I recently chaired a session on ‘Going from company vision to Actionable Metrics’ at the Stoos Stampede conference in Amsterdam. In that session I tried to show some ideas on making the link from an overall company vision, through different approaches to achieve that vision, to concrete actionable metrics allowing teams within a company to autonomously pursue steps towards making that vision a reality. I’m not sure I succeeded in all of that in the session, so I’m trying again in this post…

Discipline is an interesting subject. One that I find myself regularly talking about. Or discussing about.

In the last year I lost about 20kg of body weight through a combination of diet change and exercise. This apparently give some people the impression that I am very disciplined. I’m not. I do know, however, how to make change easier to absorb. And how to inspect and adapt.

During the Specification by Example training I talked about recently, Gojko Adzic introduced me to Effect Mapping. He’s writing a more extensive booklet on the subject, of which he’s released a beta here. I think this is an excellent tool for exploring goals, opportunities and possible features. It can be used as a tool to generate a backlog of features, as a way to explore possible business hyptheses, and perhaps even as a light-weight way to do strategic management of a company.

On the 24 an 25 of May, my colleague and I organised and attended the Specification By Example course of Gojko Adzic at our company. We both very much appreciated Gojko’s book on the subject, and much of what he says fits very well with the style of dealing with requirements that I’ve used in the past. And takes it that much further.

As a trainer myself, it was very useful for me to see the excellent way Gojko has structured the training. He relies on a heavily participatory style, where the students take a very active roll. He specifically mentioned the book ‘Training from the Back of the Room’ as inspiration for this approach. In our own workshops we also try to keep audience interaction going throughout the day, and find it to be very effective in preventing sleepy students and getting stuck in theory. The reason this was doubly effective in this training is that many of the excercises Gojko gave us were techniques that are also effective for use when doing the things the training is about: facilitating communication on requirements and specifications.

Yesterday, after my brother’s 47th birthday, I was talking with my father. My father is 79, and he has had an interesting professional life. He started out as a catholic priest but, as you could guess from the fact of my existence, at some point figured out that this was not a sustainable career path for him.

While talking, my father touched upon the subject of work, and the importance of working for the right reasons. He discussed people that had found a work/life balance that worked for them, by not focusing on financial rewards, but on the contents of the work, and the need to spend time on their families. Of course he sees that many people, including himself at one point, have manoeuvred themselves in positions where making those choices has become very difficult, if not impossible. Certainly many people now are in positions where two full-time salaries are needed to be able to keep paying the mortgage. But focusing on intrinsic motivation for work is very important for your enjoyment of work, and life.

I’ve noticed that I very regularly get people visiting my blog through a Google search for the term ‘Strategic Inflection Point’. Since that term has some very direct connections to other concepts I’ve been learning about, I thought I’d give some detail on Strategic Inflection Points, and their relation to the Lean Startup ideas of Pivots and Pirate Metrics.

I once reported on a presentation by Mary Poppendieck at the Lean and Kanban conference in Antwerp of 2010, where she mentions Andy Grove’s book ‘Only the paranoid survive’. This 1999 book deals with the way Grove ran Intel, and includes the concept of the Strategic Inflection Point, also described by Grove in his 1998 speech at the Academy of Management.