The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Muhammed cartoons

    Wikipedia has an up-to-date overview of the whole brouhaha over the Muhammed cartoons.

    What many seem to be missing is this: The problem is not Islaam, the problem is fundamentalism. There are fundamentalist moslems, yes, but also fundamentalist christians, jews, hindus, anti-homosexuals, conservatives, communists, etc…

    And while fundamentalism seems to be on the rise these days, I believe there is cause for optimism. Today fundamentalist movements and organizations everywhere are being crowded by an increasing modernism driven primarily by science and mass media. Lately the internet has been pressuring them even further.

    Fundamentalists everywhere currently lash out in panic at seeing their base erode, and we’ll see it again and again, though less and less. In that light it’s hardly surprising. I mean, we can’t really expect fundamentalists to go out quietly, can we? :o)

  • Podcasts from the WorldBlu Forum

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    A short while ago I spoke at one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to: The WorldBlu Forum on Organizational Democracy. Previous coverage here, here, here and here.

    The organizers have put up podcasts with many of the speakers including Dan Pink, David Weinberger and … me (7 min., 8 Mb mp3) being interviewed by the charming and delightful Susanne Goldstein. I somehow manage to go all the way back to Aristotle and the Dalai Lama and then talk about happiness at work and how it relates to democratic workplaces.

    Find all interviews from the forum here.

  • eXtreme Projects

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    eXtreme Programming is a process used to structure software development projects. It is radically different from more traditional methods, in that it defers more of the detailed planning till later in the project. Most traditional methods try to answer all the big questions up front. This makes it less susceptible to changes that occur during the project – something that can otherwise seriously disrupt software projects.

    eXtreme Programming, or XP, is based on a set of principles that at first may seem awkward and counter-intuitive, but which actually support each other nicely, resulting in a process that is:

    • More efficient
    • More predictable
    • More flexible
    • More fun

    Since I switched from the IT business to making people happy at work, I’ve used some of the XP principles in many other situations, where they have proved to work just as well. Here is my list of which XP principles translate to non-IT projects, and how to utilize them:

    Frequent small releases

    Rather than spending a long time building up to one huge release, find a way to divide your project into several smaller releases. This means that your product makes contact with the real world sooner, and allows you to better incorporate feedback from actual customers/users. in XP, you want to release something every 2-3 weeks, which is certainly preferable to working on a project for 6 months, delivering it to the customer and THEN learning that it doesn’t fulfill their needs. And don’t tell me this never happens.

    Iteration planning

    This means breaking the current goals down into tasks that are small enough to be accomplished in 1-3 days. Based on these estimates, the teams decides which tasks to include for the next deliverable. This means that the work immediately ahead gets broken down into small, manageable pieces and you can easliy track progress.

    Move people around

    Rather than assigning fixed roles to each person, let people switch roles. This enhances knowledge sharing and learning and also helps avoid information bottlenecks. XP also lets people choose for themselves which part of the project they want to work on.

    Daily stand-up meetings

    You’ll be amazed how much faster meetings go, when people can’t sleep in their chairs. in XP projects every day starts with a stand-up meeting to coordinate the days work.

    The customer is always available

    That way you don’t have to guess what the customer wants/intends/needs. You can easily and quickly ask.

    Pair programming (or pair work)

    This means that no work is done by one person alone – each and every task is tackled by at least two people. This may seem inefficient at first, but experience shows that people do better work when working together and it also enhances cross-training and team-work.

    Simplicity

    Choose the simplest solution that could possibly work. Don’t get fancy when simple will do.

    Create spike solutions

    If you’re faced with a difficult choice, don’t analyse it to death, trying to look for the right solution. Instead create spike solutions – quick tests that allow you to try various possible solutions out. This gives you fast, specific, real-life data to let you choose and helps avoid paralysis by analysis.

    Collective code ownership (or collective project ownership)

    Everybody owns the whole project. This helps avoid bottlenecks and that unpleasant situation where people feel that they own a part of the project and seem reluctant to share knowledge or accept criticism on their “property”.

    No overtime

    Period!

    I believe that these principles can be applied to many kinds of projects and I have done so myself with considerable success. Are they always applicable? No. Read the XP entry on when to apply XP for some inspiration on when to use XP – and when not to.

  • Pixar gets it

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    The Holllywwod way of organizing a movie is by using only contract labour. The vast majority of movie people, from grips and gaffers to high-paid actors, are in essence self-employed and are hired for one movie at a time.

    Pixar goes against this trend, by focusing on people:

    Contracts allow you to be irresponsible as a company. You don’t need to worry about keeping people happy and fulfilled. What we have created here – an incredible workspace, opportunities to learn and grow, and, most of all, great co-workers – is better than any contract.
    …
    We’ve made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We’re trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners. It’s no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it’s a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people.

    Says Randy S. Nelson, the dean of Pixar University.

    Among the advatages cited are:
    * People learn to work more efficiently together through long-term collaborations
    * People can better support each other through difficult creative processes
    * A culture of learning
    * People have more fun

    Also check out the amazing offices at Pixar.

  • Ping-pong matrix style

    This video is really, really funny!

    It also shows how conditioned we’ve become to Matrix-style slow-motion, bullet-time, 3D-rotation effects.

  • Sure you can!

    Great new website; nice, simple execution: Can I crash?

    Patricia and I already put ourselves in there.

  • Meetings: Hell or heaven?

    We recently developed a product in the Happy at Work Project to create better meetings – or in our parlance happy meetings. We tested it on a few organizations and one group of leaders told us, that they normally have 20-30 hours worth of meetings a week. I was flabbergasted.

