (letters S or N)
• How do you prefer to process information and make decisions?
  Thinking vs. Feeling (letters T or F)
• What lifestyle do you prefer?
  Judging vs. Perceiving (letters J or P)

The test will produce a four-letter result, depending on what preferences you have in each category. You can be things like ISTJ or ENFP. A total of 16 possible combinations are possible.

It is hard to remember the letter combinations but people instructed in MBTI know how rare is type INFJ or how well ISTJ and ESTP work together [1].

DISC

DISC was created by Professor Marston and is also inspired by Carl Jung’s work. Instead of four categories, it uses two:

• people oriented vs. task oriented
• fast paced or active vs. slower paced or reflective (sometimes referred to as extroverted vs. introverted)

This results in four possible combinations, usually identified by colours:

In DISC, instead of “personality”, they talk about “behavioural style”, and they suggest every person has a natural style, the way we behave naturally, and an adapted style, the way we adapt to work in a certain environment. The natural style, they say, is almost impossible to change, but the adapted style can be trained, and it can be different for different environments, like home and work.

Instead of assigning “your colour”, or “your letter” like in MBTI, they suggest each person has a different value for each of the colours. Usually, there are one or two main colours in a DISC profile.

Insights

In Insights they talk about cool blue and fiery red. Insights is also based on Carl Jung’s theories. Like DISC, it also uses four colours (they talk about colour energies) but the categories are slightly different.

They also provide a “conscious” and “less conscious” collection of values for each of the colours.

Social Styles

Social Styles was developed in the 1960s based on behavioural science instead of personality theory. The focus is not on the internal personality but on the observable behaviours. Providing self-awareness is important as in the other models, but in Social Styles it is also important how you are perceived by others. That is the reason why there is a personal self-assessment but also the individual is assessed by their colleagues.

During my Social Styles training I heard for the first time The Platinum Rule, even though I don’t think they invented it. If the Golden Rule says “treat others as you would like to be treated”, the Platinum Rule says “treat others as they would like to be treated”.

Social Styles also uses two dimensions and four colours.

• Assertiveness. How we try to influence the thoughts and actions of others.
• Responsiveness. How we respond to others and express our feelings when relating to others.

This gives, again, four colours:

It seems to be GitLab’s tool of choice.

In a company I was working for, coaching different teams with different needs, each of them gave me a different colour in their Social Styles assessment, evidencing that I was behaving differently.

Other tools

All the tools described are proprietary and in order to use them, you have to pay a fee. Usually, you also need to be a certified practitioner to share the surveys, and you are supposed to explain the tool in a training before giving it to participants. Certifications and fees are their business model in a highly competitive testing market.

I have seen other tools like Enneagram, StrengthFinder, Hogan personality inventory and Hexaco personality inventory, but I haven’t used them. If you are curious, you can find many more [2].

What is good

The book Surrounded by idiots [3] starts with the story that gives its title. A manager who thinks that everybody around him behaves in a stupid way, just because they are different from him. They are not idiots, but different. The book continues explaining how people “really” are, based on DISC but renaming it to DISA (Dominant, Inspiring, Stable and Analytical).

Using any of the mentioned tools has, in my opinion, three exceptionally good outcomes.

First, it gives people the chance to reflect on themselves, to open the door to self-awareness. We are usually trapped in our day-to-day life and we don’t have a chance to question what we do or how we do it, or to consider other ways of behaving.

Second, it opens the eyes to see that people are different. We tend to judge other people based on our own preferences, and it is very difficult to see rationality in other ways of behaving. Reflecting on other people may help us accept them and perform better together.

And third, it gives vocabulary to talk about emotions. It is a topic we are not used to discussing, but when you disguise it with colours, it seems more neutral. Without better words, saying that someone is behaving “too red”, may be a good starting point.

What is not so good

In most of the training sessions I have been on these tools, they remark that they are not about categorising people and putting them in boxes. However, participants end up categorising and labelling people. This is bad because they think someone is a colour. They will judge them based on a stereotype. They will consider that colour cannot be changed. They will start to find explanations based on the colours. And in some cases, it will become an excuse like in “I can try, but you know that I am yellow”.

What’s your Meyers Briggs personality type?
I’m Sagittarius.

― Simon Wardley, A tweet

It is hard to believe that there are 4, 12 or 16 types of people. It is terrible to pigeonhole someone and consider they have static characteristics that cannot evolve. Or when you attribute other behaviours just because the results gave a certain colour. A senior manager in a company I was working for said “now I want all the Product Owners tested: we need more reds!”

On the other hand, we all categorise people. It is very hard for our brain to cope with the world’s complexity, so it builds shortcuts to simplify understanding. The problem arrives when we accept the simplification as the truth.

When I see people waiting for their result, and then “their colours” are given, it seems to me like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter yelling a house name: Gryffindor!

Not the biggest problem in psychometrics but worth mentioning is that the language used in some descriptions could match almost anyone. You can watch a YouTube video where Derek Brown tests the validity of some personality assessment results. He validates the Barnum effect, also known as the Forer effect.

Risks to handle

No perspective is ever completely accurate and reliable. The more perspectives we have, the more clearly we see and understand ourselves and others. These results are useful to perceive diversity in the human condition.

When sharing these tools it is very important to know them well, and I also think it has value to share different tools, just to be aware that there is no single recipe that will give you the instructions to understand people.

All these models are great to perceive that people are different, but I don’t think it is good to think any of them are “the answer”. Just to demystify a little bit, go to Google Images and search for “mbti star wars”, “mbti lord of the rings” or “mbti harry potter”: someone has mapped characters to personality types.

I find these tools extremely useful, once their risks are properly managed. But, anyway, my main colour is blue.

Toni Tassani — 30 June 2022

This article was originally published on 24 May 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

Language is another topic that fascinates me, in all its possible dimensions including body language and visual language. If you know me, you will know that I love to talk about the language of comics and the power of metaphors, but today I will focus just on narrative and choice of words. The words you choose to write, speak and think will influence how people interact with you and how you experience life.

Some words may evoke power (boss, rule) or maybe helplessness (permission, brittle). Words are not completely innocuous. Some words have a loaded meaning for a group while being clean for others.

A person can say “I’ve been assigned this project” and “they’ve thrown this project at me” describing the same facts, but will feel very differently about it.

Words are, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it.

― Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2

Organisational culture and language

In the book Tribal Leadership [1] the authors suggest that it is possible to tell the level of collaboration of a group by the words they use and the relationships they create. They suggest five stages.

At stage one the main theme is “life sucks”. People at this stage use the language of gangs and prisons and they share a sensation of despair and hostility. Only 2 per cent of American professionals operate at this stage, according to the authors.

At stage two the sentiment changes to “my life sucks”, and it is shared by 25 per cent of professionals. Scott Adams’ Dilbert and The Office exhibit this culture. People are disconnected from organisational concerns, show passive-aggressive behaviour and sarcasm and cynicism are prevalent.

Stage three, according to this model, is the dominant culture in 49 per cent of the working population. “I’m great” or, more fully, “I’m great, and you’re not” is the theme. Performance is measured individually and there is a belief that knowledge is power. Employees at stage two have bosses at stage three. The keywords “I”, “me”, and “my” exemplify this individualistic culture.

At stage four, in 22 per cent of the workplace population, the theme is “we’re great”, or “we’re great, and they are not”, as there is always an adversary to beat. The idea of “the common enemy” is also encouraged in Ray Immelman’s model described in Great Boss, Dead Boss [2]. There is “tribal pride”. People see themselves as a tribe, with a common purpose and shared core values. There is a language of “we”, “our”, “team”, “them”, and “commit”.

Stage five is in less than 2 per cent of workplace tribal cultures. They have the sentiment of “life is great”. The language is around infinite potential and making history —not to beat a competitor. This is a stage of vision and inspiration, but it is an ephemeral stage that quickly returns to stage four.

The authors suggest that you cannot move more than one stage at a time. You cannot go from stage two to stage four without going through stage three. They provide practical coaching advice to influence the language in use so that people can operate from stage four, and aspire to have periods of stage five if possible.

Leadership is language

Another author, David Marquet, emphasises the importance of language. He was a US submarine captain who prepared himself to command a nuclear submarine, learning all the technical details of that specific ship, but was assigned to a different one at the last minute. He found himself commanding a ship with a demotivated crew and he could not give orders, because he didn’t know how things worked there. So he decided to stop giving orders. In Turn the ship around [3] he describes how he asked the crew to voice what they were about to perform, instead of asking for permission or waiting for an order, using the formula “I intend to…” You can watch his story and the explanation of intent-based leadership in a beautifully animated short video [4].

He realised the importance of language and has been investigating and consulting since then. He collected his findings in his second book Leadership is Language [5]. Marquet affirms “changing our words changed our world”. He says that they succeeded by replacing the following elements:

• A reactive language of “convince, coerce, comply, and conform” with a proactive language of “intent and commitment to action”
• A language of “prove and perform” with a language of “improve and learn”
• A language of “invulnerability and certainty” with a language of “vulnerability and curiosity”

They focused on achieving excellence, not avoiding errors. On “getting better”, not “being good”. This is similar to the attitude Brandy Agerbeck takes to practice and improvement when she replaces the saying “practice makes perfect” with “practice makes progress” in The Graphic Facilitator’s Guide [6, p. 268]. And to Kent Beck saying “perfect is a verb” in Extreme Programming Explained [7, p. 28].

The words and the story

It is not only the choice of words but also the stories you build around the things that happen. In front of the same event, of the same objective situation, we can create multiple stories. These possible narratives are options we can take.

David Marquet also talks about the importance of the mindset, as described by Carol Dweck in her book with the same title, Mindset [8]. Dweck, a researcher in the field of psychology, found that the view you adopt of yourself affects the way you lead your life. Mindsets are just beliefs and you have a choice. You can believe that your abilities are fixed in you and cannot be changed much (fixed mindset) or that your abilities can be developed and changed (growth mindset). In the fixed mindset, failure can be transformed from an action (“I failed”) to an identity (“I am a failure”). Recognising effort instead of success and learning from criticism instead of avoiding feedback are some traits of the growth mindset. In her research, she found that people influenced by the growth mindset (remember that it is a choice), performed better.

In an episode of the podcast Coaching For Leaders [9] they invited Andrea Wanerstrand who leads the global coaching programs at Microsoft. She said that the main focus there was to cultivate the growth mindset.

Words to create identity

In a biblical story, the Ephraimites and the Gileadites had a great battle. The Gileadites defeat the Ephraimites and set a blockade in the Jordan River to prevent the Ephraimites from returning to their territory. To identify and kill these Ephraimites, the Gileadites told each suspected survivor to say the word shibboleth. As in the Ephramites dialect there was no sound sh, they were unmasked and slaughtered.

In modern English a shibboleth is a linguistic distinctive, jargon or way of pronouncing, that allows to identify another as a member or not-member of a group. The purpose is inclusive (feeling of belonging) and also exclusive (telling who is not part of the group). You can read the Wikipedia entry to find multiple usages of shibboleths throughout history.

Beware when your efforts to create a sensation of belonging isolate the group.

Another sign to watch is dehumanising language, an usual predecessor of human atrocities [10].

Self-talk

Some of the explanations we build will stay only in your head, in your internal dialogue, your self-talk. Don’t you have conversations in your head? (“No, I don’t have them”. Yes! That conversation.) That conversation you have with yourself shapes how you perceive the world, and the good news is that you own it. You have relative control on the things that happen around you, but you can control how you think about them.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.

― Viktor Frankl

Daniel Pink, author of Drive, The surprising truth about what motivates us, in his book To sell is human shares some research that suggests an interesting strategy to improve our efficacy: interrogative self-talk [11, p. 82]. Instead of positive or affirmative self-talk before tackling a challenging task, ask ourselves whether we will succeed or not. It seems that asking questions forces our brain to be actively seeking for answers. It works better for our motivation and lasts longer than encouraging ourselves. Interrogative self-talk may also inspire intrinsically motivated reasons to perform the goal, something that does not happen with declarative self talk. Why not try this?

Practical advice

In our feedback training there is a lot of good advice on how to give and receive feedback. Now that we are aware of the influence of the choice of words, we can be more mindful when receiving a message and listen beyond words. In particular, not to be trapped by a particular word.

Be careful when you say “I need”, “I have to” or “I must”. Do you mean what you say? And be cautious with “should”, as it means obligation.

When giving feedback, prefer “you have done” over “you are”, because qualifying someone may be perceived as an aggression. Even worse if it is not directly to the person. No need to gossip.

Avoid absolutes like “never” and “always”. Probably they are not true.

Consider adding “yet”, like in “I can’t do it… yet”.

Watch for the “but” that hides a “no”. As Tyrion Lannister was reminded, “nothing someone says before the word ‘but’ really counts”. If you can, prefer “yes, and” over “yes, but”. “And” builds.

Words, words, words

Words are important.

Can you think without words? For how long?

Can you be exposed to some written text in a language you know and not read it?

You own your choice of words. There are multiple angles to tackle the problem of being more conscious about the way we explain things to ourselves: mindfulness, cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), stoicism, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), non-violent communication (NVC).

It is your choice.

Toni Tassani — 23 May 2022

This article was originally published on 3 May 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

I like reading and learning and I have been experimenting with different ways of making the experience more joyful and enduring. Currently, I am following a system that includes some structure that allows me to:

1. Select the book I will read next
2. Take notes while I am reading
3. Create a summary of the book
4. Remember the basic ideas

I have experimented with different techniques and tools, and I have also learnt what others use. I use them when reading business books and sometimes when reading fiction.

Select next book

I usually have more than one book in progress and I like to know what I will read next. Knowing what’s ahead grows my desire to read and makes the progress of the current book more consistent. I used to keep a list of recommended books on a text file on my laptop, but seeing the book cover adds more to “growing my desire”. I also tried keeping the list of “what’s next” on Goodreads, but I didn’t like the way the list was visualised and the mechanisms to sort it.

Currently, I use Calibre to manage my book library. It is a cross-platform open-source tool created to manage e-books. I have also added my physical books and my wish list, and I keep notes, links, ratings, and reading stats. It could make a good replacement for Goodreads. I have learnt to use cover “emblems”, small icons placed next to the covers and I use them to visualise my “reading order”. In the following picture, the number 0 means books I am currently reading, the number 1 the books that will come next, and so on until number 5. I use decimal numbers, for fine-grained sorting, but these “buckets” work for me. I currently have 56 books on my “To read” list.

Whenever I obtain a book recommendation I add it to my old text file on my laptop (I still keep it) and when I decide I will read it, I add it to Calibre. I structure my reading sequence in a way that the books “more likely” to be picked up next are at the top, but when the time to make the decision arrives, I listen to my immediate emotions not only to my structured planning. Do I prefer a novel? What’s the topic I should be learning about? What has been recently recommended? Then I select. And I make mistakes. A lot.

Taking notes while reading

I like to take notes while I am reading to remember the content and to reference it in the future. When I am reading on Kindle I highlight the parts I find interesting and when I finish the book I go through the notes to write a summary. When I use paper books I don’t write on them, so I need a different strategy.

My colleague Richard Haywood takes a post-it note and cuts it to make little tags. When reading the book he places the tags so they stick out from the pages. When he gets to the end of the book he goes through the tags and creates notes. He does it in one sitting, so he can come up with coherent notes that he can make public.

My friend Pablo Domingo uses a post-it note whenever he finds an interesting part and he creates a summary of the idea, with a drawing if possible. He places the post-it note on the page and leaves it in the book. He always reads with a pen on his hand, and I follow that advice as well.

I’ve tried the same process myself, but I prefer a coherent summary to a collection of scattered notes, and I don’t have the patience for dedicating to the notes while I am reading.

I tried to have a folded A4 paper in the book to take my notes, but what is working for me now is to use post-it notes to stick to my bookmark. When I find something interesting I write down in the post’it note the page and the idea, or the first words of the text, if I want to keep it as a quote. Sometimes I leave the notes in the book, at the end of a chapter, but I collect them all when I finish the book.

