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This is a post about software. And it’s about flexibility, adaptability, and world peace.

The Agile 2008 conference is officially over yet I find myself experiencing multiple a series of post-conference sessions, if you will, that have occupied my time while wondering how to report on the impact and import of this event.

I know you’re not all creating software, at least not the kind that is run by microprocessors. Yet hopefully this will be interesting, because geeky topics like algorithms and programs took up such a small part of this conference for me. My revelations attending this computer software conference were about leadership, rhythm, and making the world a better place.

First of all, my first real experience of the conference after seeing multiple people with conference badges come up to each other and hug, was the opening ice-breaker party at the hotel in Toronto. It was packed full of programmers, scientists, and leaders in this small but quickly growing movement in the software industry. And at the event, they had some entertainment that surprised me. There were Tarot readers and handwriting analysts. One of them, Tara Greene , had a microphone attached to a small speaker box to amplify her voice on the small table in the large hotel ballroom full of people chatting so her voice would not run out. Now some scientists and advocates of rationality might not see much value in reading chicken trails or random cards, but I actually found her intuitions about my situation accurate and her advice very helpful in making my experience of the conference successful. If you’ve ever been to a business conference or trade show, you might know how challenging it is to successfully pick and choose from the huge set of opportunities presented at a conference. I was quite grateful. And it also set the tone - there is a different mindset in these innovative thinkers and doers in the Agile software development community.

What does Agile mean? It’s largely about two methodologies that have taken hold, Scrum and eXtreme Programming or XP. Although XP is strictly for writing software, and was my first exposure to Agile, Scrum is about how to organize a team, any team. But this conference was about so much more than these two methodologies

The open, democratic, free, and participation encouraging conference methodology called Open Space was represented. They had a relaxing space that invited smaller conversations where they held the Open Space part of the conference. And I learned that the Agile Alliance conferences, when smaller, were completely run as Open Space. I’ve written about Open Space in other entries like this one. It’s exciting, inviting, and it’s changing the world.

Jim McCarthy delivered a rousing speech at the conference, about the “Core Protocols” he and his wife uncovered through running their team work laboratory. I’ve attended a few of their bootcamps. Though they came out of software and my first event was with programmers, managers, and software authors, we learned what we learned mostly through creating art and performances. It turns out that the architecture of a team and how people work together well can actually be thought of as software. And we can improve it. And it can be fun and deeply self-expressive as are all of the arts. Not just the art of software.

The most inspiring aspect of the conference for me was learning about the book Fearless Change. One of the authors, Linda Rising, gave a few presentations and was one of the Agile 2008 conference organizers. She’s been to one of Jim McCarthy’s software development bootcamps. She and Mary Lynn Manns gave a wonderful interactive workshop to help people introduce new ideas, and because of the conference, they talked about the Agile ideas, but their methods could apply to anything new. It’s about being a leader, even if you don’t hold the official reigns of power. You can make a difference, and so can everyone else. What else could bring about a beautiful enlightened world civilization.

Finally I have to mention something I’ll be doing later this evening. Which is drumming in a full moon drum circle in Missoula. A software developer who facilitates groups in Agile software technology, Eiichi Hayashi, lead a drum circle at Agile 2008. I’d been to a drumming class at JavaOne before the dot com bubble exploded, and found it could be a very valuable team development tool. Eiichi and I drummed together briefly at the closing party for the conference, and it was inspiring to see how music and rhythm can bring people together. How can we make good products without getting aligned. Music and drumming can do it.

Agility in mind, spirit, and mission is all about being able to adapt to the changes in the world and to have access to the gifts available all around us, especially those in our fellow human beings. The computer has evolved at a very rapid pace as have many of our technological advances. What would it mean if the field of “Agile” as they call it in the software industry, were to provide teamwork and organizational advances at a similar pace? Maybe some of our intractable social issues would not be so intractable? Maybe Agility is really just a different word for Love. Maybe it’s time.

Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles wrote a page turner with their book Gung Ho! A book about leadership, the lesson was delivered in the form of a story where a manager is tasked with turning around a failing plant and instead her own ideas of leadership are turned around by a maverick manager of one of the teams at this plant.

