Jan Bosch
There’s a powerful story in the narrative of Western civilization around the team. It comes up in the context of the military, especially special operations, in the startup community, especially in the early phases of a company, in sports as well as in the leadership literature. The idea is that a group of people can … Read more
Although the Agile aficionados tried really hard to kill the notion of process in their efforts to remove the heritage of the capability maturity model, the fact is that every team, company and business ecosystem uses processes. These can be formally defined, to the point of individuals or companies being legally liable if the process … Read more
It’s highly controversial to claim that there’s no such thing as “the architecture” of a system. On the one hand, folks in R&D use the term to indicate that the technical debt in the system has reached a point where more resources need to be dedicated to architecture refactoring. On the other hand, those on … Read more
As humans, we like to label things and put boundaries around them. As we have limited intellectual and information-processing capabilities, this helps us abstract otherwise complex concepts and use them in building even higher-level concepts that we can use to explain, predict or create things. Of course, the nature of this process is that it … Read more
As I am slowly emerging from summer vacation, there are a couple of reflections that have come to mind as I am engaging my brain again. One topic that I have been noodling on is that I have noticed an undercurrent of anti-agile thinking in what I read and the people I talk to. It … Read more
Human intelligence is amazing and has led to everything that we experience in our day to day lives. Every thing we use, every idea we communicate around with our peers, every abstraction we use to deal with a complex problem has been created by a human. Nothing exists until it has first been imagined in … Read more
The last posts have taken us through 15 rules that I believe are important to ensure we’re the protagonist of our own lives. As I wrote in the introduction to this series, I believe that those who read my content have in common that we take a proactive approach to life and view ourselves as … Read more
There’s an interesting pattern at universities where a full professor typically is the only one who’s an expert in a particular field. Because of this, over time, professors tend to become quite confident in their expertise. The consequence is that they start to view their research field and themselves as the most important in general … Read more
Whenever I talk to people that are (even) older than me and ask them about how they spend their time, there often is a reflection along the lines of “The days go slow, but the years go fast.” Especially in retirement, it seems that the number of things people spend time on is quite limited … Read more
In science, there’s an interesting pattern few people talk about. It turns out that inventions often occur at the same time or almost the same time in multiple research groups. These inventions aren’t struck-by-lightning insights by a single scientist; they tend to be ideas that evolved and emerged in a research community for an extended … Read more