Create a summary

I borrowed the expression closing the book from Pablo Domingo. When the book is finished I like to collect my notes, create a summary, create a short review in Goodreads and archive it properly. All these things are what I call “closing the book”, and sometimes it takes me two or three hours. The most important part is the summary because that’s what I get for the future.

Richard Haywood creates his summaries with the aim that someone who has not read the book can understand them as well as himself, being able to use them for reference in the future.

I create the summaries for me. Sometimes they are no more than a collection of quotes and other times they are a very long collection of ideas, not properly condensed. I used Google Docs for my summaries but now I am using Zettlr, a Markdown editor that allows me to tag entries and link content. Sometimes I use the Zettelkasten method for my notes, as it allows me to discover relationships. I will explain it in a future article.

In the past, I liked to create my summaries as sketchnotes or mindmaps, but now I value the capacity to search them.

I started my book summaries on a medium sized ruled Moleskine.

I continued with independent sheets of paper that I was writing while I was reading and keeping them in the book.

And sometimes I created a kind of mindmap with extensive text.

I liked keeping my notes in a notebook and simplifying them as much as possible, but it takes time.

Keep it in your head

Once I finish the book, I don’t want to forget all of it, and I create flashcards. I create one or more cards for the book, with a question on one side and the answer on the other side, so I can try to remember the content in the future.

I use spaced repetition to try to recall the content. The more I know the content, the longer until I review it again. The cards I remember easily, won’t be shown until a month or more. The hard ones will be asked tomorrow. I use an application on my phone to help me with this, AnkiDroid, that I learnt thanks to Jordi Falguera. Every morning I run Anki for 10 minutes. The application selects some of my cards and shows me the title. I have to remember the content and the application asks me how good I was with the card. If it was easy for me, it won’t be shown again in a few days, but if I fail it will repeat the card in the same session and tomorrow.

This is a habit that I have stopped since the Coronavirus crisis started, I am afraid.

Reading, for me, is not only going through the pages of the book. I also enjoy taking notes and sharing what I’ve learnt.

Happy reading.

Toni Tassani — 16 May 2022

This article was originally published on 26 April 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

2022 update

I still don’t use Anki and have also stopped using Goodreads, completely replace by Calibre.

Images help me understand and they attract my attention. I have a visual learning style and I have discovered that when I do the drawings the information sticks better with me. I have also discovered that they help my communication both in documents and in live explanations. If you enjoyed drawing as a kid and you think they could help your learning and communication, I have good news: you can learn.

I won’t tell you that we all can draw like Jurgen Appelo suggests in his “I can’t draw” video. I know many people who were not interested in drawing when they were kids and they are not now. And that’s OK. But if you are interested, continue reading.

I am not talking about artistic drawing, but about improving your notes and your whiteboard drawings. You will need to improve your eye-hand coordination, practice your hand muscles, find the right tools and learn some basic techniques. It can be done.

The purpose of visualisation is insight, not pictures!

― Ben Shneiderman

If you enjoy drawing, practice is not going to be painful.

Naming your practice

People come to use drawing in their daily work from different angles and they have been creating different names for their practice. Everybody is selling something, and they need a differentiator so you see value in their proposition. It is useful to know all these diverse names so you can use your favourite search engine to find more information.

Drawing in a large format and in front of an audience is called graphic recording, and you may have seen it in conferences. Here, the important thing is the final drawing that can be used to remember what was said. It is created live and there is no interaction between the recorder and the audience or the speaker. If it does not happen live, it is an illustration.

When the drawing happens in a similar setting, live in front of people, but with interaction between the recorder and the audience, it is called visual facilitation [1]. One of the pioneers in this area, Dave Sibbet, called them just visual meetings [2]. In this setting the important thing is not the final drawing but the conversations that take place, the process. As Brandy Agerbeck puts it, “it is the process, not the product” [3, p. 71].

In face to face conversations, mainly in sales situations, Dan Roam used the term back of the napkin [4]. In UX conversations, Mike Crothers coined presto sketching [5]. In informal settings Sunni Brown preferred to simplify and called them doodles [6]. Other people use the same ideas for personal organisation in bullet journals. Some people group all these formats into a catchall visual thinking and probably there are more names.

The term that I use more frequently is sketchnotes, popularised by Mike Rohde [7]. He talks about note-taking at conferences, using boxes, arrows and visuals so that you capture only the essential parts and what resonates with you, and that way it is more likely that you will review your notes in the future. You can use the technique for taking your notes at a conference, from a podcast or from a book, and it will help you to be present. “Sketchnotes are about capturing and sharing ideas, not about art” [7, p. 18]. Ideas, not art.

In some cases you draw on a notebook and others on a flip chart. Sometimes you can take your time to think and draw and other times you are drawing live in front of a group as fast as you can. In some situations you care only about the process and at other times you want to keep your final product. But the basics about visual notes stay the same.

Visual notes fundamentals

We are going to review the building blocks of your visual notes and we are going to skip some of them. We won’t discuss structure, hierarchy, lines, dividers, colour, shading and people, but there is no shortage of references out there in the internet.

Choose your tools

You need to find the pen and paper that better works for you. I want to enjoy my tools and I’ve tried a lot of them. Try paper of different sizes and thickness, bound and unbound (in a notebook or loose paper) and make your choice. Use a pencil if you have a better reason than “because I can erase”, because you have to love your mistakes. Consider trying pens with different thickness.

I like the feeling of Sharpies, but I don’t like that they smear on certain paper, they bleed on the other side and they have strong fumes. Check the traction of your marker on the surface. If it moves too fast it will be harder for you to control. It happens to me with ball-pens on a single sheet of paper on the table.

Digital tools are great, but don’t choose them because you can undo. Be brave.

For a long time I stuck to Staedtler pigment liner 0.05, 0.2 and 0.8 on a pocket-sized, plain paper, hardcover Moleskine.

Lettering

The first approach to drawing is drawing letters: writing. It is a usual recommendation to use capital letters because they give you more consistency. It is also useful to have more than one “font”, at least for titles, so you can have a visual hierarchy.

Practising handwriting is about repeating the alphabet, or short texts. There are going to be letters that you will have to relearn.

Brandy Agerbeck suggests an exercise repeating the alphabet three times: normal, perfect and fast, so that you can identify the letters you need to work on [3, p. 177].

Arrows

You can practice different arrow types to describe relationships between the elements or to guide their sequence.

Bullets

It is useful to have more than one type of bullet for your lists, while keeping consistency.

Containers

You can group parts of your notes in boxes or highlight special messages using containers. Most of the time it is better to write the text first and then add the container.

Icons

Some say there is a visual alphabet [8] of basic symbols that form what you draw (e.g. dots, lines and circles) whilst others consider that the important thing is a visual vocabulary [9], with the basic ideas you want to draw (e.g. light bulbs and magnifying glasses).

Taking visual notes is not about adding more drawings and using more icons. Some people have the tendency to create an icon for every term that is mentioned, something that Brandy names iconitis [3, p. 276]. Icons help, but they are not the main building block and they can slow you down.

To create your own collection of symbols, you can copy the icons on your phone, use thenounproject.com for inspiration, or create your own ones based on photos. You can also search in Twitter or Instagram for the hashtag #sketchabit that Eva-Lotta Lamm uses and you’ll see instructions on how to create certain icons. Some of them are in her reflection on visual alphabets [10]. They say that if you repeat the same image 50 times, it will stay as part of your personal visual vocabulary.

Practice, practice and practice

From now on it is up to you to practice and hone your skills. You have all the hints to find more references on the Internet, and you can find more in Sketchnote Hangout Resources [11].

Find the right tools for you and enjoy your new notes.

Toni Tassani — 9 May 2022

This article was originally published on 12 April 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

I like reading books. In 2012 I started using websites to track what I was reading and connect with other readers. First I used LibraryThing and later Goodreads, and this last one allows you to define a reading challenge for the year and check progress on it. In 2017 I read 24 books, 31 in 2018 and 36 in 2019. I was basically reading books on topics related to work such as agile, psychology, culture or leadership, and I was happy with my reading record.

I was not only reading the books but learning with them. In 2017 I was working with my friends Jaume Jornet and Pablo Domingo and they introduced me to the habit habit of taking notes and creating a summary at the end. We call it “closing the book”.

