Yesterday I cam across the following cool presentation tool prezi and decided to give it a try. Here’s the result (toggle full screen for better view):
After this toying around I am definitely going to use this tool more often. Not only for some presentation, but probably also for creating one or more mind maps.
At my work we are trying to keep people aware of agile practices. During an agile course I learned that we use practices, because we value something. (And principles can be regarded as a rule or code of conduct.)
To aid in the quest of boosting agile practices, I made the following A3-printable versions of the agile values and principles. As a bonus I added the manifesto for software craftsmanship, because I personally value it’s statement.
They are here for you, so you can also stick them on the wall of your office as a subtle reminder.
As
someone eager to learn, I constantly feed my craving for information. On this quest for information, I encountered a lot of valuable ideas packetized in anecdotes. The clues of these anecdotes sometimes seem silly or obvious, but they have superpowers. First they are true and second they seem to stick. At appropriate occasions, I have found myself telling them to team members. We smile about them, but after that we regularly keep refering to them. Especially when we need a reminder of the pitfalls or our daily work. You will find these anecdotes appearing on my blog, starting with the following.
Imagine yourself walking through the woods on a bright, sunny day. Down the path you see a lumberjack sawing down a tree. The man is working very hard, moving his saw back and forth at a high pace. As you approach, you notice that he is not progressing very fast. On the contrary, when you get even closer, you notice the cut he is making is not getting deeper at all. This guy’s saw must be blunt!
Nice as you are, you decide to give the man some free advice: “Hello mister lumberjack! I have been looking at your hard labor and noticed the cut you are making is not getting deeper. It looks like your saw is blunt and you might want to consider sharpening it.”
The man shortly raises his head and replies: “That sounds like an interesting idea. But I don’t have time to sharpen my saw. I really need to saw down some more trees.”
That’s it, the punch line you can use to remind eachother: Take time to sharpen your saw. When working constantly at a high pace, you might find yourself in the same situation as this poor lumberjack. Being extremely busy, working very hard, but making no progress.
Here are some examples of opportunities that might slip by:
(Note the wish, excuse-for-not-doing-it pattern.)
The story about the lumberjack tells us to take time to learn, reflect and improve. By taking time to do this you will make progress faster. During my work I noticed that saw sharpening can be done in different ways and by different means.
Also teams can benefit by taking time for sharpening their saw. One of the best ways I found is reflecting on what you’re doing. Take time to shortly discus how a meeting, brainstorm, pair programming session went. Look back on iterations or longer periods together with customer. (e.g. using retrospectives)
After writing this post, I shortly googled for similar stories. I found that the source of this anecdote is Steve Corey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. This book has been put on my list of books I want to read.
Here’s a post on mind mapping. A few months ago, I pulled this undervalued tool from the bottom of my toolbox and it has proven it´s use.
About five years ago, while I was still studying, I learned about mind mapping. A guy named Jan-Willem van den Brandhof, the owner of brainstudio and writer of this interesting book, gave a workshop on how to use your brain more effectively. I learned that mind mapping is a technique for capturing information. Originally invented by Tony Buzan. By stimulating both sides of your brain, mind mapping helps you to remember better.
During the workshop, these ‘rules’ of mind mapping were teached:
In a mind map these rules might look like the following image:
Jennifer Goddard's map on Mind Map Laws
One thing I could not find on the internet or in the book is the addition of the date and your authograph to your map. I liked this subtle twist, because it makes your map a personal piece of art.
During the workshop mindmapping fascinated me, but I concluded it was not of practical use to me and continued studying algorithms and data structures.
A few months ago I started mindmapping to create meeting minutes. Why? I can’t remember. What happend? I found out I could capture meetings better, while stil participating in the conversation. Second, I remembered more of what was said during the meeting. As it proved it’s worth, I started using mind maps for other purposes. Such as:
The maps helped me in capturing my thoughts during these brainstorms. I also found that mind maps help me ‘steer’ my thoughts. Going up or down a branch helps keeping focus or switching to a slightly different context.
For those of you who want to try mind mapping, you only need the following tools:
well known pencils from stabilo
For those in search of software: xmind and mindmanager are two. I use xmind to capture some (non-readable) mindmaps for distribution and it works quite intuitive. But, I would not recommend using the computer while brainstorming, nothing beats ‘going analog’.
While writing this post, I looked back at what I remembered about mind mapping and remarkably it was almost everything. I started using the technique right out of the box. At first I used one color, mainly out of convenience. But I am introducing multicolor now. There is one thing I do ‘wrong’. I am not putting words on the lines. Somehow I created a method where I draw roots ending up in words, which again spawn roots. This has worked for me and I concluded it is what makes those maps unique.
My bag now has as set of stabilo´s and whenever a suitable moment occurs I start mindmapping. The next map, I will try the official way to get a feel of the difference. Another thing I would like to explore is using mind maps during team retrospectives. During the retrospective, different maps with specific topics are passed through to team members and people add their thoughts to eachother’s maps.