It’s a great book. I hope many people read it and take it to heart. It lays a very realistic plan for optimum performance through the honoring of the individual as more than a resource, as people with real lives, concerns, hopes, and dreams. And that when we embrace the full humanity only then will the team come together to provide high performance for the company’s objectives.

There are so many business books on leadership, yet there seems to be such a lack of it most of the time. Perhaps leadership has much more to do with every one of us than it does the people at the “top”.

The World War II term, Gung Ho!, actually came from the Chinese word Gōnghé which is short for a longer phrase meaning “industrial workers cooperative”. It’s interesting that an über-capitalist book would adopt a Chinese Communist term, but perhaps it is indeed only in the collective that we’ll ever get to participate in truly enthusiastic collaborative - and fulfilling - work.

Thank you to Phil Gerbyshak for pointing out this talk by Ben Zander at TED. I don’t know if I can introduce it better than Phil, as Phil saw the full 75 minute lecture live. Ben Zander shows the difference between playing a piece with short phrasing and playing it with the full vision in mind and rocking from one buttocks to another slowly with long phrasing.  Seeing the full vision is the difference between getting distracted with what we’re going to have for lunch and a Nelson Mandela who spends 25 years in prison. Please watch this!

We interrupt this broadcast for something completely silly.

The Missoula BarCamp 2008 approaches in only 8 days.  Saturday April 26, 2008.  The Missoula Area Economic Development Corporation has generously donated their space.  We’ve received support from several other companies and organizations.

Having this conference was to meet a strong desire to participate in such an event.  Coming to the Missoula Web Developers Discussion group meetings once a month has been invigorating and enlivening.  It helps to learn in less formal settings and to enable more easy exchanges.  A BarCamp is an agile method of producing a conference.  It makes it easy to contribute and easy to attend.  It’s kind of a Just In Time method for knowledge transferal.  A computer language compiler converts the program written by the programmer into bytes and bits that can be processed by the hardware of a computer.  Just in Time compilation may seem lazy, just leaving things to the last minute.  But it turns out that leaving things to the last minute has some real benefits.  Because you can optimize based on the circumstances.

This isn’t a general truth.  There are times when thinking things through in advance is a very good idea.  It’s also true that some of the most interesting problems, sometimes called “wicked problems”, are best solved with more agile approaches.  And this way of thinking is solving some of the more difficult engineering and software development problems today and it has also been streamlining product delivery, requiring less warehousing and storage as production lines get closer to producing them upon demand.  It’s amazing the costs when you have to know everything up front.

What does David Allen’s business time management program for “Getting Things Done”, or GTD for short, have to do with an ancient Hawaiian shamanic practice? Perhaps nothing on the surface, but they’ve been running together so seamlessly for me that perhaps this meditation will make sense to others as well.

David Allen’s program can look like a cult for the intensity of his following. His instruction gives great detail about managing our lists of projects and actions and finding a way to get everything out of our head and process all our actionable stuff into a trusted system. He goes to great lengths to describe his personal revelations about how best to manage our Treo’s and our Outlook folders. It can seem very technical. Yet all it’s about is clearing our heads so we can have the mental space to make good decisions in the moment. We need to collect our full inventory of things that need to get done so that our heads can be clear. Clear for what? David Allen says for intuition. But also for inspiration.

You might not know anything about this strangely named Hawaiian healing practice. It’s called Ho’oponopono. The apostrophe is a glottal stop, which means you have a short silence by closing the throat at the point of the apostrophe. I first heard about it from an article read at St. Patrick’s hospital in Missoula at their annual Integrative Healing Conference. The article stated that someone healed an entire ward of criminal psychiatric patients in Hawaii using Ho’oponopono without actually seeing any of the patients. He healed them by reading the profiles and cases statements of the patients and then healing in himself what he found in the patients.

This might seem really far out to some. It struck a chord in me, as I am part Hawaiian. And also the spiritual path I’ve embarked on some time ago had led me to see that we’re all so connected through our common genetic ties, our common cultural ties, the planet, the magnetic fields around it, the sunshine we share, that it does not seem unlikely that thought could have tremendous power. If a thought at the right place and time could either cause us to twitch a finger to launch a destructive missile or a donation on the internet to a charity that saves lives, why couldn’t a thought help heal others.