My colleague Richard Haywood told me he read 60 books in 2019. It meant more than one book a week and seemed impossible. With the pandemic and the lock down I was going to have plenty of time and I had a long list of books to read so I considered the idea.

Things I have learned

I finished 60 books in 2020 and I learnt a few things during the process. I think I learnt more things about myself than from books. Let’s look at them.

It can be done

I started the year with a Goodreads challenge similar to what I achieved the previous year, but lower: I wanted to read 24 books. The average for Goodreads’ users is above 40, but two books a month seemed reasonable. I have a long wish list and I had books bought and never started.

After the lockdown, having more time, I saw that I would reach that challenge sooner than expected and I increased it to 36, 3 books per month, looking at the number 60 as something unachievable. By summer, I told myself I wanted to read 60, but I did not dare to commit to that on Goodreads: I did not want to fail. I was telling myself that if I aspired to 60 but achieved 40 that was a success, but an inner voice had fear of failure. I was also conscious of the risk of picking shorter books and declining longer ones, even if they were more interesting.

My book selection was important to me, and keeping my reading practice: notes, summary, review… I will share my reading habit and tools I use on a future occasion.

When I started finishing a book every Sunday it was a relief: it was giving a rhythm and it was less hard to decide the next book to read as it was going to last only one week. It was also good to know that the next book was close.

I was finishing some books that had been on my wish list for years. Kindle, books bought long ago, buying used copies and borrowing books made the economic cost something not to worry about.

Maybe I was also lucky in my book selection, I found no “blocking book”, these books that make me hate reading. Fortunately, not in 2020.

It was in November when I said I was going to read 60 and I finished the 60th book on 31st December.

It is not a great idea

Some people claim you can read 200 books a year just by using less social-media [1]. I’ve also seen people giving tips for that challenge, including replacing books with audiobooks played at 1.5x [2]. If your objective is to read more books, these tips may work for you, but it is not my objective.

I enjoy reading books. I usually get satisfaction out of it. I enjoy understanding, learning, connecting ideas and sharing them. People I know with great ideas have built them on top of other ideas from books and I enjoy going to these sources. It’s clear to me why I read, an essential part to enjoy reading [3]. And it’s not about fast reading or taking shortcuts. I enjoy more “reading books” than “having books read”. It’s the journey, not only the destination.

The more I read, the more I enjoy… to a certain extent. Setting that challenge by the end of the year added stress to me, self-imposed stress. I started being obsessed with reading, usually during the weekend. I stopped doing other things I like because I had to be reading. It created an obligation in me that was uncomfortable. I was aware of the discomfort and I was considering failing on my challenge and achieving 58 or so books as a lesson to me: “you can fail, that’s not bad, and nevertheless you made that big amount of books”. But in the end, I did not allow myself to fail and I coped with the pressure, guilt and stress.

I am delighted with achieving my goal, and I acknowledge it was a bad idea. I want to read a lot, but I don’t need to read 200 books a year.

The sensation of reading the same book

During 2020 I had the sensation a few times that I had already read the book I was reading. Many books use the same examples and describe the same thesis just adding a small detail. That happens to me with some business books or books on organisational culture. Now I smile when I find yet another reference to W. E. Deming, W. L. Gore, Toyota, Tesla, Southwest Airlines, Semco, Patagonia, Ritz Hotels or Morningstar.

I also pay attention to the references at the end of the books. The ones that look so similar share many of them, and I have been adding them to my reading list, books like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, Carol Dwek’s Mindset, Daniel Pink’s Drive or Robert Cialdini’s Influence.

To avoid having the sensation of reading the same book, apart from going to the original references, I added diversity to my reading list by accepting recommendations and balancing my different interests. I joined my company’s London Book Club and listened to other recommendations, added books on philosophy, drawing and coaching to the ones on culture, business and change.

Adding diversity to your reading list is good.

Everybody is selling something

Something I discovered in 2020 that may be obvious for many people is that everyone who gets a book published is selling something. It can be their company, their product or future consulting engagements. It can be their prestige or their clever idea, but they are looking for something.

There are many good ideas that are packaged in long books because they need to have a certain length to have a reasonable price tag. And there are books that seem so similar that you don’t know what’s the difference: The Power of Habit, Tiny Habits, Atomic Habits, …

Well, I may be overgeneralising, but thinking this way helps me taking all the books with a pinch of salt. Being conscious that the author may be selling a partial picture and they may not even be aware of that.

I may be influenced by the reputation of an author or other myths about brands or countries. I have to be aware of it and keep my critic awake.

It depends on your context

We can read the same words and understand different things. A fragment may evoke a past experience for you and it can be boring to me. A book may be transformational to me because it builds on top of something I have learnt and it may have no effect on you.

The effect of a book, or any other experience, depends on the context you have when reading it, the environment and surroundings, your living conditions and your previous experience. It is very hard to recommend a book.

Combine reading with other activities

If my purpose is learning, reading is only one way of achieving it and dedicating all my time only to reading would be a bad idea. In 2020 I also started to listen to podcasts, to take care of my health working out, to keep up with my mental health by doing meditation with the support of some apps and I even joined the Advent of Code, a challenge to solve coding problems on daily basis from 1st December to 25th December, adding more stress to my Christmas time.

I joined some virtual conferences as well, but by the end of the year, I realised that they were not working for me.

Books are only one aspect of learning and it’s good to add variety.

What I did well

I enjoyed most of the books I read last year. I was keeping my discipline of learning and keeping my reading habit intact. It was good to start reading some philosophy books. I joined a reading club and enjoyed sharing my interests. I was also influenced by other recommendations that I am grateful to. I did not buy any book that was not read during the year and cleaned part of my “to read” list. In the past, it was usual for me to buy books immediately after they were recommended and last year I succeeded in buying “just in time”. Japanese people have a word for piling up books without reading them, tsundoku [4]. When you buy a book you don’t buy the time for reading it.

I was also conscious of my mental commitment to read books. I’ve seen Goodread users who read a couple of books per month and add four to their “to read” list in the same period. I keep my reading radar as clean and prioritised as I can.

What I will do differently

I don’t want to read from a sense of obligation. I want to read more classics and literature. I want to read novels and science fiction or fantasy books. I want to read not only in English but also in Spanish and Catalan. I want to re-read books. I want to be able to drop a book I am not liking. I want to digest what I read, to reflect on it. I may want to read less.

In 2021 I want to enjoy reading¹.

Toni Tassani — 2 May 2022

This article was originally published on 29 March 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

Paper is made from wood pulp and that’s why the expression “dead tree” is used to refer to anything made out of paper, in particular books. You can even find the adjective “dead-tree” in Merriam-Webster or Collins dictionaries online. As an adjective, you can say “the dead-tree edition of that document”.

Can be a book something that is not dead trees?

Electronic books

Electronic books have been with us for a long time with different levels of fidelity and quality, from simple text files to multimedia interactive books. With Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection some publishing companies accepted e-books and dedicated devices to read have been moving more people to electronic reading.

Now, you can read the same content you have on paper using an e-book reader, a tablet or even your phone. The distribution of the pages may not be the same and if the book contains images or colour pages some details may be lost, but you can carry several books without bothering about their weight.

Some e-books are pure digital, with video or interaction options, but I want to focus on the ones that can be both digital and paper. Some books are born digital with the option to be printed, like in Lulu. Some are born pure e-book, like in Leanpub. Some e-books are free like the ones in Project Gutenberg and some can be bought in stores like Kindle, Google Play, Apple Books or eBooks.com. You can find books that were on paper and were converted to digital form in O’Reilly Learning and some books only exist in a digital medium, like Simon Wardley’s Wardley Maps [1]. To add more variety, some authors have converted their digital blog posts into printed books like Tobias Mayer’s The People’s Scrum or Michael Lopp’s Managing Humans.

Audiobooks

And there are audiobooks. An audiobook is a recording of someone reading a book to you. It can be a digital voice created via a Text-to-Speech system, the author, an actor or someone else. You have the same content as in the book, but you don’t have to use your eyes to read it. Are audiobooks books?

There are cases where audiobooks are far better than their physical pair: when you cannot use your eyes. It may be a temporal or permanent circumstance, or because you are using them while performing another activity like driving, washing dishes or walking.

