Roasting Marshmallows

The game “Among Us” is all about finding the imposter and throwing it out of the spaceship. When you play as imposter, your job is to sabotage the ship and kill the crew mates. Playing as either role is pretty fun, but it is always a little bit more exciting when you get to play as the imposter.

While being an imposter in a video game is good fun, in real life many people feel like an imposter at their job. They fear that others will find out about them, that they are incompetent, that they achieved their success through sheer luck and that voice in their head saying that one day everyone will find out they are useless.

As consultant being hired for our expertise, we also sometimes experience imposter syndrome. Can we help this client? What our my help isn’t good enough?

Today, we are roasting marshmallows around the campfire, sharing stories of imposter syndrome and how we cope with it.

Way back in episode 13, we discussed mobbing, or ensemble programming, with Woody Zuill. While we think this topic deserves more widespread recognition and adoption, there’s no denying that pair programming is more well known, and is being done more.

Of course, pairing is not limited to just programming. For example, studies have shown that kindergarteners sharing an iPad enables them to learn more and score better on certain tests, most likely due to forcing them to collaborate, which in turn emphasises communication and sharing alternative viewpoints.

Collaboration and communication are the key words here, and increasing that will eventually yield  significant benefits, such as increased quality, widespread knowledge and improved morale. These things will all contribute to a higher productivity.

So today we are discussing these benefits, but also drawbacks, of pairing!

Nowadays, everyone wants to make an impact. Nobody wants to do meaningless work. What it means to make an impact is different for everyone, but it is the driving motivation why people do the work that they do, be it helping senior citizens out of their beds, or maximizing profit for multinationals.

Indeed, some of the low points of my career as a software engineer is being part of a project that ends up in the bin. Sure, sometimes a project might fail, which in itself is ok, but if you spend a lot of time on something that ultimately did not even get a chance to make an impact is demotivating at best. If you base an entire business on something like that, you are in big trouble.

That is why Tim O’Reilly has been urging people to work on stuff that matters for over 10 years now. He talks about working on something that matters more to you than money, creating more value than you capture and taking the long view.

This does not mean everyone should do non-profit work, but it does mean the social value of businesses to be done right.

How can you apply these guidelines to your organization? What does working on stuff that matters mean to us? That is the topic of the show today!

Start ups are usually considered pretty sexy. They bring about cool new apps that your friends insist you just have to get. They disrupt the market with innovative new goods and services. They display their awesome company culture in such a way that working there becomes a goal in itself.

But what about the Business to Business startup? You don't hear a lot about those being the next hottest startup. Maybe not, but, because they cater to the needs of other businesses, they are really good at making money.

Today, we are roasting marshmallows with Alex Cojocaru, one of the co-founders of Licenseware, an open ecosystem of Software Asset Management applications that contains the collective work of thousands of experts, enabling businesses to make the most out of their licenses.

Alex started his career as an Analyst in 2011, and has had various roles with a focus on software asset management, data analytics, and software development.

In 2020 he co-founded licenseware, with the mission of commoditizing software license management.

https://licenseware.io/

Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-cojocaru/

We are, when recording this podcast, in lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The omikron variant is running rampant, so this means most of us are working from the kitchen table, or if you have the room, the home office again.

So, entire teams are working remote again, not physically meeting each other for an extended period of time. How do you make sure everything keeps running smooth? How do you make sure communication, coordination and control do not degrade due to increased distance of the team members?

Luckily, the software engineering industry has had decades of experience working with remote teams: near- and offshoring has been pretty common, and the lessons learnt from that can be applied to working from home.

To help us pin-point the takeaways from these lessons, we are roasting marshmallows with Rini van Solingen, speaker & author on speed and agility of people & organizations. Rini is a professor at Delft University of Technology, and he investigates how to make global teams hyper-productive and how to decrease the impact of distance in global software engineering.

Rini wrote several books, on topics about changing leadership, accelerating organizations, agile transformations and scrum.

