Agile Learning Quotes

At least once every human should have to run for his life, to teach him that milk does not come from supermarkets, that safety does not come from policemen, that 'news' is not something that happens to other people. He might learn how his ancestors lived and that he himself is no different--in the crunch his life depends on his agility, alertness, and personal resourcefulness.

Clean code is not written by following a set of rules. You don’t become a software craftsman by learning a list of heuristics. Professionalism and craftsmanship come from values that drive disciplines.

Innovation is a learned organizational capability. You must train people how to innovate and navigate organizational barriers that kill off good ideas before they can be tested.

There are two parts to learning craftsmanship: knowledge and work. You must gain the knowledge of principles, patterns, practices, and heuristics that a craftsman knows, and you must also grind that knowledge into your fingers, eyes, and gut by working hard and practicing.

If you wait for the mango fruits to fall, you'd be wasting your time while others are learning how to climb the tree

This need for humans to enhance their capabilities to become AAA is relevant in the context of machines learning faster, with increasingly higher-level human functions.

Learning agility means to learn, de-learn, and relearn all the times.

I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow-creatures were, high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these acquisitions; but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profit of the chosen few. And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant; but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endowed with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they, and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded their's. When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?

In looking for the right places to make these tiny changes, there are three broad areas of opportunity. You can tweak your beliefs—or what psychologists call your mindset; you can tweak your motivations; and you can tweak your habits. When we learn how to make small changes in each of these areas, we set ourselves up to make profound, lasting change over the course of our lives.

What is it that constitutes virtue, Mrs. Graham? Is it the circumstance of being able and willing to resist temptation; or that of having no temptations to resist? - Is he a strong man that overcomes great obstacles and performs surprising achievements, though by dint of great muscular exertion, and at the risk of some subsequent fatigue, or he that sits in his chair all day, with nothing to do more laborious than stirring the fire, and carrying his food to his mouth? If you would have your son to walk honourably through the world, you must not attempt to clear the stones from his path, but teach him to walk firmly over them - not insist upon leading him by the hand, but let him learn to go alone.' 'I will lead him by the hand, Mr. Markham, till he has strength to go alone; and I will clear as many stones from his path as I can, and teach him to avoid the rest - or walk firmly over them, as you say; - for when I have done my utmost, in the way of clearance, there will still be plenty left to exercise all the agility, steadiness, and circumspection he will ever have. - It is all very well to talk about noble resistance, and trials of virtue; but for fifty - or five hundred men that have yielded to temptation, show me one that has had virtue to resist. And why should I take it for granted that my son will be one in a thousand? - and not rather prepare for the worst, and suppose he will be like his - like the rest of mankind, unless I take care to prevent it?

An adult female orang-utan cannot defeat an adult male spotted hyena. That is the plain empirical truth. Let it become known among zoologists. Had Orange Juice been a male, had she loomed as large on the scales as she did in my heart, it might have been another matter. But portly and overfed though she was from living in the comfort of a zoo, even so she tipped the scales at barely 110 pounds. Female orang-utans are half the size of males. But it is not simply a question of weight and brute strength. Orange Juice was far from defenseless. What it comes down to is attitude and knowledge. What does a fruit eater know about killing? Where would it learn where to bite, how hard, for how long? An orang-utan may be taller, may have very strong and agile arms and long canines, but if it does not know how to use these as weapons, they are of little use. The hyena, with only its jaws, will overcome the ape because it knows what it wants and how to get it.

Then I said to myself, "If the centuries are going by, mine will come too, and will pass, and after a time the last century of all will come, and then I shall understand." And I fixed my eyes on the ages that were coming and passing on; now I was calm and resolute, maybe even happy. Each age brought its share of light and shade, of apathy and struggle, of truth and error, and its parade of systems, of new ideas, of new illusions; in each of them the verdure of spring burst forth, grew yellow with age, and then, young once more, burst forth again. While life thus moved with the regularity of a calendar, history and civilization developed; and man, at first naked and unarmed, clothed and armed himself, built hut and palace, villages and hundred-gated Thebes, created science that scrutinizes and art that elevates, made himself an orator, a mechanic, a philosopher, ran all over the face of the globe, went down into the earth and up to the clouds, performing the mysterious work through which he satisfied the necessities of life and tried to forget his loneliness. My tired eyes finally saw the present age go by end, after it, future ages. The present age, as it approached, was agile, skillful, vibrant, proud, a little verbose, audacious, learned, but in the end it was as miserable as the earlier ones. And so it passed, and so passed the others, with the same speed and monotony.

