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Archives for Michael Buffington
Permission to Behave Like a Child
I just watched Temple Grandin’s talk at TED about the kinds of minds the world needs. She describes how the world is full of different kinds of thinkers – visual thinkers, abstract thinkers, and verbal thinkers. She goes on to emphasize how the world seems to be one that favors abstract thinkers more than any other.
Before continuing – spend some time learning about Temple Grandin and her life. This is an amazing woman who has taken what many might see as a disadvantage, her autism, and turned it into an advantage that we’ve all benefited from.
One of the things that came to my visual/verbal thinking mind while she spoke was how, despite the different kinds of “thinkers”, kids seem to share one thing in common: their drive towards getting hands on experience with the world around them is nearly unstoppable.
Consider this scene: a block of clay sitting on a table surrounded by 5 year olds. How many of those kids will sit around that table discussing what might be created with this clay? How many would whiteboard the pros and cons of certain structures over others? How many would write a functional spec? I’m pretty sure we’re all correct when we say none.
Of Mutual Benefit
As part of our recently started book club we’ve been reading Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained. Though some of us have read the book and applied a lot of the ideas to our day to day work, we all thought it’d be great to read and talk about it as a team.
In a mind-bending, recursive, meta sort of way, what I read this morning has inspired me to take our book club up a step.
This morning I read about one of the principles of Extreme Programming (XP): mutual benefit. I, like most middle children, am already an expert in the realm of all things mutually beneficial. Middle children are always at risk of having their plans for fun being thwarted by their older and younger siblings and as such become mutual benefit samurais at an early age.
Mutual benefit, in XP, means that every activity should benefit all concerned. As a kid, if I wanted a cookie, the only way I was going to be able to have that cookie was if I could distract my siblings. Either they’d also needed a cookie, or they needed to be distracted long enough for me to obtain and consume a cookie without threat.