But where’s the commonality between the GTD practice and Ho’oponopono. When I first heard about the ancient Hawaiian practice, it seemed very mysterious. But after hearing a lecture and workshop from the very healer who healed that entire criminal psych ward in the Hawaiian Islands, some of it seems pretty straight forward. Dr. Len Ihaleakala spoke of the process as “cleaning”. The experiences we have had that require healing are simply lingering thoughts that need to be cleaned up and let go. Some of these lingering thoughts are very ancient. But it’s all of our experiences. And what does GTD help us do but to get things out of our head, get our inboxes to zero, so we can have the “Mind like water” experience that David Allen likes to reference from his Aikido training.

This all helps me remember the healing value of getting the flow in my email inboxes and my desk. Thank you Dr. Iheakala and David Allen. I’m going to Ho’oponopono my inbox a bit right now.

Footprints to rememberance

Originally uploaded by hajush

A small holiday moment is captured here. The wind blowing gently but firmly in the sun descending over the Pacific from our view at Carmel-by-the-sea. The steps ahead, they’ve usually been tread before, and these certainly have. The evidence is plain, if only for a moment. Soon it will be washed clean from the sand. But the footprints in the mind, those take longer to fade, if ever.

This beach brought back memories of decades past, moments fresh and new. I’d come from the east coast to the west, a new job, a new life. All was adventure, so much of the story had yet to unfold. And in the crashing sounds of the surf and the grains of sand underfoot, the moment is washed clean yet again.

Steve Chandler has done a fantastic job in a book he published last year titled “The Story of You (And How to Create a New One)“. I first stumbled on Mr. Chandler in a book store in Palo Alto. Not in the flesh, but in plastic. In an audio book CD set entitled “17 Lies that are Holding You Back and the Truth that Will Set You Free”. It took me a while to listen to it, months in fact. I didn’t expect much. I had a lot of time for a long drive, and it sounded like something that would remind me of things I’d heard and learned before. Instead I was surprised by his direct and simple approach, the depth of his personal sharing, and the freshness and direct applicability of his insights. So I had high hopes when I ordered “The Story of You”.

The basic idea of the book is that our personal stories are our problems. We need to get rid of them, rewrite them, make better ones. Perhaps it really all just comes down to a basic philosophical realization that has yet to be fully comprehended while in reality it is also at the heart of many of the spiritual lessons delivered by the great masters over the millenia. The famous painting by Magritte of a pipe with the words below in French that say “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Or, “This is not a pipe”. Others have expressed this as “The Map is not the Territory.”

Our stories are not who we are. They’re stories. What is amazing is that our stories actually direct much of our experience as well as our actions. So the stories we make up about ourselves actually create our futures. But at the same time, our stories serve a purpose. Often times they make us be the hero in a sad victim story.  If we tell such a sad story over and over, it starts running our lives like a record stuck on the same track.  It just repeats over and over ad nauseum.  I could make up a story about how busy I’ve been and why I haven’t posted. But this post is not a story. It’s great to be alive. It’s great to have the opportunity to share Steve Chandler’s work. He has blessed my life with his writing. May the reader be blessed with stories that bring inspiration and love.

Much has progressed towards holding an “unconference” in Missoula. An Unconference is a self-organizing event where the participants create the agenda in a transparent fashion. The format encourages dynamic content and participation in a way that a closed agenda event can not. The great people at Missoula’s own ModWest have been early supporters of having a BarCamp here. ModWest is an internet and web hosting, one of the top 10 web hosting companies in the world. Right here in our small city of Missoula! The people there started a Web 2.0 social networking site that has been featured at the Wall Street Journal. It’s a way for people to set up fun polls. There is a poll on that site for the theme of the BarCamp. The number one choice fits well with the idea that it be a convergence of art, technology, and community.

On the technical side, I attend the JavaOne conference every year since the year after it started. This month I also went to a new offering, an unconference barcamp like event called JavaOne Camp. This was my very first unconference, and it was facilitated by the wonderful Kaliya Hamlin, also known as the Identity Woman.

