Captain's Log | Thursday, April 15, 2010

In plain English

Since my oldest son could speak we're having these funny conversations. I truly enjoy explaining him stuff but what is so remarkable and I catch myself doing it all the time is I explain things in a very different manner than I would explain something to my wife or friends. How's that you ask?

First, people tend to get nervous when explaining something, mostly due to our educational system that has learned us that failing is not an option, you fail, you get punished with bad grades and than you probably get punished by your parents... it's a nightmare!

Than because failure is not an option we tend to bluff that way we hope they other one thinks you are that much smarter than you are and they what you are saying must be write, remember those professor who only used words you had to lookup in a dictionary?

So what happens when we talk to our kids? None of the above rules count!
The moment we talk to our kids our primal instinct takes over, we protect them, we guide them, we'll do anything what is needed to help them 'survive'.

So how do you teach him how an apple looks like? Right, you just show him a real or a picture of an apple! That did not feel strange did it? But what happens when your boss asks you for a status report? You go crazy, probably open up powerpoint start making pointless slides, you joggle a bit with the numbers because it's your neck that...

Also check out this blog post I made comparing explaining some aspects of Scrum versus teaching a kid what an apple is. Something I quickly drew up today... just for fun. Let me know if you like it.


Live Streaming

Francesco Masia - who was also one of the speakers at AATD - informed about UStream.tv as an out-of-the-box solution for live streaming events, definitely going to have a look at it.


Lean & Kanban 2010 | Speakers

Still no luck on getting mister Goldratt himself. Should anyone knows him personally, let me know otherwise this will be a dead end road.

It will be hard to get Jeff Patton in, he was very enthusiastic about our Lean & Kanban 2010 event but it is the same date as his daughter her birthday. First things first, we understand.

I also tried to get in touch with the one and only James Womack. Yeah right, no way this guy will show up in a local event as ours. I received an email back from his secretary or so informing me that he 'only does very big events with impact' :-)

Final, I'm trying to get in touch with people from the university of Brussels and Leuven to see if they are running studies around Lean & Kanban. I'll keep you posted on that one... will take some time. I'm hoping I can find some students who are willing to do a 15 min pitch talk!


Lean & Kanban | Mystery Tickets

For the true fans, those who are mean clean lean machines, who will attend this Lean & Kanban event no matter what's on the program I introduced the Mystery Ticket. This tickets gives you to opportunity to buy a ticket at 50% discount without knowing who is on the program or how it will look. This ticket comes at 325 Eur and sales end the day the call for paper ends, so end of April 2010. Curious to see who the die hard fans are... if we have any in Belgium?

Training | Business Model Innovation

Today I got in touch with the people from IBBT and UNIZO to see if we can work together on promoting the Business Model Innovation workshop with Alex Osterwalder to startups and other companies. Again, conversations will take some time...

Over and out