"Calm down, take a deep breath and just talk to me“

Luke Hohmann founded FirstRoot to advance participatory budgeting in schools. Let me get straight to the point: You can invest in this company in this early stage. You can also support the cause by talking about or by simply using the free software and talking about it in your kids’ school.

Luke Hohmann and me go back a long time. I met him ca. 12 years ago in one of his trainings and was fortunate enough to co-train and facilitate with him. He wrote an early book „Beyond Software Architecture“ which to me is one of the best books on software Architecture (sic!) and was ahead of its time. He then got deep into Serious Games with his Innovation Games trainings and a great book on it. Also ahead of its time.

From there he was on a constant path towards which had to end in what he does now. Through his Innovation Games, he made it to participatory budgeting in communities, in the Enterprise and other important places. Also, he built an enterprise SaaS company to further bring his ideas deeper into Companies and also enable distributed Serious Games. Now, he founded FirstRoot, bringing participatory budgeting to schools.

(You will realize over the course of the pod, that we couldn’t constrain ourselves - we wouldn’t be Luke and Markus, then - from drawing all kinds of parallels to Quality of Software, agile, Portfolio Planning, Architecture, Comics for Story Mapping and what have you.)

The underlying problem that Luke is tackling with FirstRoot is inequality of chances by social background, financial illiteracy (lack of education on that topic in school in general) and economic disparity.

First Root is having its part in solving that problem by offering a five step process in facilitating Participatory Budgeting to pupils around the globe, based on a software solution.

Steps are:

1. Planning
2. Gather Ideas
3. Refine Ideas to proposals
4. Voting (there will always be more ideas than we can afford - „a truism in life“
5. Projects in implematation

In the pod Luke thoroughly leads us through an example to show us how it works and which impact it has.

I put the core of the idea at the beginning of the cast.

Again: If you believe in this story, you can also invest for as little as a couple of hundred dollars alongside of people like Alex Osterwalder, Lysa Adkins and many more. You also help by just using the software and bring it into schools. Just follow the „Invest“ link on firstroot.co

Timo Lutter und seine Frau Jule sind Deutsche, die in Oslo wohnen und arbeiten. Timo hat lange als Molekularbiologe gearbeitet und arbeitet jetzt in Oslo im Rikshospitaletals Mikro-Biologe. Jule arbeitet in Oslo als Kindergärtnerin. Beide sind höchstwahrscheinlich wahrscheinlich Covid-19-positiv und tragen die Krankheit in ihrem sogenannten „milden“ Verlauf aus. Die beiden berichten aus Ihrer Erfahrung mit der Krankheit, dass schon das ist nicht mal eben einer lockeren Virusgrippe entspricht.

Ich habe die Chance genutzt, Timo ein bisschen seines Virologen-Wissens zu entlocken und so kommen wir zu Erklärungen darüber

• was ein Virus ist
• was es heisst, einen Virus zu sequentieren
• warum sich Timo sicher ist, dass das Virus auf keinen Fall ein „Designervirus“ ist
• was Timo’s Einschätzungen zu den getroffenen Massnahmen ist
• wie sich Gesundheitssysteme aufgrund gegebener Umstände unterscheiden und
• welchen Einfluß das auf den Umgang mit dem Virus hat.

Ich wusste vorher nicht, dass Tino so viel Vorwissen zu dem Thema hat und habe einfach diese Fundgrube genutzt.

Ich würde mich über Feedback freuen. Bewertet das Podcast wo immer Ihr es hört. Empfehlt es weiter!

Falls Ihr von weiteren Geschichten hört, die es lohnt zu Corona zu erzählen, meldet Euch gerne. Ich versuche gerne etwas daraus zu machen!

Bis zum nächsten mal,

Markus

This is the story of Peter Bihr and his family whoa actually wanted to visit a wedding in the United States, but instead got stranded in Costa rica. Peter and his family accidentally find themselves locked up in a place which turns out to be a bit of a paradise. There could, of course be better times and conditions to find and enjoy a paradise. But let’s listen how Peter perceives his current situation. If you know of other weird stories happening during these strange and difficult time, let me know and maybe we could make this another episode!

You can reach Peter for more on his great work here.

He also publishes a fantastic, interesting and personal email newsletter.

Have fun, stay healthy and sane!