Free human dialogue, wandering wherever the agility of the mind allows, lies at the heart of education. If teachers do not have the time, the incentive, or the wit to produce that; if students are too demoralized, bored, or distracted to muster the attention their teachers need of them, then THAT is the educational problem which has to be solved. . . That problem . . . is metaphysical in nature, not technical

You don’t need to be rescued or saved. You just need spaces that allow you to expand and rebuild.

GET OFF the paved path. It’s way too BASIC for you. There’s AIR to BREATHE. Oceans to FLOAT in. Dances to be DANCED. Songs to SING. Splendor to BEHOLD. Stop WAITING for PERMISSION.

A programmable mind embraces mental agility, to practice “de-learning” and “relearning” all the time.

Resistance to change should be a thing of the past if we could develop growth mindsets and create organizations with growth cultures.

These comments are so noisy that we learn to ignore them. As we read through code, our eyes simply skip over them. Eventually the comments begin to lie as the code around them changes.

At least once every human should have to run for his life, to teach him that milk does not come from supermarkets, that safety does not come from policemen, that “news” is not something that happens to other people. He might learn how his ancestors lived and that he himself is no different—in the crunch his life depends on his agility, alertness, and personal resourcefulness.

Being real is the power skill of the century, but we’re taught to be otherwise in the places that should hold it most sacred: our families, schools, workplaces, communities, houses of worship, and governments.

Stop searching for wizards and wands. Don’t buy into the belief that you don’t have the brains, heart, and courage to make it. Link arms with your fellow travelers and never let go. Hold each other up so that you can see your own magic.

Emotional agility means being aware and accepting of all your emotions, even learning from the most difficult ones. It also means getting beyond conditioned or preprogrammed cognitive and emotional responses (your hooks) to live in the moment with a clear reading of present circumstances, respond appropriately, and then act in alignment with your deepest values.

It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carriers of heredity. They are active during life;

It’s okay to be messy. Like sunflowers, galaxies, and fingerprints, your life is an intricately designed spiral. Your wrinkles, bumps, and bruises show the world you are a force of nature. Forget linear. When you embrace chaos, it brings its own kind of order.

Stop letting people shove you into the binary. There’s not enough room for your soul to fit into the narrow box being forced upon you.

Stop trying to bend your mind around someone else’s organizing framework.

When we continuously snuggle up to antiquated ideas, we shut our eyes against the light of our potential.

Is the enterprise agile (able to react quickly), Lean (efficient) and adaptive (intelligent, proactive and change oriented)?

Learning agility is the willingness and ability to learn, de-learn, and relearn. Limitations on learning are barriers invented by humans.

Bad design is the default mode, since it takes the least effort to create.

Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

The Agile Project Management principles and framework encourage learning and adapting as an integral part of delivering value to customers.

when agile projects fail, it’s often because of cultural and philosophical differences between waterfall and agile methodologies.

A retrospective’s huge potential for learning should not be off-limits to any team member.

You can only fail better only if you learn from failures. And then failing is something that prompts you to move ahead.

Perhaps the most important problem-solving skill that I have learned and practiced over the years is mental agility.

Good agile project managers and teams don’t focus on mistakes — or on who did them, or on how many times they were done.

QUESTION: What is the best way for a person to learn Chinese gung fu? BRUCE LEE: By being himself. The main thing is teaching a man to do his thing, to just be himself. The individual is more important than the style. If a person is awkward, he should not try to be agile. I’m against trying to impose a style on a man. This is an art, an expression of a man’s own self.

Stay woke. Jump out of bed, even if it makes you dizzy. Listen to your voice, even if it startles you. Breathe in the smelling salt, even if it stings you. Stare into the light of the reality before you, even if it burns. If you get weary, ask for help—whatever it takes to keep your eyes open. Bask in the glow of conscious living. You are awake. This is when change happens.

In the art of love,” she said thoughtfully, “you are the best I’ve ever seen. You are stronger than others, more agile, more willing. Well have you learned my art, Siddhartha. Some day, when I am older, I wish to bear your child. And yet all this time, beloved, you have remained a Samana. Even now you do not love me; you love no one. Is it not so?” “It may be so,” Siddhartha said wearily. “I am like you. You, too, do not love—how else could you practice love as an art? Perhaps people of our sort are incapable of love. The child people can love; that is their secret.