Rini's website: https://rinivansolingen.com/

Rini on twitter: @solingen

Rini on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/solingen/

Fear. We all know the feeling from a terrifying experience at some point in our lives. However, 75% of the people get fearful when having to speak in front of a group of people. Even the idea of doing it is sometimes enough for many people to get fearful.

Yes, most of us — even those at the top — struggle with public-speaking anxiety. When people think about what makes them nervous, they usually come up with the same answers:

Some might say the fear will go away as you do more and more talks. This is not always true: our guest today, Thierry de Pauw, has done many talks: about Continuous Delivery, Agile transformations, Trunk based development and so on. However, Thierry has publicly shared about his struggle to start public talks.

Thierry is a Senior IT Engineer at the fintech startup PaxFamilia.

On the side, he founded ThinkingLabs, an advisory firm in the adoption of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

He is an occasional speaker at international conferences about everything Continuous Delivery.

Thierry's website: https://thinkinglabs.io/

Thierry on twitter: @tdpauw

Thierry on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tdpauw/

Most people don’t grow up learning very much about their emotions — what they are, how they work, or how to manage them well.

This means there are a lot of people out there with perfectly normal levels of academic or social intelligence, but surprisingly low emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence means the capacity to reflect on and understand your emotional life.

Because the clearer you can be about your emotions — what they are and how they work — the better you’ll be able to manage the most difficult and painful ones.

Thankfully, we can all improve our emotional intelligence with a little learning and some practice. This is important not just for ourselves, but for our children as well. To help us improve, we have Marc Brackett on the show today.

Marc is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine at Yale University. His most recent book, ‘Permission te Feel’ explores ways for our emotions to help, rather than hinder, our well-being and success at home, in school, at work, and in everyday life.

Marc's website: https://www.marcbrackett.com

Marc on twitter: https://twitter.com/marcbrackett

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Even though the world around us is changing faster and faster, it proves challenging for companies and individuals to adapt to these changes. For these, change sometimes comes much slower and more painful than hoped. Changing, or adapting to change, is not simple on any level. Often, there is no right answer, and responding requires trial and error, learning and unlearning.

Understanding that you don't have to push, prod, persuade or punish people to create change in your organization, our guest today, Esther Derby, offers change by attraction, an approach that is adaptive and responsive and engages people in learning, evolving, and owning the new way.

She is the author of the book "7 Rules for Positive Productive Change: Micro Shifts, Macro Results for Change by Attraction". In it, she presents a set of seven heuristics—guides to problem-solving—that empower people to achieve outcomes within broad constraints using their personal ingenuity and creativity.

You may also know Esther as co-author of Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great.

Esther on twitter: https://twitter.com/estherderby

Esther's website: https://www.estherderby.com

Different problems need different solutions. An approach that aids in decision making is The Cynefin framework, which was created in 1999 by Dave Snowden and was born with principles related to theories of how we perceive things. Cynefin (pronounced “kuh-nev-in”) is a word of Welsh origin that means habitat or place of many belongings.

Cynefin is a model that can be used in different sectors, at different levels in an organization and in different contexts, in fact context is the key word for Cynefin. Its main use is for effective decision making based on the analysis of the context in which we are inserted.

We are roasting marshmallows with Dave Snowden, founder and chief scientific officer of The Cynefin Company, formerly known as Cognitive Edge, a Singapore-based management-consulting firm specializing in complexity and sense-making, to thrive in a complex world.

Dave's specialties include: Sense making, Knowledge Management, Complexity Science applied to organisations and Narrative. Dave is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style, and is a popular and passionate keynote speaker. 

Do awards motivate people? Yes. They motivate people to get rewards. You can pretty much bribe anyone to make them do what you want them to.

Consequently, the quality of the work or the learning suffers for it. This goes for children, students, but also in the work place, where reward structures might be in place that incentivize destructive behavior.

The book "Punished by Rewards" details the trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, grades, praise and other bribes, and we are roasting marshmallows with it's author: Alfie Kohn!

Alfie is an author and lecturer in the areas of education, parenting and human behavior. He is a proponent of progressive education and has offered critiques of many traditional aspects of parenting, managing, and American society more generally, drawing in each case from social science research.