A friend of mine told me he reads business books faster when he reads and, at the same time, listens to the audiobook played at high speed: it helps him to keep the focus.

Book summaries

Another phenomenon I’ve come across recently is book summaries: services that provide brief book summaries, sometimes in audio format. You can get a gist of a business book in less than 10 minutes. Blinkist and Instaread offer book summaries. They are ideal for the busy person who wants to stay up to date knowing what other people are learning. They get a view of the destination but they miss the journey. Like saying you’ve been to Paris because you’ve seen a picture of the Tour Eiffel. I would not say they have read the book.

The magic of reading

Reading requires attention and a mental effort of decoding or recognising symbols in your head. A collection of sheets of paper, the product of dead trees, become alive once you start revealing its content: when you read. There is a transformation of languages, there is a mapping from different levels of abstraction that I’ve always found magical. That process is different when you are listening.

The book as an object is another fascinating topic. I remember buying music albums, arriving home, and playing them carefully, full of attention while looking at the cover and lyrics. Once played, the album was stored with my collection and whenever I glanced over it, I was capable of listening to the music again in my head. Just having it visible on my shelf was useful for my memory.

Something similar happens to me with the books on my shelf. When I look at them I remember their content, where I bought them, what I was doing when I read them, what I felt when I was reading them, … The physical objects act as an anchor to the knowledge I got from them or the adventures I experienced when reading them. And that anchor is used every time they are in front of me. I don’t get these echos with electronic books.

Dead

You cannot ask a question to a book, electronic or on paper. You cannot start a debate. It contains an idea that was set in the past and, maybe, the author is not currently fond of it. Some critics saw the advent of websites, forums and blogs as the right replacement for books. The can be changing all the time. They can evolve as their authors’ minds.

I like that books are a snapshot in time. The idea has been disconnected from the author and you can share with others and discuss it. You can give a pointer to start the conversation.

When I read The Leprechauns of Software [2] I was puzzled by the title of the preface: “This book is a work in progress”. It is published in Leanpub, and they allow this model: the author can share as they progress and readers can support, even if the work is not complete. That book in particular looks finished, it is consistent as it is and it has not been updated since 2017. I cannot reference a page of the book because I don’t know if it will change in the future. I like the commitment that books imply.

The book as an experience

A novel, a history book, a philosophy essay, a comic book, and a business book, are very different but all of them are books. I would like to distinguish only between reading for learning and reading for leisure. When I read for leisure, I like to enjoy my time and I go through the contents and that’s it. When I read for learning, I take notes and I search for things on the internet. What I remember about the book is important to me in this case.

I’ve realised that I recall better the contents of physical books. Usually, I remember “it was on the lower part of a right page” or “about half a centimetre of pages before the end of the book”. I don’t have these cues in electronic books. I also remember the covers, the colours and the touch of the pages. I lose these with my Kindle.

It’s a very different experience to hold a pocketbook than a hardcover. A new book with the pages cracking or an old one with yellowish pages.

I have many books signed by their authors. I loved reading Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch in English) and going back and forth the pages, something I wouldn’t have experienced clicking on a link. I like to see the wrinkled spines of my books and the faded away covers. I remember I read that book on the beach, I bought that one at that airport and this one was a special gift. Books, as an object, have been a companion to me. They carry more stories than the ones written inside.

Books read

I bought my first Kindle in 2019 and, before that, I had read electronic books using an iPad. I had also read book parts on my phone. Now, I combine electronic books with dead-trees ones and I like to have one book-in-progress of each type. I can take my Kindle everywhere and I have a dictionary at my fingertip. I can start reading a book in English a few seconds after I’ve paid instead of waiting for the delivery, and it does not take any space on my bookshelf. I can choose a big font size which is helpful for my eyes and I can search for words.

I only read the paper book at home. I don’t pay attention to the “what’s better, paper or electronic books” discussion. It seems like the theatre vs. cinema one: they are different.

Audiobooks have not worked for me. I have only tried books in English and I haven’t tried in my native languages yet. Being a non-native English speaker, I tend to look up words in the dictionary and re-read whole paragraphs. When I am listening, if there is a word I don’t get, it affects my attention. The apps I have tried have to improve, with bookmarks, notes, and easy rewind.

A few years ago I tried the audiobook The Ocean at the End of the Lane read by its author, Neil Gaiman, and I enjoyed it but I was reading at the same time. Now that I have had higher exposure to English in conversations and podcasts I could try another one.

Some participants in book clubs I am in listen to the audio version (they say they “read audiobooks”) and they share a similar understanding of the content that the ones who read the words. I wish I could do more audiobooks.

The “Gutenberg parenthesis” [3] suggests that humans have been immersed in an oral culture that has been suspended 500 years since Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. With the printing press, the only ideas that survived were the ones that could find the funding to be on paper. Now, with digital media, we are returning to a second “orality” based on a return to fluidity in communication.

Reading is démodé, videos are easier to consume and books do not hold the authority of knowledge. Some say that nobody likes reading but some like having read. I disagree. I will continue reading because I love it. Dead trees or not.

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Toni Tassani — 25 April 2022

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This article was originally published on 15 March 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

Insights Discovery® is a psychometric tool “built to help people understand themselves, understand others, and make the most of the relationships that affect them in the workplace”. Basically, you complete a questionnaire and based on your responses you will get different values on four categories that you can compare with other people.

When I took my training on Insights®, it reminded me of another tool I used in the past, DISC®, and you will understand why.

The images below are the usual representation of Insights® (on the left) and DISC® (on the right).

You may have noticed that the same set of colours are used and the wording used to describe each of them is very similar.

• Red is demanding, dominant, strong-willed.
• Blue is more rational, cautious, formal, conscientious.
• Yellow is more sociable, persuasive, influential.
• Green is caring, steady, patient.

One circle is rotated with respect to the other, and in Insights® there are elements added to the colours: fiery red, cool blue, sunshine yellow and earth green. It can be a coincidence, and the selection of colours may be the best option to help our memory (it reminds me of the Spanish game of parchís). To my eyes, both are very similar.

Insights® is based on Carl Jung personality theory [1] while DISC® is the result of the theories of an interesting individual: William Marston.

The invention of DISC was not alone

William Moulton Marston was an American psychologist who came with the DISC theory while he was working at Columbia University around 1928. The original terms he used for the traits where: Dominance, Inducement, Submission, and Compliance.

Marston was married to another professor at the University, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and together they created a device that could connect measurements of blood pressure and emotion: they invented the lie detector, the polygraph.

But the personal life of Professor Marston is even more interesting. While he was married, he started a relationship with a student, Olive Byrne, and his wife, far from taking that as an offence, accepted and the three of them started living together.

Their relationship was a scandal at the University. He was fired and they had to move to another city. No University wanted to hire him and he thought he could get some money creating scripts for comic books. Under the pen name of Charles Moulton he created the character Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman included his feminist ideals and some references to bondage. The character uses a magic lasso that forces people to tell the truth, a reference to the lie detector.

Their polyamorous relationship was not just an adventure. Marston had two children with each women and they lived together until the end of their lives. Marston died of cancer at the age of 54 and Elisabeth and Olive continued living together. Olive died in 1990, aged 86 and Elisabeth in 1993, aged 100.

The story

I have spoiled it, but this is the basis of the movie Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (Angela Robinson, 2017) available on streaming platforms. An interesting movie that some descendants of the Marstons have criticised saying that elements of the film are not based on reality and the family was never consulted.

True or false, connected to Insights® or not, Marston’s story was so good I thought it deserved to be shared.

Toni Tassani — 18 April 2022

This article was originally published on 8 March 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

Pixar is a really interesting company. They started doing research on computers and images, turned into a technology company and then moved to their aspiration of creating animation feature films. The book Creativity, Inc. [1] tells their story starting from its inception by George Lucas, then the acquisition by Steve Jobs until their association with Disney. The author, Ed Catmull, former president of Pixar Animation, explains that just after they released Toy Story they created a Pixar University, initially meant to deliver training on their proprietary software but soon after they included other topics.