Your first investment should be in yourself. Learn new skills. The market can go up or down but you’ll never lose your skills. This is more true today than ever before. Diversify your skills.

An awakened mind and heart will serve you well. Rigidity stalls upward progress. Be as expansive as you can. Even when you think you’ve reached your limit, there’s more to unlearn and relearn.

stress can be a real monster you have to vanquish from your team. And one of the main ways to do this is by ensuring that you plan your project in a very sustainable way, from the very beginning.

It is a state of mind, a learning of the oneness of things, an appreciation for fundamental insights known in Eastern philosophy and religion as simply the Way [or Tao]. For Boyd, the Way is not an end but a process, a journey…The connections, the insights that flow from examining the world in different ways, from different perspectives, from routinely examining the opposite proposition, were what were important. The key is mental agility

So, why do we do development work in these short cycles? To learn. Experience is the best teacher, and the scrum cycle is designed to provide you with multiple opportunities to receive feedback—from customers, from the team, from the market—and to learn from it.

Your goal is to build the kind of environment and work atmosphere that will make people actually want to work on their own, without feeling the threat of punishment if they have a bad day and without feeling constantly pressured by the stressed expressions of their bosses.

One reason that it’s difficult to understand is that twentieth-century managers had learned to parrot phrases like “The customer is number one!” while continuing to run the organization as an internally focused, top-down bureaucracy interested in delivering value to shareholders.

Implicit in the notion of such education as it is practiced in the United States is the concept of breadth. You concentrate in one field, but you get exposure to a range of others. You don’t just learn to think; you learn that there are different ways to think. You study human behavior in psychology, and then you study it in literature. You see what philosophy means by reality, and then you see what math or physics does. Your mind becomes more agile and resourceful, as well as more skeptical and rigorous. And most important of all, you learn to educate yourself.

Scrum is about whole people, not about skills. Scrum is not I, but We. It is about sharing, learning, continuous improvement, vibrant interaction, passionate collaboration, and personal growth. Scrum is about tribes, it is about building community. Each tribal member needs a sense of belonging, a personal quest.

Learning to write clean code is hard work. It requires more than just the knowledge of principles and patterns. You must sweat over it. You must practice it yourself, and watch yourself fail. You must watch others practice it and fail. You must see them stumble and retrace their steps. You must see them agonize over decisions and see the price they pay for making those decisions the wrong way.

I made a lot of mistakes along the way and wish I had access to the information in this book back then. Common traps were stepped in—like trying a top-down mandate to adopt Agile, thinking it was one size fits all, not focusing on measurement (or the right things to measure), leadership behavior not changing, and treating the transformation like a program instead of creating a learning organization (never done).

Sprint starts, sprint ends, and a lot gets changed in between! Once the sprint is over, you may not realize but one thing is for sure... You are not the same person who initiated last sprint, you grow with every sprint and that's what Agility is all about....So, not a good idea to count in years, the age of Agilist...now you know what to count!, didn't you? By the way, an Agilist never gets old, he just becomes more Agile!

I’d gone to an outdoor store in Minneapolis called REI about a dozen times over the previous months to purchase a good portion of these items. Seldom was this a straightforward affair. To buy even a water bottle without first thoroughly considering the latest water bottle technology was folly, I quickly learned. There were the pros and cons of various materials to take into account, not to mention the research that had been done regarding design. And this was only the smallest, least complex of the purchases I had to make. The rest of the gear I would need was ever more complex, I realized after consulting with the men and women of REI, who inquired hopefully if they could help me whenever they spotted me before displays of ultralight stoves or strolling among the tents. These employees ranged in age and manner and area of wilderness adventure proclivity, but what they had in common was that every last one of them could talk about gear, with interest and nuance, for a length of time that was so dumbfounding that I was ultimately bedazzled by it. They cared if my sleeping bag had snag-free zipper guards and a face muff that allowed the hood to be cinched snug without obstructing my breathing. They took pleasure in the fact that my water purifier had a pleated glass-fiber element for increased surface area. And their knowledge had a way of rubbing off on me. By the time I made the decision about which backpack to purchase—a top-of-the-line Gregory hybrid external frame that claimed to have the balance and agility of an internal—I felt as if I’d become a backpacking expert.

