In our local daily newspaper for September 5th (yes, the actual hold-it-in-your-hand variety), a small article caught my eye. The First Lady of Japan says she has such a busy schedule that sometimes it is up to the prime minister to wash the dishes or take out the garbage.
Recently, I read an interview between Bernie DeKoven (who has aliases as varied as: Major Fun, The Shaman of Play, and more) and Barry Joseph (Associate Director For Digital Learning, Youth Initiatives, at the American Museum of Natural History). While the whole interview is delightful, and I recommend it, I was particularly struck by the game called “The Out Blessing Game” or “Endless Blessings.”
If you’re in a particular Agile crowd, “certification” is a dirty word. On the other hand, the Human Resources/People department in your organization looks for certifications on your resume, asks about them in job interviews, and you may get promoted or better compensated party through the accumulation of certifications. Getting “certified” as a user of a tool, or as a signal of skill acquisition may give you a personal boost as well. So, what’s with the dirty word? What’s not to like about certification?
There’s this thing…as Jim (James Shore) and I have mentioned before, in the early days of Agile we would visit teams and hear, “This is the best job I’ve ever had. I love this work.” People who were doing Agile (usually Extreme Programming) were excited about it, they shared it with others, who did it, and got excited. But at some point, someone shared it with someone who got excited about it and shared it but didn’t DO it, so their sharing lost a bit of fidelity, like a copy of a copy.
This an update for the Agile Fluency Project on Kickstarter. I’m very excited about the project and its implications for team learning and the world of Agility. Since it’s the culmination of our thinking about fluent proficiency and has implications for the Agile community, I’m including it on the FutureWorks blog.