They introduced a course to teach everybody in the company to draw, even though they already had people who could draw beautifully. They did it because they thought there is something underlying the process of drawing that everybody needed to understand. They taught workshops based on the 1979 book by Betty Edwards Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain [2] to improve observation skills. Edwards’ book uses the concepts of right and left brain, being the left verbal and analytical and the right more visual and perceptual. Part of the process of learning to draw is learning to see, and in order to achieve this, you need to shut down your left side of the brain.

For example, when you try to draw a chair, you know it has four legs and you’ll try to represent that mental model from your head, regardless of whether you see the legs or not. People who draw better can set aside their preconceptions. It is important to disconnect from language and logic when we are drawing and focus only on what we are seeing now.

There are different ways to train for this. One is placing the model we are trying to draw upside down so that the student cannot recognise the object and sees just only shapes. The left side of the brain will not step in because it sees no familiar references. The right side of the brain will work only on sizes and relative distances of what is seen.

Another technique is to ask students to draw “all that is not the object”. To draw the contours, the surroundings, the boundaries that define what is not the object to draw: the negative space. In the example, when drawing the negative space of the chair, the student is not going to use their mental model of the chair and the proportions are going to be taken more easily, focusing only on what’s in front of them. There is not going to be any meaning added to what is seen, suspending all previous knowledge, all judgement, and all the impulses that can distort their vision.

As fascinating as it is, this is not about drawing, but about being able to see “what is not there”.

Shaping the organisation

In Team of Teams [3, Ch. 138] the author mentions the acronym MECE (pronounced mee-see), which stands for “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive”. A MECE breakdown has the intention of dividing a whole into a series of categories that do not overlap but together cover everything. An org chart has the intention of being a MECE structure: nobody assumes there is going to be something left uncovered and there is a lot of effort in clarifying responsibilities that do not overlap.

Even though that is the intention, eventually you will find elements in the organisation that are not covered or that have duplication. From there, you can delineate the negative space of the organisation.

Going back to the org chart, the hierarchy clarifies the assignment of responsibilities, useful when there is arbitrage needed. If something is not clear at the team level, the Team Leader can step in to clarify. When something is not clear between teams, the supervisor of the group of teams can solve the dispute. But when the differences are in something that is not in the defined responsibilities of any team, the negative space, it is hard to tell looking at the org chart who has to help with the problem and the question may be left forgotten until it becomes a serious problem. Who owns it? Who has to coordinate? Should the CEO intervene? That would not make sense.

Mechanical solution

An approach to solve this problem, presented in a different way, suggests eliminating the space in between the teams. The book Team Topologies [4] suggests that the organisation should be structured in a way that the smaller actor is the team (not the individual), teams interact in clearly defined modes (collaboration, as a service or as facilitators) and there are four types of teams: stream-aligned teams (the preferred type), enabling teams, complicated subsystem teams and platform teams.

Authors of this solution obviate the structures above the teams, the management, and external companies. Their promise is that any dependency between multiple teams is solved through a platform.

I agree they provide a very valid thinking tool and a good vocabulary to talk about teams and their relationships. Even I accept that their solution could improve certain organisations, but I don’t think it’s applicable in all environments.

It is complex

Maybe we are asking the wrong question. We are trying to find the pieces that form an organisation and put them together to build the whole puzzle. We are thinking about the organisation as if it was a machine and we need to find the solution. Where is the missing piece?

General McChrystal, trying to improve adaptability over efficiency, found that anti-MECE organisations worked better. The redundancy of responsibilities creates inefficiencies that allow adaptability and efficacy [3, p. 139]. “Great teams are less like ‘awesome machines’ than ‘awesome organisms’.”

An old parable goes like this: Three blind men, who have never come across an elephant, try to learn what it is by touching it. One of them says “it’s like a tree”, while hugging its leg. Another one says “I have the real facts and it is wide and broad, like a rug”, touching the ear. The third man, reaching out the trunk says, “you all are wrong, it is like a snake”. All of them were wrong and all of them were partially right [5].

A system is more than the sum of its parts [6, p. 11]. I tend to use the language of machines and factories when talking about teams, input and output. It’s easy to understand but I am perpetuating the image of the machine.

While we find a better language (living organisms? gardens?[7]) we can talk about the negative space to think on how to improve the way we work.

Toni Tassani — 11 April 2022

This article was originally published on 1 March 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

In the world of agile methods, the term coach has been used since the beginning as the person supporting the development team to achieve their objectives. Kent Beck discussed how to choose a coach in his Extreme Programming Explained [1, p. 143]. Other authors went deep to discuss the roles of the coach, influenced by their training as personal coaches [2].

My initial exposure to the term coach was through the agile community and I understood that it was about asking the right questions and helping people get to solutions using their own resources. In one meetup I had the chance to practice that coaching thing in a coaching dojo.

What is a coaching dojo?

Dojo is a Japanese word that means “the place where you practice”. Some people started to talk about coding dojos [3] to describe a way to improve coding skills by practising exercises named code kata [4]. I don’t know how, but somebody thought that the idea of learning by repetition and deliberate practice could also be used for coaching.

The facilitators in my first coaching dojo told us to split in groups of three. In each group we had to distribute three roles. We would do three rounds, so that each one in the group could experience each role. Each round would be 6 minutes plus 3 minutes for feedback. The roles were:

• Coach, who is going to practice coaching skills.
• Seeker or coachee, who comes with a (real) problem to solve.
• Observer, who is going to observe the interaction and provides feedback to the coach at the end of the round.

It was a great experience that I repeated in many other meetups and conferences, also in different formats.

The positives

The first time I participated in a coaching dojo I observed how other participants asked good questions, how difficult it was for me to find good ones and how important the feedback was to improve. I’ve been able to practice coaching dojos several times and even included the exercise in some of our courses. It is about coaching, not agile coaching.

People from different backgrounds, with no knowledge of agile, usually have a sensation of awe during the exercise. As facilitators, we talk about a “safe environment” and a good level of “trust”. We ask coaches to “stay curious as much as possible” and to “ask open-ended questions”. We ask seekers to find a real topic that worries them but could not take time to think about it. As coaches they realise how difficult it is to avoid offering a solution and staying in the problem as much as possible. As observers they see how important it is to pay attention to the questions, not to the answers. As a group, that bubble of trust is sometimes very powerful. Staying humble and silent when receiving the feedback is sometimes hard. And not commenting on the topic during the feedback time but how the interaction was, is the most difficult part.

One small concern

After doing my learning on coaching I realised that when participating in coaching dojos, often we were practising before learning, without expert observers. We were putting in practice something that we had an intuition about, but we didn’t know.

An image came to my head. I imagined myself interested in Kung fu but with the knowledge of someone who has viewed a couple of movies. I could try to copy the actors’ movements, and I could go to the park to practice with my friends, with the same knowledge on the subject as me. A kick here. A punch there. Now a pose. Then being corrected by someone who does not know.

“coaching dojo was like practising Kung fu in the park with my friends.”

It can be fun, it is exercise and it can be beneficial, but it is not learning Kung fu. You cannot practise what you don’t know. You cannot learn by only practising (even though Plato, in the theory of recollection described in Phaedo, says that to learn is to recollect).

Learn and improve

I realised that an important component of the coaching dojo, or any other practical exercise, is to explain the basic techniques so that participants can practise something they have learned. Or that the facilitator ensures that only the seekers don’t know about coaching in the first iteration and the feedback time is used to do some teaching.

Participants must understand what is good listening. To distinguish leading questions from open-ended questions. To stay curious. To listen to what is not said. To read the whole body. Coaching is more than asking questions.

A short round of a coaching dojo cannot be like a course but can hep you learn how to ask coaching questions.

Go and practice. Keep your love for learning. And be cautious when you realise you are practising Kung fu in the park with your friends.

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Toni Tassani — 4 April 2022

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This article was originally published on 22 February 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

The term team is a confusing one and we should do better clarifying what we mean when we use it. In the book Team Topologies [1, p. 32] they explicitly define it as:

In this book, “team” has a very specific meaning. By team, we mean a stable grouping of five to nine people who work toward a shared goal as a unit. We consider the team to be the smallest entity of delivery within the organization.