That is what I want our young nascent readers to become: expert, flexible code switchers -- between print and digital mediums now and later between and among the multiple future communication mediums....I conceptualize the initial development of learning to think in each medium as largely separated into distinct domains in the first school years, until a point in time when the particular characteristics of the two mediums are each well developed and internalized. That is an essential point. I want the child to have parallel levels of fluency, if you will, in each medium, just as if he or she were similarly fluent in speaking Spanish and English. In this way the uniqueness of the cognitive processes honed by each medium would be there from the start.

You are the third bride wed for peace," Cymbra said with a smile. "And to be frank, it has not been an easy road for the two of us who went before. Yet knowing what we do now, neither Krysta nor I would ever have chosen a different path." "How much choice did you have?" To Rycca's surprise, Cymbra laughed. "In my case, none." She sighed in mocking languor. "I still remember Wolf's deeply romantic proposal. He told me that if I did not wed him, he would kill my brother." "He what?" "Oh,don't worry, he's gotten much better." She laughed again, fondly. "Much, much better.Besides, Dragon is the one who was always good with women." Rycca could not dispute that but neither could she ignore what she had just been told.Shocked, she asked, "What did you do?" "Do? Why,I punched him,of course. What else could I do? He went to our wedding worried that the blow still showed." "You...punched him?" The ethereal beauty beside her had struck the fierce Wolf? "Rycca,dear sister, something you must learn at once.Wolf and Dragon are both wonderful men but they are also overwhelming. It is part of their charm. Nontheless,with them it is always best to be firm. For that matter, the same can be said of my brother, as Krysta learned readily enough." "She and Lord Hawk seem devoted to each other." "As are Wold and I. That doesn't mean one should be a meek little woman rubbing feet." "What a horrible notion! However did you think of it?" "Oh,didn't you know? That's the kind of wife Dragon always said he wanted." Too many more shocks of this sort and she was going to turn to stone right where she stood. "He said that? Whatever could he have been thinking? Any such woman would drive him mad." "Which is more or less what Wolf told him, only he said she would kill him with boredom. No, Dragon needs someone who can match his spirit, which I am now reassured you can do. Come, let us seek out Magda, who will serve us cool milk and cakes and give us a snug place to talk while the men amuse themselves." "Dragon has a sword for his brother." "The Moorish sword? Perfect, they will be occupied for hours.We won't see them again until they are satisfied neither is stronger or more agile than the other.

Sara watched in awe. As agile as the dealers in the club were, she had never seen any of them handle cards with such ease. That, coupled with his extraordinary mind for numbers, would make him an invincible opponent. "Why don't you ever play?" she asked. "I've never seen you in a casual game with Lord Raiford or your other friends. Is it because you know you would always win?" Derek shrugged. "That's one reason," he said without conceit. "The other is that I don't enjoy it." "You don't?" "I never did." "But how can you be so good at something and not enjoy it?" "Now there's a question," he said, and laughed softly, setting aside the cards. Leading her to the hazard table, he took her by the hips and lifted her up. She sat on the edge of the table, her knees pushed apart as he stood between them. Derek leaned forward, his mouth a warm, gentle brand. "It's not like your writing, sweet. When you sit at your desk, you put your heart and mind into your work, and it gives you satisfaction. But cards are just patterns. Once you learn the patterns, it's automatic. You can't enjoy something if it doesn't demand a little of your heart." Sara caressed his black hair. "Do I have a little of your heart?

The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging.5 Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker. Foragers mastered not only the surrounding world of animals, plants and objects, but also the internal world of their own bodies and senses. They listened to the slightest movement in the grass to learn whether a snake might be lurking there. They carefully observed the foliage of trees in order to discover fruits, beehives and bird nests. They moved with a minimum of effort and noise, and knew how to sit, walk and run in the most agile and efficient manner. Varied and constant use of their bodies made them as fit as marathon runners. They had physical dexterity that people today are unable to achieve even after years of practising yoga or t’ai chi.

