An Evening with Kanban - GDG Dublin

Few months into the Career Resolutions I set for myself and I'm struggling with 1 in particular and that's going to events.

So it took me until April to go to my first one and I ended up travelling all the way to Dublin with some colleagues to attend an evening with kanban in the Google Dublin offices which was being put on by the Google Developers Group Dublin (god love them they have google+ account as well) and Lean Kanban Inc.

I always find the networking part the hardest at these events. Always have and probably always will. I decided this time I would engage a stranger in conversation so after grabbing a cookie I decided to attempt my icebreaker. "I know we Can Ban, but I think the question is should we because you know censorship" (yes I know, I know it was terrible but I didn't have much time to think of a kanban pun so leave me alone) it was met with confusion and then they just sort of looked away so I scampered back beside my colleagues as a single tear strolled down my cheek. As Drake would say "No new Friends" :( I can't be the only one to struggle with this right?

Next time maybe I'll try and be a grown up and ask how people find using Kanban, I just feel like if you can't accept me at my worst you don't deserve me at my best...

The talkers were from Paddy Power and David Anderson who wrote the book on Kanban, no he actually did. Paddy power told us about their personal journey and an overview of their working process and it was all very inspiring with delivery pipelines and autonomous co-located teams hammering value out left, right and centre.

David Anderson took us on a journey of his own introduction of Kanban in a U.S telecoms company before going over some kanban design patterns that he's seen in the wild. 

The talks were great and they reaffirmed for me the reasons why at NantHealth (formerly NaviNet) we use Kanban. I think every now and again it's good to take that step back from what you do every day to see how other people are evolving their processes and increasing their value add and really trying to get back to brass tacks of why we went on that journey in the first place.

So small social embarrassment aside it was a really worthwhile journey from Belfast and a big thank you to the organizers and presenters for such a slick overview.

Book Review - The Tipping Point

I just finished reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

It's a book that tries to quantify and explain what it takes for an idea or concept to go mainstream or viral. In tone and theme it feels similar to Freakanomics but not as fun. I think this is the loosest book I've read this year which I consider to be career related. I always think it's interesting how some ideas you love don't cross over and other more throw away ones somehow do. I hoped this book would give some insights into how to prepare your ideas or make them more palatable.

Gladwell has a number of concepts he feels explains how ideas move, evolve and take hold and each of those is backed by a case study from the 90's ranging from Airwalk to Hush Puppies and beyond. I'm a little disappointed the 90's examples aren't Sunny Delight and Melissa Joan Hart because to be honest I still can't explain either of those.

The book covers a number of topics like personalities involved in idea's going viral, how to make your message sticky and how context is king. Each time we get a detailed case study and numerous callbacks to earlier ones. It feels like the overall narrative is a little forced. The book offers a lot of insights but I think they are dulled by trying to tie them together into 1 strand.

All in though the book felt long and by the time I got to the part about smoking I was really done in. Even that section has some interesting thoughts and asides but I didn't feel like many of them were actionable. A sense of how these things happened is great but a lot of the time the examples felt so specific that it was hard to pull them into something that is applicable to your day to day challenges in work. The thoughts on making the idea sticky was probably the closest as the maven, salesman and connector thing feels like it's something you either are or aren't.

Would be interested in seeing some of the same analysis put to things like the Ice Bucket Challenge or some modern examples.