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Culture Learning Motivation Principles

Fuck the Bread. The bread is over.

HÄNSEL AND GRETEL, BY ALEXANDER ZICK

Please take a couple of minutes and read the fabulous essay Sabrina Orah Mark wrote in her Happily Column. Her Blog focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Within the many things that resonate in her post, one thing struck me most:

It’s about learning. Why are fairytales so important for learning, and why you need to curse “fuck the bread” sooner or later!

Enter Japanese Martian Art – Aikido. Shu-Ha-Ri is a concept describing the steps to mastery. I came across it a couple of years ago, when Alistair Cockburn took away my Scrum blinders.

shu (守)

protect, obey

This is the very first stage of learning, you apply traditional wisdom, you learn fundamentals, techniques, heuristics, proverbs. Think of children baking their first simple cake. Mine was a marble cake (“Marmorkuchen”). You strictly follow the recipe (If you’re not into baking, watch Karate Kid):

  1. Mix 125g of butter until it is creamy.
  2. Add 3 eggs and 120g of sugar. Mix until creamy.
  3. Add 170ml of milk and half a pack of baking soda
  4. Split in two bowls and add cocoa powder into one half
  5. Fill in buttered cake tin and fill with alternating dough
  6. Bake 50mins at 180°C

It fits like a shu (“shoe”). You do exactly as said, you’ll get a consistent result. It’s like a fairy tale. You walk through a dangerous forest, you don’t leave the path, you are ok.

Scrum is another great example for a Shu recipe. You create a backlog, you estimate and prioritize stories, you do sprintplannings, daily standups, reviews, retros. Timeboxed, with the right roles present. If you follow exactly the rules it’s guaranteed that you’ll have a consistent result.

Ok, we’re done with learning! You’ve learnt a technique. Many people stop here. And like in a fairytale they live happy until the end. But, Oh wait!

ha (破) 

detach, digress

In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career.

from Sabrina Orah Mark’s Blog post

No worries. There is more! Sometimes it’s necessary to yell “Fuck the Bread“. And break with the habits. Maybe Hänsel and Gretel walked the forest 100 times. And at some point they dare to take a different path, and guess what – it’s safe as well and more beautiful, and even faster! In this stage, curiosity, or the limitations of the given technique (think of cooking) cause you to experiment. Break with the norms. You’re collecting techniques. It’s the learning stage.

Back to cooking: After dozens of marble cakes (ask my mom!) I gradually left common recipes and I consider myself being a chef at the ha level in most cases – I can comfortably leave the exact recipe, I’m experimenting (and failing) – and in some rare moments I’m creating exciting new things! For complex szechuan recipes or a Ottolenghi masterpiece with dozens of ingredients I might fall back to shu level.

Throughout this stage you gradually separate from the strict form of the shoe “Shu”. Make sure you work on your habits, because:

In the first 30 years, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your live, the habits make you.

Steve Jobs

ri (離)

leave, separate

At some point you are able to fully detach from the form. You can’t say why you chose a specific technique. You just do it naturally, no recipe, no preparation needed. Martin Broadwell describes it as unconscious competence. The easier you can leave the form, the more often you detach from it, the closer you are to the ri level.

Translated to learning, you now invent and blend techniques. The magic happens at your very own “You at your best” moments, where there are in the flow and time and space disappear.
Earlier I spoke about “Fuck the bread”. You’re past the point where you care about that. But you’re anything else but careless and you’re neither ruthless as well.

Dalai Lama state? Can anything come after? The Shu-Ha-Ri ends here,


but Alistair Cockburn (mentioned earlier) is on the journey to dive deeper and find out what could come after:

Kokoro ( 心)

essence, heart

Kokoro is used in the writings of the 17th century samurai master Miyamoto Musashi to refer to the essence or heart of the samurai. It’s the radically simplified essence of a skill area. The figure below shows how practice starts off simple (Shu, learn one technique), grows more complicated as one learns more techniques (Ha, collect), becomes indescribably complicated at the Ri level (invent and blend), and finally takes on a simple form (Kokoro) when given by the advanced teacher.

Alistair Cockburn “Heart of Agile

By teaching others you improve your mastery. Kokoro represents the teaching stage of the advanced practitioner. It is characterized by the advice “Just master the basics.”

  • The marble cake.
  • Hänsel and Gretel following the path
  • Following the essential rules of Scrum

“You know what, Mama?” he says. “You’d make a really good teacher.” “Thank you,” I say. And then I show him how to draw a bet.

Closing words of Sabrina Orah Mark in her column

Right now my learning journey is getting better in coaching, active listening, … and I’m glad to learn the basics from masters like Matthias Ehrhardt or Dieter Rösner.