Henning Wolf hat mich im Hotelzimmer bei einer Konferenz interviewt. Es geht um mein Thema Nummer eins, neben Produkt: Strategie Machen! Wir erklären, was an Strategie kaputt ist und wie man es fixen kann.

Wir erklären, was die drei relevanten Ebenen in Strategie sind und wie man sie wieder koppeln kann, um alles zu reparieren. Denn es ist das Koppeln dieser drei Ebenen, was Strategie repariert. Die drei Ebenen sind:

Marker: unsere Identität, ausgedrückt über unseren Antrieb, langfristige Ziele. Alles was ausdrückt, wer uns was wir sind und was wir in der Gesellschaft bewirken wollen. Unsere Identität eben.

Optionen: Das ist alles, was wir als nächstes tun könnten. Alle Möglichkeiten, die wir haben. Da wir nicht alles machen können, was wir gerne machen würden, entscheidet die beste Auswahl, die Qualität unserer Entscheidungen und Committments darüber, wie es uns geht.

Arbeit: Arbeit soll fliessen und es muss passend viel Arbeit auf gute Optionen angewandt werden. Arbeit auf schlechten Optionen ist nutzlos. Viel Arbeit auf guten Optionen bringt viel. Dies erklärt auch warum Output wichtiger sein kann als gedacht ;)

Arbeit realisiert Optionen, Optionen verwirklichen unsere Marker. Umgekehrt helfen Marker Optionen zu bewerten (und abzuleiten) und Optionen helfen Arbeit abzuleiten.

Wichtig ist, die stabilisierende Natur und langfristige Wirkung von Markern zu verstehen und akzeptieren. Ebenso ist es wichtig, die mittelfristige Wirkung und die Notwendigkeit von längerfristigen Optionen zu verstehen. nur Arbeit soll fliessen, nur hier gelten Flow-Gesetze und ähnliches. Mechanismen von Arbeit auf die anderen Ebenen zu transportieren, zerstört diese Ebenen.

Deshalb ist Business Agilität mit ähnlichen Mechanismen auf diesen Ebenen auch oberflächlich gedacht und toxisch.

Viel Spaß bei dieser Folge. Vielen Dank an Henning Wolf für die Zusammenarbeit und die Geduld beim Fragen unter widrigen Bedingungen im Hotel bei einer Konferenz!

This is part two of the conversation I had with Jabe Bloom and Marc Burgauer during the Devops Conference 2018 in Munich.

All information can be found in the show notes of part 1, which is Episode 21 of this podcast.

Here some short show notes on this second part.

"Russell Ackoff wrote a brilliant paper titled "On Data Mismanagement Systems and the basic thesis is: Managers need data to make decisions and the more data they have, the better it is. Of course, the answer is: Managers don't need more information, they need the right information"

"Of course, big data is a response to a particular problem and the particular problem is "Oh god, we made such big piles of data that no human can actually process it anymore. And now we have to come up with an algorithm to summarise the data for us."

"By definition all future things are stories. They don't exist. That's why they're in the future. You can't measure them. You can't use data to understand them. You can only use data to understand what exists now."

"People think that you have to change people's thinking first. You change what they think about things and then they change their behavior and that will change the output. And that's absolutely wrong. You have to change what they're looking at and that will change their thinking. And when you want to change something, that's when you need to create those models and give people new things to look at."

"Right now everyone goes rushing towards high cycle time, high frequency: spin as fast as you can. If everyone is playing to the same time cycles, there is no advantage to doing that. … In fact, the advantage will be having the discipline … of having long term vision and connecting them to the capabilities of having a short cycle time. That's the next competitive advantage. We need people to be able to understand how to make commitments beyond two weeks. Period."

"We need to create space for commitments. If everything is an option you have no commitments. If you had no commitments, you have no identity."

"I hate the word autonomy. … I think autonomy is individuating. … The way I hear the word and I think other people hear it - and I might be wrong and other people hear it differently - but the way I hear it is "I have the right to make my own decisions. I have the right to make my own rules."

"If you look up the etymology of the word it means "the owner of the rules". (Whereas) Agency is my ability to chose in that environment and to see the result of it. Autonomy as the ability to act without responsibility is my concern. The ability to act without considering the feedback loop of what s the effect of what I have done.

Thanks for listening!

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