    Our product aims at making meetings more fun, productive and dynamic by distributing ownership and responsibility for the meeting’s content from one person (typically the manager) to the entire group. When everyone is involved in setting the agenda and prioritizing items, meeting participants become more focused, engaged and creative.

    And now The Guardian reports on a study on meetings which found that:

    1. The more meetings one has to attend, the greater the negative effects
    2. The more time one spends in meetings, the greater the negative effects
    …
    The results speak volumes. “It is impressive,” Luong and Rogelberg write in their summary, “that a general relationship between meeting load and the employee’s level of fatigue and subjective workload was found”. Their central insight, they say, is the concept of “the meeting as one more type of hassle or interruption that can occur for individuals”.

    Notice that it is not meetings per se that are annoying people – it’s bad meetings. I’m pretty sure that fun, engaging, productive meetings would simply make people happier at work.

    Here’s my question to you: What do you think it takes, to make meetings fun and productive rather than boring and stressful?

  • Socratic teaching

    Rick Garlikov tried something new teaching a third grade math class:

    The experiment was to see whether I could teach these students binary arithmetic (arithmetic using only two numbers, 0 and 1) only by asking them questions. None of them had been introduced to binary arithmetic before.
    …
    17) How come we have ten numerals? Could it be because we have 10 fingers?
    COULD BE

    18) What if we were aliens with only two fingers? How many numerals might we have?
    2

    19) How many numbers could we write out of 2 numerals?
    NOT MANY /
    [one kid:] THERE WOULD BE A PROBLEM

    20) What problem?
    THEY COULDN’T DO THIS [he holds up seven fingers]

    21) [This strikes me as a very quick, intelligent insight I did not expect so suddenly.] But how can you do fifty five?
    [he flashes five fingers for an instant and then flashes them again]

    The result:

    Their teacher told me later that after I left the children talked about it until it was time to go home.
    …
    The chief benefits of this method are that it excites students’ curiosity and arouses their thinking, rather than stifling it. It also makes teaching more interesting, because most of the time, you learn more from the students — or by what they make you think of — than what you knew going into the class. Each group of students is just enough different, that it makes it stimulating. It is a very efficient teaching method, because the first time through tends to cover the topic very thoroughly, in terms of their understanding it. It is more efficient for their learning then lecturing to them is, though, of course, a teacher can lecture in less time.

    Here’s a though: Rather than asking why many kids don’t like (or actively hate) school, we could ask how we might create schools that are so much fun, that we couldn’t possibly keep the kids out, no matter how hard we tried. And this is certainly one way!

  • Making the switch

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    I’m writing this blogpost on my laptop in the Firefox browser as usual, but this time… IT’S RUNNING ON LINUX. Penguins rejoice!

    I’ve been wanting to install linux on my laptop for a while because lately it’s been running slower and slower – a typical syndrome for PC’s running Windows. All the usual windows remedies gave only short term improvements.

    So friday I installed Ubuntu Linux (probably the most user friendly and easily installed flavour of Linux), and I’ve spent the weekend trying it out and getting stuff to work. The installation was really easy once I figured out how to install it on my laptop which doesn’t have a CD-rom drive. Importantly, all the major stuff worked right after installation and the Ubuntu installer correctly recognized and configured my hard disk, keyboard, trackpad, wifi, etc… A few things didn’t work or weren’t installed by default, and in each of those cases, I’ve been able to find excellent online resources giving step-by-step instructions.

    Some major victories:
    * Getting my online bank to work
    * Getting my Palm Treo to sync with the Evolution calendar application included
    * Migrating all my mails and bookmarks from Windows

    Woo-hoo :o)

    My overall impression is paradoxical:
    Windows XP Professional Edition which I’ve been running so far is made by a huge, succesful corporation and sells for a lot of money. Linux is made by passionate amateurs and professionals around the world, loosely organized in an open source Community. The version I’m using is not only free, they actually go to considerable lengths to give it away, eg. by mailing people free install CD’s.

    And yet Ubuntu Linux feels like a more professional, finished and complete product than Windows XP, which has always struck me as half-baked. There are solid practical reasons why I think Linux is preferable to Windows:
    * Price/value – Hey, it’s free and just as good (at least)
    * Free appplications – Ubuntu comes with the Openoffice.org office suite and many other great applications.
    * Speed/performance – Applications run faster than on Windows
    * Security – Linux is less vulnerable to viruses, adware and other attacks than Windows
    * Stability – Windows is famous for crashing or needing rebooting often. Linux is famous for being stable.

    Also, there are two “fluffier” reasons for me to choose Linux:
    * Ideology
    Ubuntu Linux is committed to an ideology which is Free Software. This is free as in freedom not free as in gratis, meaning:

    * The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
    * The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs.
    * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
    * The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that everyone benefits.

    Microsoft on the other hand is comitted to … Microsoft. Time and again they make business and technology decisions that clearly favour their bottom line rather than their customers. I don’t blaiming them, most businesses (but not all) choose this approach. It’s just not a philosophy I favour or want to support more than I absolutely have to.

    Does values and philosophy matter when choosing products? It does to me, and while the Free Software philosophy doesn’t make the product any more useful to me, I believe that these principles will create better IT solutions for all of us.

    * Technology base
    Linux has a better technological base than Windows – quite simply, it’s built on a better foundation. Again, this may not make much of a difference for me here and now, but in the long run it definitely pays to build on solid ground.

    PS.
    Mygdal suggested I should switch to Apple, but while the Apple OS is certainly a better product than Windows, Apple falls short on values. Apple is Microsoft with better design.

  • Joke of the week

    Jon Stewart on The Daily Show on the latest Osama Bin Laden tape:

    Bin Laden has released his 19th message; it’s only a matter of time before he starts podcasting.

    Followed by this delightful little screenshot:

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