The Cambridge Dictionary definition says something like “a number of people who do something together as a group”. Other definitions include “to achieve their goal”. These definitions work also for company or organisation, as well as for team. And we easily use the term for a group that “does the work” and we also use it for a “senior leadership team”. In fact, one of the best sellers on team performance, The five dysfunctions of a team [2], is about a leadership team. Why don’t we talk about “a team of Team Leaders” or a “team of Engineering Managers”?

In Team of Teams [3] General McChrystal describes how a military organisation became more adaptive, using the term team without defining it. In Superteams [4] Khoi Tu uses the term team to describe groups and organisations as disparate as Pixar (a company), the Red Cross (an NGO), a Ryder Cup team (a team of golf players), SAS (a military unit), the Northern Ireland peace process participants, Ferrari F1 and The Rolling Stones. Team is a flexible term.

Groups of people

There are many possible compositions for groups of people doing something together. Talking about sports, we understand a basketball team, an American football team and a judo team will work in different ways. Some sports require all participants working together like in basketball, others require specialised teams like defence and attack in American football and in other sports participants work in isolation or in turns, and then they sum their score, like in judo or bowling. Even in sport, team has different meanings.

Research on team performance has shown that the team construct is not always the best solution to solve problems [5, Ch. 2]. The same author, social psychologist Richard Hackman, identified the optimal conditions for an effective team [6, Pt. II]:

• Create a real team
• Set a compelling direction
• Provide an enabling structure
• Establish supportive context
• Arrange for expert coaching

The same author also identifies different types of collaboration that could fall into a wide definition of team [5, Ch. 2]:

• Community of interest
• Community of practice
• Emergent collaboration
• Coacting group (work in parallel, but do not have collective accountability)
• Distributed team
• Project team and task force
• Semi-permanent work team

The agile literature has made prevalent other concepts like high-performance teams, the Tuckman model of group formation [7] (the forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning litany), and stable teams, even though now there are voices questioning some of the ideas [8].

Self-organisation is another widespread concept. Hackman talks about four levels of self-management [6, Ch. 2]: manager-led, self-managing, self-designing and self-governing. The 2020 Scrum guide [9, p. 5] has changed “self-organizing” to “self-managing”. According to the Scrum guide revision history, they mean self-organizing for “choosing who and how to do work” while self-managing for “choosing who, how, and what to work on”. Other authors include other aspects for self-managed, like managing their budget, scheduling or rewards [10]. The concept of self-management is also an essential part of Teal Organisations [11, p. 61] and aligned with Empowered Product Teams [12].

Software teams

In many software organisation, a team is a group of people organised together to achieve a mission. These groups are formed in a way to be as autonomous as possible, with all the required skills. They prefer not to have highly specialised teams that are dedicated to perform just specific parts of missions, like a front end team, a documentation team or a testing team, because they could easily become a bottleneck. So these organisations combine together people with different skills: programming, analysis, interaction design, documentation, machine learning, etc.

Some companies call these teams product teams. A similar construct is defined in Team Topologies [1] with the name stream aligned teams. In The Connected Company [13] they prefer the name pods.

In some organisations teams also have a product manager, someone who is dedicated to ensuring that the team is working on the most valuable thing. Finally, teams also have a team leader.

Leading what?

The team leader is a people manager for some of the engineers in the team, usually excluding specialisations like UX or Data Science, and also excluding the product manager. Supposedly, the Team Leader leads a team. Then, what is the team?

We have a Team Leader who is managing a group of people who are part of a group, along with other people who are managed by people outside that group. Sometimes they refer to the people managed by the team leader as the team, and other times they refer to the whole group contributing to the mission as the team. However, sometimes they use expressions like “the team and the product manager” excluding the latter from the team. Wouldn’t it be great for them to have a sense of belonging generated from the language used for all the contributors to the mission?

Do groups of people need someone leading them? It seems they hold this belief.

First Team

Can we belong to more than one team? We can belong to more than one group of people, that’s for sure. We may be part of our reading club, our sports club, the neighbours, the hospital volunteers, the Fridays partygoers and our church, and all of these can be different groups without causing issues.

In Spotify [14], they also explored the possibility of belonging to multiple groups that they represented with chapters and guilds and, as they wanted to refine the meaning of team, they decided to use the term squad. There are also communities of practice and book clubs. We do belong to multiple groups.

Example 1: Shelly, a software engineer in team PrioratWine in Barcelona, and is interested in Domain Driven Design may belong to the following “teams”:

• PrioratWine Team
• DDD community of practice
• Meetup organisers
• Runners club

Example 2: Alex, Team Leader in the same team, may belong to:

• PrioratWine Team
• Facilitators community of practice
• Board gamers
• The team of Team Leaders in his area

They have a sense of belonging to different groups, there may be multiple overlaps. It seems reasonable that multiple Team Leaders and Engineering Managers can work together to pursue a common goal. That would be a team.

If you can belong to multiple teams it is very important to clarify which one is your first team.

Toni Tassani — 28 March 2022

This article was originally published on 15 February 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

“The unexamined life is not worth living”, said Socrates. Those of us who have been playing around with agile methodologies are familiar with the term retrospective. According to the Agile Aliance [1]:

The team meets regularly, usually adhering to the rhythm of its iterations, to explicitly reflect on the most significant events to have occurred since the previous such meeting, and take decisions aiming at remediation or improvement.

I also want to improve at a personal level and that’s why I became fond of dedicating reflection time by the end of the year. I tried a higher frequency, but I realised that the time I take to reflect and the moment of the year made more effective a yearly retrospective and some ad hoc catch-ups whenever I need them.

The purpose

I don’t try to set my New Year’s resolutions when I do the retro, even though it was something I did in the past. The intention is to reflect objectively on the year that has finished, considering the whole year, the events that took place and how I felt about them. I try to consider all the aspects that are important to me in that moment of my life, like work, family, finances, travel, sport, health, drawing, programming or learning. They have been changing.

To be objective it’s important to review data. I use consciously my diary (Google Calendar): I take care of the things that get written so I can review them at a later point. When the year ends, I review the conferences I’ve attended, the meetups I went, the books I’ve read, the exercise I did, the visits to the doctor, the big changes, the events at work. I can do that because I noted that down, I accept or decline invitations and I keep my calendar tidy.

To get more data points I also use Slack (and I search what I posted in public channels), Google Maps Timeline, Goodreads and Instagram.

I reflect on my year, for my whole self. I know some people do a work retrospective, but I prefer to see life as a single-integrated-complex thing, the wholeness referred by Laloux [2].

Usually, I recall things I completely forgot: I went to the doctor because of that, that person joined the team, that colleague left us, I spoke there. You will read what you wrote down.

The setup

Christmas time is important to me. It is a cold time in my city, school holidays and my birthday, so I usually take some vacation days. As the days are shorter and it is time for me to remember my missing ones, it provides an ideal timing for slowing down and introspect.

I don’t plan to do all my thinking in a single sitting, but dedicate one hour here half an hour there. Last year I finished my retro on 19 January, and the year before it was on 30 January. This year I finished on 5 January. Am I improving there? I don’t care, it’s not important if next year I finish later.

I’ve done the retrospective using pen and paper. I’ve tried also mind maps and sketchnotes but lately, I’m using a Google Doc. I create the structure of the things I want to reflect upon and I fill the gaps.

The different facets of life

To discover what’s important for me I tried the Wheel of Life that is used in coaching [3]. The wheel of life I’ve used identifies the following aspects: Career, Family & Friends, Significant Other, Fun & Recreation, Health, Money, Personal Growth and Physical Environment. Of course, you can identify other aspects for your wheel [4].

The idea is that you score from 0 to 10 how you rate your level of satisfaction with that aspect of your life. It’s not about scoring 10 in everything but to have a balanced life. Seeing all the aspects at once you can assess better what aspect you want to work on, if any.

Another tool I’ve used to inspect areas of interests comes from the Agile Coaching world: the Agile Coaching Competency Framework [5]. That framework, created by Lyssa Adkins, outlines the different dimension that Agile Coaching has to consider and, in my case, the aspects I wanted to develop. The dimensions are Agile-Lean Practitioner, Professional Coaching, Facilitating, Teaching, Mentoring, Technical Mastery, Business Mastery and Transformation Mastery.

