Martin Burns is a Lean Thinker, Improvement Obsessive, Recovering Project Manager, learning ways of introducing the best of Lean and Agile to historically skeptical enterprises through success, failure, dialogue and speed-reading.
Lightning talk: This Is The Sound of All Of Us
This is the sound of all of us
Singing with love and the will to trust
Leave the rest behind it will turn to dust
This is the sound of all of us
(The Wailin’ Jennies – One Voice)
Often we talk about the power of small, self-organising groups of people, working collaboratively. Lyssa Adkins gives a beautiful example of a string quartet in her powerful book on coaching on how the quartet members work together and communicate constantly throughout a performance. Some of the most powerful music of the last century has come from pairs of writers and performers working intimately together – George and Ira Gershwin. Lennon and McCartney. Simon and Garfunkel.
But music, like software, often seeks to deliver work at a larger scale and with more complexity than a single, self-organising team can manage. And seeks to do so with unpredictable skill levels of the performers. What lessons can music teach us about the problems and potential workarounds of scaled delivery of creative work?
Using more musical examples than deserve to fit in 10 minutes, Martin Burns brings 40 years of musical experience and formal education from his first career to bear on the problems of his current day job.