Me and a few colleagues attended yesterday the AgileTalks#2 MeetUp in Bucharest. Below are my insights from this event.
As usually the most interesting part were the free talks during the Open Space in the end.
Photo by Vlad S.
There were 2 presentations:
Cornel Fătulescu from Pentalog talked about his experience as a self-taught manager
Reaching for excessive control as a manager was a bitterly disapointing experience for him.
Finally he ended up in the Agile way of thinking – handing over to the team a lot of responsibilities within a few accepted rules.
He did a nice parallel with his personal life experience – told us how he experimented new approaches with his kids based on Agile principles – including a Kanban board for at-home activities (!)
He noticed that there were not many differences on how to approach a kid than how to approach a member of the team.
Conclusion: Gaining control is not the point – making the team responsible for their own work is the key.
My Insight: Personal life management has similar challenges as people management at work. It’s worth trying and experimenting techniques from both worlds to obtain a desired outcome
Nice discussion during Open Space:
- The way human mind is working usually is counter-intuitive and irational
- The most obvious example is the decision-making under stress.
- It came to discussion the two-systems theory of Kahnemann-Tversky
- The conclusion was that at crucial times it would be better to control our “System 1” (the limbic system) reactions
- There are quite a few people able to achieve such self-control – like those who practice meditation.
The second speaker was Eduard Budacu, PhD Student at ASE.
He talked about how to reach productivity using a technique called “Pomodoro”.
My Insight: the most challenging part of the technique is to get rid of the “INTERNAL (SELF) DISTRACTORS”.
How to achieve that: relaxation techniques, meditation, therapy (“Positive Psychology”)
Nice concepts discussed during Open Space were:
- How Pomodoro technique helps you enter the “State of Flow” – ideal for best productivity
- He does at most 4 “Tomatos” per day – that is chunks of 25 minutes focused work – and is very happy with it. (No need to overcommit yourself!)
- Our personal wellbeing is the most important part. So he experiments with relaxation techniques (relaxation breathe)
- He did a lot of psychological sessions (both individual and group therapy)
- Some Apps to help you for better productivity (unrelated to Pomodoro technique):
++ Remember the Milk
++ Teamviz
++ KanbanFlow
++ Asana
++ Desktime
++ even hardware like: toy-semaphore plugged via USB and configurable
All in all it was a nice experience hosted by Claudia from AgileWorks with quite a crowd of people (about 50 persons – one of the biggest MeetUps so far).
Looking forward to AgileTalks#3 now….
@adysuciu 