And so, when I tell stories today about digital transformation and organizational agility and customer centricity, I use a vocabulary that is very consistent and very refined. It is one of the tools I have available to tell my story effectively. I talk about assumptions. I talk about hypotheses. I talk about outcomes as a measure of customer success. I talk about outcomes as a measurable change in customer behavior. I talk about outcomes over outputs, experimentation, continuous learning, and ship, sense, and respond. The more you tell your story, the more you can refine your language into your trademark or brand—what you’re most known for. For example, baseball great Yogi Berra was famous for his Yogi-isms—sayings like “You can observe a lot by watching” and “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” It’s not just a hook or catchphrase, it helps tell the story as well. For Lean Startup, a best-selling book on corporate innovation written by Eric Ries, the words were “build,” “measure,” “learn.” Jeff Patton, a colleague of mine, uses the phrase “the differences that make a difference.” And he talks about bets as a way of testing confidence levels. He’ll ask, “What will you bet me that your idea is good? Will you bet me lunch? A day’s pay? Your 401(k)?” These words are not only their vocabulary. They are their brand. That’s one of the benefits of storytelling and telling those stories continuously. As you refine your language, the people who are beginning to pay attention to you start adopting that language, and then that becomes your thing.

artists and acrobats, the walls were enough to keep most people in. I don’t get super strength or scary points. But speed is my friend, and I caught her flat-footed because she thought one thing was happening when it was really something else. She thought I was running from her—and I was just trying to get up some speed. I ran for the wall. I don’t know what she thought I was doing, but she chased me hard for most of the distance. But as I approached the giant stone wall that surrounded the grounds, she slowed, anticipating that I would be stopped by it. A few months ago, a bunch of the pack had been at Warren’s house watching a Jackie Chan movie—I don’t remember which one because we were having a marathon—and Jackie just ran up a wall like magic. Warren had a wall around his backyard. Someone stopped the movie, and we’d all gone out and tried it. A lot. The werewolves had gotten moderately proficient, but my light weight and speed had made me the grand champion. The trick is to find a corner and have enough speed to make it to the top. Instead of stopping at the wall, I Jackie-Channed it up the stone surfaces and leaped over. I caught the werewolf totally by surprise. I don’t expect Bonarata and she watched old martial arts movies together. It didn’t seem like that kind of relationship. Her pause meant that the wolf, who could have caught me because as agile as I’d learned to be imitating Jackie Chan, going up was still slower than going forward, had missed her chance. I didn’t intend to give her another. I changed to coyote as I came off the top of the wall. I’m not a were-anything. It takes them time to change from human to wolf. I could do it—well, in this case I could do it in the time it took me to drop off the wall. I landed on four feet, running as fast as I could down a narrow road that was walled on both sides. I had no idea where I was, but out was a good direction, and I didn’t hesitate as I headed one way. Nor did I slow

When applied to the prefrontal lobes, TMS has been shown to enhance the speed and agility of cognitive processing. The TMS bursts are like a localized jolt of caffeine, but nobody knows for sure how the magnets actually do their work.” These experiments hint, but by no means prove, that silencing a part of the left frontotemporal region could initiate some enhanced skills. These skills are a far cry from savant abilities, and we should also be careful to point out that other groups have looked into these experiments, and the results have been inconclusive. More experimental work must be done, so it is still too early to render a final judgment one way or the other. TMS probes are the easiest and most convenient instrument to use for this purpose, since they can selectively silence various parts of the brain at will without relying on brain damage and traumatic accidents. But it should also be noted that TMS probes are still crude, silencing millions of neurons at a time. Magnetic fields, unlike electrical probes, are not precise but spread out over several centimeters. We know that the left anterior temporal and orbitofrontal cortices are damaged in savants and likely responsible, at least in some part, for their unique abilities, but perhaps the specific area that must be dampened is an even smaller subregion. So each jolt of TMS might inadvertently deactivate some of the areas that need to remain intact in order to produce savantlike skills. In the future, with TMS probes we might be able to narrow down the region of the brain involved with eliciting savant skills. Once this region is identified, the next step would be to use highly accurate electrical probes, like those used in deep brain stimulation, to dampen these areas even more precisely. Then, with the push of a button, it might be possible to use these probes to silence this tiny portion of the brain in order to bring out savantlike skills. FORGETTING TO FORGET AND PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY Although savant skills may be initiated by some sort of injury to the left brain (leading to right brain compensation), this still does not explain precisely how the right brain can perform these miraculous feats of memory. By what neural mechanism does photographic memory emerge? The answer to this question may determine whether we can become savants. Until recently, it was thought that photographic memory was due to the special ability of certain brains to remember. If so, then it might be difficult for the average person to learn these memory skills, since only exceptional brains are capable of them. But in 2012, a new study showed that precisely the opposite may be true. The key to photographic memory may not be the ability of remarkable brains to learn; on the contrary, it may be their inability to forget. If this is true, then perhaps photographic memory is not such a mysterious thing after all.

