Home Alone

 Yesterday I seemed to be the only one at work with the group calendar showing most of the folks OOO - out of the office. Some are out of state enjoying their vacation. Most will be coming back at the start of the new year. I decided to stay or rather had no plans to travel out of state. Instead, I decided to stay home and do some work attend, online training, catch up on work and strategize for the coming year. 2022 had been a wild ride for me with my new role and I often seemed overwhelmed.

There is too much to learn and I started an online course on Agile and scrum made by the IBM network. I know most of the concepts but never in this manner. I did not have any training in my new role as scrum master and the training said this is the first mistake that companies make by not providing training to new people who come on board like me. In most cases, the thinking is that project managers can automatically become scrum masters and the biggest mistake is to adapt 'waterfall' methods to lean and agile sprints.

I did attend the lean and agiler journey but as a team member not as a scrum master. So I have a good understanding of the agile process but not as a squad leader. So the training is a good refresher. I am also attending short pieces of training on JIRA which is the tool used in our company. However, I get to use new tools like ZenHub and GitHub instead of JIRA. This is a refreshing change as gives another viewpoint on the process. One of the main concepts is kanban which is a technique to visualize work externally via visual cards. The use of dashboards and pipelines or swimlanes in these tools are good illustrations of the external mind.

I know I have to ramp up my skills with new thinking and methods and these training help me (because of a lack of a training plan due to the negligence of my superiors). I feel I am left on my own and to survive on my wits. Hence, I decided to spend my holiday vacation reflecting, learning new concepts, and trying out new techniques such as building a second brain and applying these new concepts using new tools like Notion and increasing my knowledge on MS suites like Teams, To DO, and Planner.

I started new meeting initiatives which also use planner dashboards that apply concepts like the external mind and second brain. There are also new thinking in my field that I need to ramp up on such as DevOps, Cloud computing, velocity, and cycle time. Being a squad leader also requires a different mindset ( following Agile philosophy) by applying the scrum process. One needs to be more of a coach and influencer rather than a manager. An entirely different role as compared to my former role as project manager. This is the paradigm shift.

From a biological point of view, I am learning to juggle, meditate, and be more mindful of my work methods and procrastination. My emotional reaction and mental bias and reactivity often take me to the wrong path so the challenge is to re-learn or replace my old mental models. This feels like a new world for me; a voyage of discovery has begun where I need to leave my mind and my mental rumination. In fact, I am trying too many things now that my mind has been opened.

The main challenge is really to focus instead on my usual scatter brain and opening up too much to new avenues that result in distraction and procrastination. This journey of self-control and focus will help me in my quest to be a novelist and entrepreneur. This is in preparation for my new career after I retire. There is too much to learn with all the available materials out there on youtube and online courses like Courserz. I plan to attend Google's digital marketing course and also several IBM courses.

Modern Poetry

I have been attending a course on modern poetry, an online class available in the website Coursera, featuring videos where an esteemed professor and his students discuss specific poems, a highly effective format in understanding today’s poetry. The session starts with the usual greats: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson and Robert Frost then moving on towards poets in the 40’s, 50s, 60s and so on. The sessions on the today’s poets offer an interesting glimpse on the different modes of expression. For example, one poet takes pictures of things like card catalogues, or folded pages in a book; arranged by the poet-photographer to elicit a kind of poetry from the materials or words at hand. Hence, the distinction between photography and poetry is blurred as the artist fashions her work on these materials which require the literary skill of a writer and the visual-technical skills of a photographer. Others recite their poems in a sort of performance art where poetry need not be written but listened to.

These people are not your father’s artists – now using different modes of expression with today’s technology. Last week I watched a video series from PBS called ART:21 about artists in the 21th century. An interesting show where people like Richard Serra or Maya Lin were presented – artists who combine the discipline of architecture, sculpture and social service with their work. It seems that today’s artists are multidisciplinary – adept at different modes of expression as well as having expertise in different fields. ART:21 focused more on visual art while the modern poetry course focused on literary art but the main theme seem to be the emergence of multi-disciplinary artists. What does that say about the modern age? Does it mean the university’s focus on specialization is no longer valid? Instead a more generalist frame of mind is needed – a master of all trades? Hence, the fox is triumphant and not the hedgehog.

Art is supposed to act like a canary in the coal mine – to give signals of the subtle changes in society and culture before the change becomes apparent and widespread, where artists act like shamans who proclaim an emerging trend before it becomes reality. Perhaps that’s the lesson of the recent election where the incumbent (writer, community organizer, offspring of white and black lineage, who grew up in Asia and US, senator and president) is a mold of diverse mixes against the challenger (Mormon, scion of rich and successful parents, brilliant and technocratic, self-made multimillionaire and white) – a man who seem to embody traditional values, the John Wayne generation that’s receding from view. The incumbent won perhaps because his team was more attuned to today’s diverse electorate than the challenger who seemed wedded to an older model. One seem to evoke poetry while the other an efficient machine.

The election result was met with vitriol and astonishment especially by the conservative establishment, as if the walls were breached by barbarians, like the world no longer made sense and the mix-up threatens the status quo. But the world now belongs to the multidisciplinary man, someone adept in different fields; he can make sense of the disparate threads swirling in today’s culture. White is black and black is white. Imagine a conservative attending an avant garde show, totally bewildered at the performance, preferring to stick to his own world of certainties while the changes sweep the world and upend his neatly constructed world. But there is freedom in change and one just needs to let it sweep through; this is the feeling one gets listening to modern poets like experiencing a breeze of fresh air.