Categories
Culture Entrepreneurship Motivation

Podcast: Von der Idee zum Unternehmen

Mein Freund Boris Gloger ist ein besonderer Mensch. Mich verbinden viele Sachen mit ihm. Wir wollten und wollen immer noch mehr gemeinsam unternehmen. Ein erster kleiner Schritt ist, dass wir es endlich geschafft haben, einen ersten Podcast aufzunehmen.

Im Frühling hat mich Boris “auf dem Fahrrad” besucht – und wir habeen beschlossen: Jawohl! Eine Podcast Episode zum Start.

Hört euch an, was wir zum Thema “unternehmen” plaudern:

“Die Ideen gehen mir nicht aus”, Jodok Batlogg ist Gründer und Geschäftsführer von Crate.io in Dornbirn. Außerdem ist er Informatiker und mehrfacher Entrepreneur, der bereits sieben Unternehmen aufgebaut hat und nun das achte Jahr im aktuellen Unternehmen Crate.io angeht. Ausgehend von einer – für ihn – glasklaren Idee einer hochskalierbaren Datenbank für maschinengenerierte Daten (z.B. Sensordaten, Daten in der industriellen Produktion) gründete er das Start-up Crate.io und fing dafür wieder einmal bei Null an.

Ich unterhalte mich mit Jodok darüber, wieso er es nicht lassen kann, was ihn antreibt und welche Hürden er überwinden musste. Er erzählt uns ein wenig über seine Produktidee, was seinen Lebensstil als Unternehmer ausmacht und wie er das gesamte Unternehmen denkt. Silicon Valley spielt natürlich auch ein Rolle.

Ich wünsche euch viel Spaß beim Zuhören!

Boris Gloger

Categories
Motivation Principles

Video: On a Tree

A couple of weeks ago my friend “Menze” a.k.a. Gerhard Beer from Hittisau introduced me to the great people from Digital Instinct. As many of us they were impacted by COVID-19 as well. However every challenge also unlocks a lot of potential.

The movie (german) is about you, how you can unlock potentials NOW, just do it. Let yourself be inspired:

On a Tree

There business is to make films for others. However, they decided to finally devote their talent and passion to create a film for themselves. And share it with the world.

I’m one of multiple protagonists. It was great to see the perfectionism and love for detail the team put into the movie. You don’t really see them in the movie, therefor I’d like to show them here:

Thomas Konrad: He’s guiding through the movie
Rainer Palleschitz is the movie director
Philipp Krebs is taking care of the camera

But even for my small contribution we spent close to a full day in the Forest, with my Bees and in the office to capture a couple of impressions.

The result is marvelous! Watch the full movie on the Digital Instict Website.

Categories
Entrepreneurship Motivation

Liebe ist

(especially after being a long time outside in the cold)

Liebe ist, January 16th 2010, Berlin

What is love?

It’s easy to say: I love my wife, I love my job, I love Pizza or I love this music. How valid are the ancient, greek definitions family love (storge), platonic/friends love (philía), self love (philautia), romantic love (éros), guest love (xenia) and divine love (agápe) nowadays?

I recently came across the study of Tim Lomas “The flavours of love: A cross-cultural lexical analysis“. He was analyzing words for love in many different languages and based on this analysis describing different flavours (that can be combined). E.g. Koinonia – the feeling if you’re being taken away by the emotions in a group for a short time. Wikipedia has all the theory about love.

Business love

I’m not sure what category to use when I talk about what I love in business life. But sometimes it feels like taking a foam bath after an afternoon in the cold!

  • The feeling when puzzle pieces fall into place. You’ve started something hard, complex, distributed and you and the team have been working hard for a long time – and at some point things suddenly and quickly fit neatly together. I love that feeling.
  • The moment you’re exiting the “valley of tears”. You had a series of bad events/messages/pity. Like it won’t ever stop and everything is going to be over. And then something game-changing is on the horizon. You realize the streak of bad luck is over. BUT you stay just a bit longer in that bad state to extend the joy of getting out of this.
  • Giving trust ahead and empower people. Against all odds you decide to trust into the person – and then you’re rewarded for that decision later. Investing that social capital and earning it back later.
  • Having impact on people. The moments I get wet eyes in the office are rather rare. But thinking back it were the moments where people (or their spouse) said thank you for the changes/personal development I enabled or I nudged them into. I’m still touched.
  • Let other shine. Of course I love the moment I’m the winner and stand in the limelight in front of thousands of people. But the more longlasting and even better feeling is if other shine – not only, but also because you coached, enabled and empowered them.
  • Waking up early, full of energy and starting something new. Priceless!

Heureka!

I’ve got it! The happenings, situations, feelings in business live I really, really love are connected to my definition of entrepreneurship:

Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled

Prof. Howard Stevenson, Harvard Business School

I love all the moments of it: Seeing an opportunity, pursuing it and seeing it working out – that’s where my inner Jodok is tipping his toes into the foambath after a long walk in the cold.