Ellen Braun, an accomplished agile manager, noticed that different behaviors emerge over time as telltale signs of a team’s emotional maturity, a key component in their ability to adjust as things happen to them and to get to the tipping point when “an individual’s self interest shifts to alignment with the behaviors that support team achievement” (Braun 2010). It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. —James Thurber Team Dynamics Survey Ellen created a list of survey questions she first used as personal reflection while she observed teams in action. Using these questions the same way, as a pathway to reflection, an agile coach can gain insight into potential team problems or areas for emotional growth. Using them with the team will be more insightful, perhaps as material for a retrospective where the team has the time and space to chew on the ideas that come up. While the team sprints, though, mull them over on your own, and notice what they tell you about team dynamics (Braun 2010). • How much does humor come into day-to-day interaction within the team? • What are the initial behaviors that the team shows in times of difficulty and stress? • How often are contradictory views raised by team members (including junior team members)? • When contradictory views are raised by team members, how often are they fully discussed? • Based on the norms of the team, how often do team members compromise in the course of usual team interactions (when not forced by circumstances)? • To what extent can any team member provide feedback to any other team member (think about negative and positive feedback)? • To what extent does any team member actually provide feedback to any other team member? • How likely would it be that a team member would discuss issues with your performance or behavior with another team member without giving feedback to you directly (triangulating)? • To what extent do you as an individual get support from your team on your personal career goals (such as learning a new skill from a team member)? • How likely would you be to ask team members for help if it required your admission that you were struggling with a work issue? • How likely would you be to share personal information with the team that made you feel vulnerable? • To what extent is the team likely to bring into team discussions an issue that may create conflict or disagreement within the team? • How likely or willing are you to bring into a team discussion an issue that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view? • If you bring an item into a team discussion that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view, how often does the team reach a consensus that takes into consideration all points of view and feels workable to you? • Can you identify an instance in the past two work days when you felt a sense of warmth or inclusion within the context of your team? • Can you identify an instance in the past two days when you felt a sense of disdain or exclusion within the context of your team? • How much does the team make you feel accountable for your work? Mulling over these questions solo or posing them to the team will likely generate a lot of raw material to consider. When you step back from the many answers, perhaps one or two themes jump out at you, signaling the “big things” to address.

Our career mantra should be learn, relearn, repeat.

This cat is missing a leg," he remarked to Beatrix. "Yes, I would have named her Nelson, after the one-armed admiral, but she's female. She belonged to the cheesemaker until her foot was caught in a trap." "Why did you name her Lucky?" Annandale asked. "I hoped it would change her fortunes." "And did it?" "Well, she's sitting in the lap of an earl, isn't she?" Beatrix pointed out, and Annandale laughed outright. He touched the cat's remaining paw. "She is fortunate to have been able to adapt." "She was determined," Beatrix said. "You should have seen the poor thing, not long after the amputation. She kept trying to walk on the missing leg, or jump down from a chair, and she would stumble and lose her balance. But one day, she woke up and seemed to have accepted the fact that the leg was gone for good. And she became nearly as agile as before." She added significantly, "The trick was forgetting about what she had lost... and learning to go on with what she had left." Annandale gave her a fascinated stare, his lips curving. "What a clever young woman you are.

learning

Certified Scrum Developers have demonstrated through a combination of formal training and a technical skills assessment that they have a working understanding of Scrum principles and have learned specialized Agile engineering skills. This 3-5 day course provides hands-on instruction in the agile engineering practices. Engineering practices include agile architecture and design, test first approach, paired programming and behavior driven development.

When new learnings are discovered locally, there must also be some mechanism to enable the rest of the organization to use and benefit from that knowledge.

The true marker of learning is turning up with more questions than answers.

Everything is learning, learning is everything.

Being a puppet is overrated. Cut your strings. We are human beings, not doings. Knowing life is about impact, not performance, is the most badass kind of clarity you can have.

Perfect is annoying, boring, and impossible to sustain. Knowing how to translate conscientiousness into something beyond the fleeting satisfaction of “me” toward a “we” mindset is the best move you can make.

Be fearless with your questions. Don’t be afraid to get a little muddy. Keep your feet nimble and eyes open for new paths and perspectives. Ready yourself to be moved.

