My Alētheia teacher offered a different frame in the middle of a hard week: not yes, not no, just this, whatever is actually facing me. A small distinction on the page, decisive in the body, and it turns out to be what Agile was pointing at all along.
Attention, regulation, and the quality of listening are trainable, and they sit under every hard conversation at work. Where the Agile coach and the contemplative practitioner turned out to be the same person.
The factory GM and Toyota reopened together shows what a healthy operating culture actually asks of people. What the andon cord teaches about safety, stopping the line, and blameless improvement.
In 2017 I asked two people I admire to build a particular kind of machine. Working with Claude grounded in a 400-reference library, I now use something close to what I was asking for.
The practical version: how a handful of us built a sustainable sitting group inside a software company, and why the workplace is a better container for practice than it looks.
Track the unplanned work and the impediments as their own signal, and the system starts telling you where it breaks. The early instinct that later became control charts on two streams.
Delight, value, and doing some good in the world: the frame I still use for products and AI tools alike. The "do good" part has only grown more central as the stakes rise.
A long, close reading of Poppendieck's talk on how plans quietly become the thing we serve instead of the thing we're building. Cost of delay, queues, and the economics underneath the manifesto.
An app to help people document civil-importance events under hostile conditions, built for a Google hackathon. What I'd change today, and what the design got right about trust under adversarial pressure.
The marshmallow challenge is the whole argument for shipping early and often, in eighteen minutes of spaghetti and tape. Prototype, test, and stop mistaking the plan for the product.