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by Simon Baker.
Original Post: At the ACCU Conference
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I enjoyed the ACCU Conference. It was certainly well attended and I giggled a bit at the number of open-toed-sandal boffins present. I put that down to the emphasis on C++ at the conference (I didn't wear open-toed sandals when I used to program C++ ;-).
I went with Mauro Talevi and met Joe Walnes again, who gave me some interesting pointers on sitemesh and oscache. I also met an old friend, Sydney Redelinghuys. Syd and I used to work together when he first came to the UK. He's now at ThoughtWorks. Syd introduced me to Dan North, another Thoughtworker. A good day out on the whole. I particularly liked the valet parking at the hotel even if I had to pay for it. Here's the sessions I attended:
I was disappointed by this session. It was originally scheduled as a 3 hour session and my expectation was that it would be experiential. It turned out to be a presentation padded with discussion to fill 1 and a half hours. Some of the discussion was in fact interesting, but I came away with very little new knowledge or tips.
This was a whistle-stop tour of Ruby with a glimpse of Rails at the end. It was an entertaining session, what with Syd's typing and the twist on pair-programming (of sorts). Dan took the role of one of the voices inside Syd's head as Syd developed a program to parse his credit card bill to tally his and his wifes expenditure. Hilarity aside, the session was informative. It was good to see what all the noise is about.
So what the hell is gumption? Gumption is enthusiasm. A gumption trap is anything that throws us off the quality track and degrades our enthusiasm for what we are doing. There are 2 types of gumption trap:
A setback is caused by external conditions, e.g. organisational beauracracy.
A hangup is caused by conditions within yourself and includes
Value traps, which block affective understanding
Truth traps, which block cognitive understanding and
Muscle traps, which block psychomotor behavior
Motivation and enthusiasm lead to effectiveness. So it's important to understand gumption traps so we can avoid them or combat the conditions that produce them.
In a group we shared stories about gumption traps we'd experienced. We selected 2 situations and drew influence charts to show the factors influencing gumption. The first situation was about the affects decreasing interesting work had on 2 team members and how their polar behaviour made things much worse. The second situation was about imposing arbitrary dates on a development team.
influencemapinterestingwork Originally uploaded by sjb140470. Influence charts look like they are a useful tool to have in your toolbox. I'm going to spend some time reading up on them and I'm keen to try using them at suitable opportunities in my coaching engagements.
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