You can be all and none of the above all at once. Don’t feel obliged to check off little boxes for the sake of doing so, especially when they do not allow for realization of the beauty of the human spectrum.

Your consciousness will lead you home.

What if the theories in psychology that dominate our mainstream culture are flawed, rather than the people they diagnose? That we close our eyes to modern brain science and global context and pigeonhole human beings as “normal” or “abnormal” is one of the biggest shams of the century.

Our old methods of excavating for problems leaves us with more problems. Everything rides on changing the positions we hold, the questions we ask, and the answers we’re willing to accept. When we only mine for weaknesses, that’s exactly what we’ll find.

If this feedback takes days or weeks to get to them, it is of limited value to the developers’ learning. If

In our highly disjointed world at VeraComm, where functions don’t communicate well and don’t significantly collaborate, we fail to improve as a whole. Everybody seeks opportunities for improvement, but because we’re separated from each other, the best we can do is improve our individual step in the process and no more. We fail to understand that problems at one step can be caused by fundamental issues at another. And with learning cycles as slow as ours–pretty much equal to the frequency of releasing, every eight or ten months–we just can’t learn. Cause and effect are so widely separated from each other on the timeline that we simply cannot connect the dots. •

the Third Way focuses on creating a culture of continual learning and experimentation. These

Feedback loops not only enable quick detection and recovery of problems, they also inform us on how to prevent these problems from occurring again in the future. Doing this increases the quality and safety of our system of work, and creates organizational learning.

The more assumptions we can invalidate, the faster we can find and fix problems, increases our resilience, agility, and ability to learn and innovate.

By seeing problems as they occur and swarming them until effective countermeasures are in place, we continually shorten and amplify our feedback loops, a core tenet of virtually all modern process improvement methodologies. This maximizes the opportunities for our organization to learn and improve.

Learning how to pivot between savvy veteran in some situations to rookie in others gives you the agility to climb new mountains and see new vistas.

high-performing manufacturing operations require and actively promote learning—instead of work being rigidly defined, the system of work is dynamic, with line workers performing experiments in their daily work to generate new improvements, enabled by rigorous standardization of work procedures and documentation of the results.

Having developers share responsibility for the quality of the systems they build not only improves outcomes but also accelerates learning.

Figure 4: Illustration of the T-shaped

Because we care about quality, we even inject faults into our production environment so we can learn how our system fails in a planned manner.

When new learnings are discovered locally, there must also be some mechanism to enable the rest of the organization to use and benefit from that knowledge into explicit, codified knowledge, which becomes someone else's expertise through practice.

By choosing carefully where and how to start, we are able to experiment and learn in areas of our organization that create value without jeopardizing the rest of the organization. By doing this, we build our base of support, earn the right to expand the use of DevOps in our organization, and gain the recognition and gratitude of an ever-larger constituency.

Automated testing helps developers discover their mistakes quickly (usually within minutes), which enables faster fixes as well as genuine learning-learning that is impossible when mistakes are discovered six months later during integration testing, when memories and the link between cause and effect have long faded. Instead of accruing technical debt, problems are fixed as they are found, mobilizing the entire organization if needed, because global goals outweigh local goals.

