A Thinkie, for those of you non-paying-subscribers, is a habit of creative thought. I publish one to paying subscribers every Tuesday. I’ve published about 60 so far, with 30 to go. Thinkie: Laughter says that when laughter is the response to an idea, try taking the idea seriously for a second.

Upgrade to paid

“I have a dream! What if the business said to the geeks, ‘No, it’s okay. Take a little longer if you need to.”

I’ve whined repeatedly about how hard it is to find good examples. Well, I had one yesterday. I was presenting a workshop on leading geeks for non-technical executives (subscribe to https://leadgeekswithpurpose.substack.com/home if your C-suite would like to get on the waitlist for a session). The whole thing was going fairly well. I had talked about going for the brass ring because software scales. I had talked about features vs structure. NPV vs optionality. Impact » Effort. All the stuff you already know about as dedicated readers.

Then I said one thing that changed, not just the tone of the workshop, but also my own evaluation of the material I was presenting. And it wasn’t what I said that changed my brain, it was their reaction.

We were talking about jackpot changes—a seemingly-small change that takes a ridiculous (from the outside) amount of time. I explained how that happened (you know, coupling). How balanced investment in features & structure reduces this problem. And then I decided to drop in one of my standard bits.

“I dream of a day when you folks ask for a feature and, when given an estimate, say, ‘It’s okay if you take a little more time.’” Big laugh. Nervous, but loud & long.

The laugh stopped me for a moment. Then I continued, “And the geeks say, ‘No, we can do a little more than that.’”

Smaller laugh, but still, “What madness is this? That’s never going to happen.” Then silence as it sank in. Yeah, that would be good.

So that’s why I’m launching the workshop. It won’t be free. I’m not writing it up anywhere. It won’t be recorded or broadcast. On-site. In-person. I’ll only take one customer a month. Four hours, including exercises. For more details, see https://leadgeekswithpurpose.substack.com/home.

Ah, but the point of this post (I’m pretty excited about the workshop so I got off track), the point of this post is that I used Thinkie: Laughter. Their laughter sounded like fear of hope to me. They feared hoping that programming would ever be an abundant resource for them. And I think it can be. Even without AI magic fairy dust.

Oops, back to the point. The Thinkie helped me generate an idea—this message has enough attraction that it’s worth pushing out there. First I had to pay attention to that idea. Then evaluate it—yes, I could spread this message around. Now I’m taking the next step & seeing how many more folks are willing to sign up (I have the first couple already).

Listen for laughter. There’s information there, & unique information if everyone else is ignoring it.

P.S. Here is the LinkedIn post that kicked this off: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kentbeck_i-came-in-peace-no-geeks-in-the-room-just-activity-7236811431101276162-HyCK?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios