I recently read a piece of research titled, ‘Historical Roots of Agile Methods: Where did “Agile Thinking” come from?’, by Noura Abbas, Andrew M Gravell and Gary B Willis – University of Southampton (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/39996418_Historical_Roots_of_Agile_Methods_Where_Did_Agile_Thinking_Come_From)
For anyone interested in agile thinking and methods, and especially for anyone who is not familiar with this thinking, I highly recommend you read this piece of research.
Reading this reminded me of an old thought-for-the-week blog titled ‘Remember Where You Came From’, which I share below.
Agile thinking and methods are one of the biggest movements in software development. Some people will have heard of this recently and some people will have learned to work this way for the past 5-10 years. ‘Agile Thinking’ is now really growing, moving outside of the engineering department and into the front office and day to day life. We now have an industry of Agile Coaches (or Innovation Coaches), teaching us this way of thinking, methodologies and helping us change our habits.
What made me share this piece with you is that I am a big believer in the saying, ‘We all have drank from the wells others have built’. Even though Agile Thinking may be new for many of us, Agile Thinking actually goes back to the 1950’s. Agile Thinking is not a new concept but a concept that has been developed over time, with the building blocks being built over the past 60-70 years.
We all have drunk from wells others have built, reminds me that a majority of my success is due to the effort that others have done in building those wells that I have had the opportunity to drink from and hopefully, helped improve.
If you are interested to see how today’s technological successes, leveraged and learned from technological developments going back to 1843, read the Walter Isaacson’s book – The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
As well, did you know that
– The first iPhone was created in 1998
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfoGear
https://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/03/26/the-first-iphone/
– The first touch screen was created in the late 1960’s
https://www.thoughtco.com/who-invented-touch-screen-technology-1992535
https://thought-for-the-week.com
Remember Where You Came From
We have had several Town Halls lately, which is great to see, as we get to hear of updates, ideas and thoughts from many of our leaders, but there was one recent Town Hall that caught my attention. One of the speakers in the Town Hall spoke about how certain things were not good enough for them and how they set out to change things around. I am a big supporter of change and constant improvement, so it is great that we have people who look to change things around (assuming the change is meant to progress, improve or solve a problem). Credit to the speaker and all who have implemented change, as driving change is not easy.
But why this speaker’s comment (or maybe it was how they presented it) caught my attention is that the speaker did not talk about what others (both internally and externally) have done before them, in order to achieve the change they achieved. My point here is to not forget where you came from and remember that for the most part, we are leveraging from the ideas, accomplishments and failures others have thought about and experienced. At times change will come from connecting dots, ideal timing, luck and building on top of what was built.
I prefer our leaders remembering where they came from
#thoughtfortheweek
thought for the week 