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

FOREWORD When Commander Perry opened up to the occidental world that shut-tight little island Kingdom, Japan, he did more than merely contact for our manufacturers a people who bought "Nifty Clothes," with two pair of pants. He gave us an insight into a world that was thoroughly organized and civilized long before Columbus discovered West where the East should have been. The Japanese learned much from the so-called civilized world, -but they taught us something we could never have learned from intercourse with any other nation. They gave our governmental forces of law and order a weapon that aided materially in the suppression of disorderly elements throughout our great cities. It took time, of course, to break down the prejudices that our early enforcement officers, in common with our then wild and wooly population, had against anything that was foreign. But when the great police forces of our largest metropolises realized that guns and billies alone would not be proof against big, burly lawbreakers, and that to instil respect in the hearts of "bruisers" they needed something other than armaments—pistols that could not be drawn fast enough,—they then discovered the wonder of Jiu-jitsu. They found that the wily little brown man depended on brain instead of brawn and that he had developed a Science and an Art that utilized another's strength to his own undoing. Strangely enough it was the layman who first appreciated the potential value of Jiu-jitsu. For many years before the Police Forces of our cities put a study of this Science into the training of every rookie policeman, there were physical culture experts in America who advocated the use of it by everyone who had any respect for physical prowess but who found the spirit more willing than the flesh. They showed that it needed no possession of unusual strength to overcome an opponent that depended entirely on his bulk and ferocious appearance to cow the meeker ones of the earth into submission. The Japanese, by the very fact of their small stature, are compelled to place more emphasis on strategy than on force. Thus they have thoroughly developed Jiu-jitsu and there is barely a saffron-hued tot in Japan that doesn't know something about the "Gentle-Art" as it is known. President Masaryk of Czechoslovakia, one of the world's greatest educators, who, together with millions of his enlightened and progressive countrymen, is a firm believer in "a strong mind in a strong body," sought to teach every schoolboy in his country some knowledge of the wisest of all physical sciences. While it does not itself develop and build muscle, it is an invaluable aid to the sensible use of the body. It is a form of wrestling that combines the cunning of the fox with the lithe grace and agility of the panther. It sharpens the brain and quickens the nerve centers. The man or woman who has self-respect must not sit by and permit our people to become a nation of spectators watching athletic specialists perform, while we become obese and ungainly applauders. Jiu-jitsu gives the man, woman and child, denied by nature a great frame, the opportunity to walk without fear, to resist successfully the bullies of their particular world, and the self-confidence which only a "well-armed" athlete can have. By its use, differences in weight, height and reach are practically wiped out, so that he who knows, may smilingly face superior odds and conquer.

The demands of customer discovery require people who are comfortable with change, chaos, and learning from failure and are at ease working in risky, unstable situations without a roadmap. In short, startups should welcome the rare breed generally known as entrepreneurs. They’re open to learning and discovery—highly curious, inquisitive, and creative. They must be eager to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Agile enough to deal with daily change and operating “without a map.” Readily able to wear multiple hats, often on the same day, and comfortable celebrating failure when it leads to learning and iteration.

To learn, dogs need time, patience, change of location, reinforcement, opportunity to make choices, and repetition.

Shaping a behaviour takes a bit more time and skill but ultimately dogs learn behaviours more reliably because they have to figure it out on their own. It is like a game of 20 questions. The dog does something and the handler uses some kind of marker (a sound, light or word) to say “yes that is (or close to) what I want!” The dog then learns to offer more behaviours in an attempt to get a reward. Dogs quickly learn that they can speed up the rate of rewards by repeating the last thing they did when they got rewarded. Shaping eliminates the need to first show the dog the reward because the dog has to initiate something to make the reward appear. This method gives you remarkable results in a short period of time but does require some experience with, and knowledge of, operant conditioning.

If you drill your dog for longer than two or three minutes he will actually stop learning.

Once the dog is happily offering the new behaviour, bit by bit start to raise your criteria for speed. Click only the fast pounce down or the quicker look back at you when you stop moving or the faster sit or the more forceful nose touch. The dog needs to learn to discriminate between the mediocre behaviours and the really great behaviours. This is the stage where you will develop drive and intensity for each behaviour. Do not progress from this stage until you have the drive and intensity you like.

This is what happens when you take a “big through small” approach. There are still dips, but they are shallower and shorter lived. Failing is learning; there will inevitably be setbacks. New skiers fall over. New musicians hit the wrong note and new language learners struggle to find the right word. A willingness to fail fast and often results in learning sooner. There is no such thing as a failed experiment. There is learning.

None of these failures occurred overnight or out of the blue. Quite the opposite. The seeds of failure were taking root for months or years while senior management remained blissfully unaware. In many organizations, like those discussed in this chapter, countless small problems routinely occur, presenting early warning signs that the company's strategy may be falling short and needs to be revisited. Yet these signals are often squandered. Preventing avoidable failure thus starts with encouraging people throughout a company to push back, share data, and actively report on what is really happening in the lab or in the market so as to create a continuous loop of learning and agile execution.

Imagine if Wells Fargo had adopted an agile approach to strategy: the company's top management would then have taken repeated instances of missed targets or false accounts as useful data to help it assess the efficacy of the original cross-selling strategy. This learning would then have triggered much-needed strategic adaptation.

He had learned that it was much less a distraction than a form of connection: of connecting to the best part of himself, and to a discipline that demanded he stay open to every sense, to the nuances of the season and to the instrument of his own body, his own agility or fatigue.