TITLE: Some Things I Have Learned, along with Milton Glaser AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: December 05, 2009 2:01 PM DESC: ----- BODY: I recently came across a link to graphic designer Milton Glaser's 2001 talk Ten Things I Have Learned. Several of his lessons struck close to home for me.

After spending time with a person, do you usually feel exhilarated or exhausted? If you always feel tired, then you have been poisoned. Avoid people who do this to you. I would add positive advice in the same vein: Try to surround yourself with people who give you energy, and try to be a person who energizes those around you.

Less is not necessarily more. That's a lie we tell ourselves too often when we face cuts. "Do less with more." In the short term, this can be a way to become more efficient. In the long term, it starves us and our organizations. I like Glaser's idea better: Just enough is more.

If you think you have achieved enlightenment, "then you have merely arrived at your limitation". I see this too often in academia and in industry. Glaser uses this example of the lesson that doubt is better than certainty, but it also relates to an earlier lesson in the talk: Style is not to be trusted. Styles come and go; integrity and substance remain vital no matter what the fashion is for expressing solutions.

This talk ends with a passage that brought to mind discussion in recent months among agile software developers and consultants about a the idea of certifying agile practitioners:

Everyone interested in licensing our field might note that the reason licensing has been invented is to protect the public not designers or clients. "Do no harm" is an admonition to doctors concerning their relationship to their patients, not to their fellow practitioners or the drug companies.

Much of the discussion in the agile community about certification seems more about protecting the label "agile" from desecration than about protecting our clients. It may well be that some clients are being harmed when unscrupulous practitioners do a lazy or poor job of introducing agile methods, because they are being denied the benefits of a more responsive development process grounded in evidence gathered from continuous feedback. A lot of the concern, though, seems to be with the chilling effect that poorly- executed agile efforts have on the ability of honest and hard-working agile consultants and developers to peddle our services under that banner. I don't know what the right answer to any of this is, but I like the last sentence of Glaser's talk:

If we were licensed, telling the truth might become more central to what we do.

Whether we are licensed or not, I think the answer will ultimately back to a culture of honesty and building trust in relationships with our clients. So we can all practice Glaser's tenth piece of advice: Tell the truth. -----