In my particular case I know that creativity and creation are important, the classes I deliver in the university, my reading and my exercise habits.

Once I’ve identified the areas of my life, I put them on a table and I rate them, from zero to ten, in three different categories:

• Perceived: What’s the level of satisfaction I have with my performance or knowledge in that area
• Wished: What’s the rating I would like
• Willing: What’s the amount of energy I am willing to dedicate to improve in that area

It’s a similar exercise as the wheel of life, but noting also my desire. I am going to note what are the gaps between Perceived and Wished where Willing is also high. These are the areas of my life where I will put more effort in finding books, courses, meetups or practising. It’s not a list of New Year’s Resolutions but it’s a tool I use when choosing a new book or deciding my next pet project. Of course, it’s a reference and will change during the year, but at least I reflected about it and avoided inertia.

The template

The template I’ve used since reviewing 2018 contains the following points:

• Conferences attended
• Training received
• Activities (Highlights of the activities performed at work in Engineering Practices)
• Training sessions delivered (at work)
• Trips (and I capture the distance made according to Google Maps Timeline because too much travel is bad for me)
• Books I’ve read (with some statistics, and I get the book covers from Goodreads)
• Health (including the episodes of back pain during the year and some summary of the training sessions)
• University Classes (I want to keep in touch, but I don’t want to be drowned)
• Coaching (the coaching sessions I’ve performed as a coach or as a coachee)
• Habits (my life is full of useful routines)
• Drawing and creativity (new drawings I’ve created, lately on Instagram)
• Areas (rated)
• Log (a detailed log of the things that have happened, from my Calendar, Slack or somewhere else)
• Summary

The summary

The final part of the retro is answering three questions:

• What was important to me in <previous year>?
• How important is that to me now?
• What is important now?

This is the part that is less data-oriented but makes a bigger impact in me. It makes me reconnect with the present after reflecting about the past.

The whole exercise makes me recall the events of the year, as a whole, avoiding recency bias. The good moments are vivid again, as well as the painful ones. There are always surprises and discoveries but it always helps me to start the year with more clarity.

Toni Tassani — 21 March 2022

This article was originally published on 8 February 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

From ignorance

I was postponing the moment to write these lines, finding multiple excuses, but the main one was “I don’t know enough”. I like learning and I like reading, and what I find more rewarding is the moment when I share. Making other people feel what I felt when I understood or when I was enlightened by that piece of information. But every new article I read, every new podcast episode I listen to, add a new perspective, sometimes turning completely my previous understanding. Maybe if I read a little more I’ll be able to convey a better message.

Somewhere I read “reading is procrastinating”. If you tend to behave in an insecure way, you need to prepare yourself thoroughly to lower the volume of your inner critic. Just a little bit more. And I realised that was my excuse to put off this task ¹.

So, my first step is to accept that what I write here is an incomplete picture, the one that I’ve formed while reading and studying. And tomorrow, when I’ve read a new book or when I’ve had a new conversation, my thoughts about the subject, my knowledge or my opinion may be different, and this doesn’t have to be an excuse to not share today.

The Why

But first, why do I want to write now? This comes from the usual Sinek’s question “Start with why” [2], making explicit my purpose. And from the revealing question “what’s my hidden agenda?” (ask yourself that question again).

Why do I want to write now? I have two complementary answers to that question. One is that I am asked for written references to the topics I like to speak about. Usually, the ones related to Lean and Agile. We’ve offered courses, sessions and conversations, but there is an audience who prefer to invest their time first, to judge whether investing more time would be useful. And they ask for “reading material”, so some people still prefer reading over watching videos. I’ve been looking for existing material and there are many topics I couldn’t find any we could use.

The second answer is that I want to write now. Oh! That’s not a good motivation! I know, but I feel compelled to put into words what I’ve been learning and share it with whoever wants to read. I do believe in the written form, taking the effort to decode and process, being able to scan and access only relevant parts. I like the two-dimensions and I prefer the physical form. Adding pictures, taking notes on the side. It helps my memory to remember “that was on the bottom-left part of the page”. Some people may benefit from this.

Sometimes, when I am interviewing people to join Ocado, I ask them what’s their preferred way of learning new things. Some answers are: in-class learning, conferences, on-line courses, from other people, reading articles or books. I am not taking notes of their answers and a work interview context would not be the best set-up for gathering this insight, but I hear a lot about reading (or it’s my bias that only recalls these answers.) I remember my answer when I was asked this question in my interview for the Catalyst role. I said that my preferred way to learn is to teach: making the effort to share what I think I’ve learnt. Do I see writing as a way to learn myself?

The written form is accused in Phaedrus. Plato suggests that the use of written words will make people more forgetful, as they will rely on what’s written instead of making an effort to use their memory. He adds that whoever reads something written may think they’ve learnt something, but they cannot ask questions. I agree that I prefer a conversation and discuss our ideas, so that’s something we can do if you want to.

I may be wrong and mine may not be the best reason, but I want to write. I am fortunate I like reading and I hope that by sharing by thoughts some people may be able to add new perspectives to theirs.

The What

I’ve mentioned above Lean and Agile as one topic I will write about but it’s not the only one. From Engineering Practices and studying productivity there are many other topics that emerge and I would like to write about them.

When I was thinking about the components of productivity I created a mind map with the related topics. I realised that there where many contributing factors to productivity. In the first level, I wrote: organisational structure, leadership, culture, methods and technology. I realised that there were many layers, different heights I could observe the problem for: the line of code, the pipelines that build it, the individual that thinks about it, the team that discusses the options, the department that sets collaboration standards, … After adding these elements to my map I realised there were many things inside. Trying to explore the individual I could think about creativity, time management, focus, communication, coaching, mindset or learning.

I like to think about my knowledge as a big hall full of doors. Some doors are open and clear, and others have a clear name on them and they are closed. The ones that are open are the ones I’ve studied, the ones I’ve explored. The ones that are closed with a label on them are the things I know I don’t know, and I may be interested in the future to explore. The hall is big and the light is dim. Sometimes new doors appear I was not aware of, and some doors disappear if I am not interested. I am sure there are many things I don’t know I don’t know, in pure Rumsfeldian knowledge ². Every time I open a door I discover a new hall, full of new doors. There are a few paths I’ve explored in that labyrinth and I’ve found a few connections that I think are worth sharing.

I will try to traverse doors that started in the path labelled “productivity”.

The other questions

I already asked for the Why and the What and many other questions come to my mind, as usual.

• Who else is going to be writing here?
• Who is really the target?
• How often do I intend to write? And to publish?
• What should be the format? Technically and content-wise. Blog, micro-content, article, …? Instructional or experience-oriented?
• What should be the language to use?
• How will I know this effort has been effective?

I don’t have a clear answer for many of these questions. In some cases I have an intuition to validate, but not in all cases.

It is about learning

Learning may happen by chance, just by being exposed to new knowledge, or it may happen by a deliberate effort. That effort takes curiosity, but also humility and courage to recognise that you don’t know. We can be blind by hubris, or just by pure Dunning-Kruger effect ³. As Edgar Schein suggests [4], it takes an attitude of humility to learn from relationships.

Learning is not downloading knowledge into your brain like in Matrix. It takes effort, and sometimes time to digest, even practice.

Humbly proud

I decided to use this title to reconcile with Ocado values. I love We are in it together and We can be even better but I felt that We are proud of what we do was in direct opposition to one of my personal values, Humility. When I explained We are proud of what we do to new joiners I used to say “you should read it as we want to be proud of what we do”, because that way the value shapes your future behaviour and is not a source of complacency.

Now, I have realised that I was fighting a false dichotomy because pride and humility do not have to be in direct opposition if you take an integrative thinking approach [5]. I still struggle a little bit with pride but now I can see its value and I am comfortable to write that, sometimes, I feel humbly proud.

Off we go

I may not be the best prepared to write. I may not have interesting things for you, but sometimes you have to find your public, and you cannot please everyone. I am grateful you made it until here and I would like to offer good reading time for you. I am sure it’s going to be for the good of both. Bear in mind I consider we both join this trip from ignorance.

Toni Tassani — 14 March 2022

This article was originally published on 8 February 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.