Steve Freeman

I was one of a group of Agile practitioners who attended a recent course on the Cynefin approach to organisational complexity. Of course, I should have known that Krazy Kat said it first in 1918.

© King Features Syndicate

Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki discuss “Blink” and “The Wisdom of Crowds”.

Via Ross Mayfield

I finally got around to reading Norm Kerth’s Project Retrospectives. To me the most important insight in the book is his underlying assumption that people and teams need maintenance at least as much as the product they’re building.

Reading his chapter on Post-mortems (projects that really have failed), I was struck by his recognition of the […]

Roy Disney speaking to Disney Shareholders on 3rd March 2004 and quoted here
shows that he understands the reality of inellectual work. I’ve worked at too many places that feel like this, and too few that don’t.

Some managemers seem to think that using bean bags in your office space will make their people more creative and inventive. I just heard a great story, at one level of indirection, from one of the original Smalltalk crew at Xerox PARC – the archetypal bean bag institution.

It seems that they introduced bean bags […]

I’ve just finished an excellent little book on the Leo, the first business computer in the world. What does it teach us? That we’ve have known the right way to get things built since the earliest days of the computer, because after all it’s about people not hardware, but precious few organisations seem to be able to do this. That customers who want cheap, effective solutions have to have internal staff who know what they’re doing, otherwise they’ll spend a lot of money on some Magic Solution. Something to remember in these days of oursourcing.