Kaliya was kind enough to invite me to attend the Internet Identity Workshop. Since JavaOne Camp had few attendees, I was not able to experience the full beauty of an unconference using the Open Space method until I went to the IIW. It was awesome! All these techies gathered in a circle and then lined up to describe the topics they would discuss and put them on a big sheet that set the agenda for the day. And then people met and talked and wandered between events. This amazing unconference happened with some preparation, but much less than a traditional conference, and the interactions were so much richer than is usually feasible at a more traditional conference where the agenda is hard wired before the event begins.

At the event, Kaliya introduced me to the wonderful Lisa Heft who is an Open Space facilitator and trainer of Open Space facilitators. I was amazed to learn that Open Space has been used in corporate board rooms, technical conferences, intentional and co-housing meetings, between Israeli’s and Palestinians, with United Nations groups, and more.

Having returned from the San Francisco Bay Area and both the JavaOne conference and the Internet Identity Workshop, I was able to do some Drums for Peace last Saturday. The leaders of the excellent peace and justice center in Missoula, the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center, Betsy Mulligan-Dague and Ethel MacDonald both were enthusiastic about holding an unconference in our town. We have the wonderful Missoula Art Museum in our town that Ethel mentioned might be a good space. We’ll see, I joined the MAM last Saturday and they have some very nice community spaces in the museum.

Turning back to the technical field, which is really more my home, there is the Missoula Web Discussion Group which meets once a month. Several members of this group are interested in getting the unconference going. We’ll see where this train goes, but it has been a great ride so far!

Martin Seligman was the president of the American Psychology Association. He’s written a few best sellers, one of which sits next to me as I write this entry. “Authentic Happiness” is the title. The book blew my mind a few times when it addressed a few psychological misconceptions which alone are worth the price of the book. It surprised me to learn that at least according to statistics and surveys, most people are happier than most people think, even people in dire and difficult circumstances. Also, people usually return to their general level of happiness. Tragedies to do strike, but even after great difficulties, people usually return to their happiness setting or pattern of happiness.

The biggest “aha” for me was finding out that the modern and largely American concept of the value of venting emotions is based on a flawed model. The idea is that people hold emotions like liquids in a plastic bag. If the emotion doesn’t get bled out one place, it will come out another. But psychological studies invalidate this. The expressing of emotions actually tends to increase them. So if you express a lot of anger, you just get angrier. If you express a lot of happiness, you get happier. Suppressing anger can be healthy. This is a gross simplification of the results of the study, I recommend looking up the book for a greater understanding of the science behind it. I’m sure there are times when it is healthy to communicate anger, but the clear message I got from the book and which is confirmed by personal experience - it is healthy to hold back angry feelings because they tend to fade. It reminds me of the bible passage, “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.”

Yet with all these benefits and messages, what most inspired me to blog about the book was the scientific implication of the God concept. Seligman relates his own journey through the field very nicely in the first chapter, about how Psychology had been focussed on problems, broken people, on mental illness. Seligman found his mission in life when he faced the facinating topic of learned helplessness and discovered that it challenged the psychological models in use. His breakthrough was realizing that they didn’t have a model of happiness and psychological health.

At the core of psychological health he believes are several virtues that are common to all the main world religions:

• Wisdom and knowledge
• Courage
• Love and humanity
• Justice
• Temperance
• Spirituality and transcendence

Seligman doesn’t philosophize much about God in his book, it’s not a theological treatise. But he does write a little in his final chapter. His ideas aren’t developed, it’s an interesting chapter because of the personal way he relates his thoughts through story, and it’s interesting because it raises questions about God, meaning, and purpose. Having spent time with scientists and engineers most of my life since college, I well know that the God concept itself is very suspect in that arena. Seligman seems intrigued by the idea that it could be valuable again in science.

We can go to the moon, we can split atoms, all based on a greater grasp of the material laws. But how meaningful really is any of that, if life has no meaning to us individually and as a culture. Isn’t it interesting that the core values that make life meaningful are virtues common to the world religions, the very heart of where mankind has encountered a Creator, the Buddha, Enlightenment, or whatever one calls the core origins of our universe?