One person that has had a great influence on me over the last 10 years or so is Woody Zuill. I’ve learned, benefitted, and become a proponent of many of his ideas; mob programming, no estimates, and his general view on life.
One of the things that Woody once told me stuck with me hard enough to have it as one of my daily reminders. It’s great and will change your outlook on life.
This post is part of a series of blog posts that I’ve written on some images I have a screensaver and what they remind me of. Here are all the posts in my series:
- Kindness is better
- Complex == Bad. Simple == Good
- What would Jesus do?
- (DO(SOMETHING(SMALL(USEFUL(NOW())))))
- Turn up the good - This post
I once asked Woody how they invented Mob programming (now known as Software teaming) and his answer was simple:
We didn’t - we just were very good at doing retrospectives.
We talked about this for a while and I then blurted out Ah, you did more of the good and less of the bad. His answer surprised me, actually, he interrupted me mid-sentence and went:
No. We only did more of the good. We didn’t care much about the bad.
This is profound. They focused on the Good (tm) and just did more of it. They Turned up the Good The bad would solve itself or be diminished in the light of the more goodness that was created.
I’ve found this a very useful and positive outlook on life that I think would change a lot of otherwise boring meetings and work.
- Imagine a retrospective where you only try to ensure that the good things that happened last
{time period}happens again and again - Imagine a brainstorming session where you together make the suggestions better by improving them instead of shooting them down with all the things that might not work
- Imagine a plan that focuses on making a pathway for great things to happen instead of focusing on all the bad things that might happen.
Conclusion
At this point, a few negative people realists might be worried that we would never focus on the bad things. Well, I’m not very old but in my life I’ve noticed that bad things that happen tend to show themselves, steal our time, and focus all by themselves. We don’t need to help them.
Instead - Turn up the Good.
Here’s the picture that I’m using for this screensaver.
