Work Different

(Update: 10/17/2019)

After a two-year hiatus, I’m back at this blog. I’m now running my own business, A Faster Horse, with four partners. Our business brings the discipline of UX to what we might think is the vapor of brand. We think about the way people interact with companies and how that affects what the brand means and how that meaning provides value to those who engage with it through purchase and use. We have had our first

(Update: 1/11/2017).

This blog primarily exists for me to take notes at conferences that include my own musings and share them out.

Since I first started this blog a good while back, a lot has happened. So while this is supposed to be about this blog, here’s a bit more about me. I’ve transformed as completely as I can (considering context) to a so-called “agilist.” I’ve run many successful agile experiments in non-agile and even non-software organizations. With amazing luck, I had the chance to study with Jeff Patton, Lyssa Adkins, Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland, Luke Hohman, and survive a few dinners with Alistair Cockburn. I’ve met and conversed with amazing thinkers like Tobias Mayer and the late David Hussman. I also have had the opportunity to be one of the co-organizers of the NYC Scrum User Group meet-up, thanks to the generosity of Rob Purdie.

I’m currently helping with communications about “agile” in the context of my current job, helping companies communicate internally and externally in a way that engages and stays true to an agile vision.
I’ve presented at several of the NYC Scrum User Group Meet-ups and conferences.

(Update: 4/7/2011).

The reason I started Work Different was for me to think through workflow and issues I encounter as a manager heading a moderate-sized department of project managers.  In researching and writing blog entries, I am finding myself learning much more and forcing myself to structure my own thinking in a much more disciplined way. I’ve steered towards Agile a lot as of this writing as it is a new area of exploration for me and for my team.  This doesn’t necessarily mean this is another Agile blog.  It’s more that by exposing my thinking to the world in a blog format, I’m forced to question my own assumptions, to look for back-up for my hypotheses and to, hopefully, encounter peer review or, if I’m lucky, review from masters.

I very sloppily moved this blog from Tumblr over to WordPress. I quite like Tumblr, but it feels to me “too light” at this point. I’m starting to hope for some mild amount of peer review and you can only get that if you enable comments. I may be hoping for too much. Who has time to read? Who even feels like reading? Instead there’s the internet with all these links to links to links to explore and enjoy, without lingering too long. An endless spiral of the imagination, of images and voices.

As a result, a lot of the post dates before February, 2011 may be random, and more a bit of me trying to put things in order.

I explain the reason I used the title “Twingle” here. For the moment that I’m writing this page, I’ve sidetracked off on Fractals a bit. So you’ll see that here as well.

In the end, the main reason for this blog to exist is for me to think through how to work. So it actually doesn’t really matter if no one ever reads it (although very nice-to-have, to put it in software-like terms). Even if I’m not peer-reviewed here, inevitably I will get peer-reviewed by just being in the world. Although, might be useful to have some small amount of a feedback loop on these particular thoughts, organized within this blog.

Wish me luck. 🙂