Archive for the ‘Competence Development’ Category

Add K and Stir

September 23, 2017

In my last blog, I introduced KFika – the smallest way to start sharing Knowledge. And fika1 we have to do anyway. Right? Adding a K to just about any word is a recipe to invent your events. So simple it’s somewhat embarrassing.

Food and knowledge sharing - it just can't go wrong.

Food and knowledge sharing – it just can’t go wrong.

Possibilities are silent, whereas problems scream and cling to your legs. Obviously the latter is impossible to miss. But how to find the former?

A simple technique2 to find those nuggets of insight is to combine two different words. What ideas pop into your head? Let the first trigger another thought and then yet another.

When analysing those ideas, I recommend two distinct phases. At first look at the upsides of each idea – no matter how far-fetched they might seem at first. We need to explore them properly. Treat them with a modicum of respect – at least in this initial phase. One idea tends to lead to the next one, which might be the perfect one.

In the second phase, you sober up and do the regular shot-them-down-thinking. This critical thinking, which is much heralded, has one major flaw. It takes a creative schmuck who is dumb enough to propose those new ideas in the first place. Hence the reason for this two-phased approach.

We’re likely to miss out on much of the follow-up ideas that might stand up to scrutiny. Or perhaps we find something that will “only” improve our current way of working, which is quite good when you think about it.

General Recipe for Finding Possibilities:

  1. Combine two (very) different words and see what ideas turn up.
  2. Positive phase: Analyse by starting every sentence with “yes, and we could…” We need to find all possible ideas and whatever thought they might trigger.
  3. Critical phase: Analyse why it might not work and what parts could improve the current way of thinking or working.
  4. Experiment and learn.

My simple formula to find a new type of knowledge event is to add “K” (as in kompetens3 or knowledge) to just about any word. What might this mean? How would that be of use? KFika is such a word. Another might be KLunch.

You might know this by the term “brown-bagging.” In short, you make sure there are sandwiches (typically in a brown bag) for everyone and someone who will share knowledge.

The lunch version does cost a bit more than a regular fika – both money-wise and time-wise for the person speaking. She or he needs to prepare.

I propose you address the second drawback first. Find a subject that with your company’s agenda, then it will be a lot easier to find a sponsor like your boss or HR. If you fail, then go for it anyway. An interesting subject will attract people anyway. Chances are you will be shaming the company into footing the bill 🙂

How do you find the subject and speaker? Talk to whoever you meet at the coffee machine. Has anyone done something worthwhile spreading on their project? I believe I can guarantee it. Ask about their work. What acronyms can you find? What did they enjoy? What was hard? It doesn’t take long to notice their passion points. Finally, go for the kill; Ask for them to share that knowledge. Since they already struggled to gain that particular experience, there isn’t much work to package and share.

The K Recipe:

  1. Combine the word “Knowledge” and some other word.
  2. What kind of experiment or event4 does this trigger?
  3. Look for people with passion points. Ask them to share it in whatever form makes them comfortable.
  4. Set a date, book a room and some food. Spread the word.
  5. Repeat. By third time this will be a tradition and easier to do.

At one company where I worked, we had significant recurring events with lots of lectures and labs. Nearly everyone shared their knowledge. The walls are still ingrained with this thinking. I’d like to believe that was one of the reasons why we didn’t have a proper HR department. Pay attention to people and ask them to share their knowledge. It is a powerful recipe for happy colleagues.

So add K to whatever and brain-storm what it could mean. Enjoy!


  1. Fika is the Swedish “afternoon tea”. Except it is typically coffee and a bun, both before and after lunch.
  2. I might be fumbling Edward de Bono lateral thinking somewhat. So go for the source if you can: https://www.edwdebono.com/lateral-thinking
  3. Kompetens is my word for the notion of systematic and sustained effort of boosting your competencies. It just happens to be Swedish for Competence. 🙂
  4. Yes, you could use any word here. In preparation for long-haul flight with my colleagues, I combined K and in-flight magazine. The result was a pack of programming articles and a Java crossword that I constructed. I still remember the captain’s word of over the speaker system as we taxied out to the airstrip. ”Can all the passenger sit down.” I did manage to hand out the puzzle 🙂

Reuse that problem

August 31, 2017

If learning is difficult given the little time we have, then teaching is even harder to do. Right? Thankfully there are simple ways to get going. Reuse the problem you had to solve during office hours.

Learning comes in many shapes and forms. One of them is teaching. After all, giving even a mere introduction forces you to go deeper into the subject. If you don’t, you will neither understand the area properly or be able to answer any follow-up questions. Now, that could be embarrassing. Luckily, there is a way to get around both the problem of lack of time and the need for deep insight.

Sooner or later you will run into problems that no oh-google-save-my-job search will solve. Those type of obstacles are possibilities in disguise if handled well.

Many hours later you found a way to solve it and feel good about yourself for at least five minutes. Most people then go on to the next problem, not picking up the possibility in front of your fingers. Remember, you found a hole on the internet? However small or niched problem it was still something that no one had solved and documented. You can be that person.

This insight is the big leap of mind. Writing half a blog is dead easy once you have put in the hours of sweat. If you can’t do it while still at work, do it that evening while you still remember it. It will not take that much time and eventually someone else will find that text and thank you for it.

That wasn’t too hard right? Imagine doing a few more times a year, and suddenly you will have a list of texts that both shares your knowledge and establishes your command of the subject. In my book, it carries a lot more weight than a line in the LinkedIn profile.

A colleague of mine used this approach at the big customer where he worked. We were both consultants so sharing knowledge mattered more than “just” the joy of it. After a while, he heard that other departments were discussing his insights during their monthly meetings. It goes without saying that he was quite happy when hearing this. All the while he was being paid for doing it and delivering better value as a consultant.

KFika – the smallest start to learning with coffee & bun

August 28, 2017









An Ex To-be

August 25, 2017

I graduated from Computer Science in my mid-twenties. As a 35-year-old programmer I was already a senior. Hitting forty I was a has-been in waiting, an ex to-be1. At fifty plus nobody believes I can program anymore. My conclusion; straight out from school we got to learn again …and again. But it’s not doom and gloom — on the contrary.

If it was possible to create a diagram of the competence over a life span, it would look something like this:

Figure: The life’s competence curve. Yellow curve: We go through education, work hard and then wait to die. Red curve: You’re promoted. Ouch.

Time is on the horisontal axis and vertical is the level of proficiency we master in our day to day job. The yellow line is the competence curve of the old good days. You spent a quarter of a century in education2 and then used that knowledge for the rest of your professional life. After that – from a professional competence point of view – you wait to die.3

Suddenly, one day you’re promoted. It could be that you’re called on the lead the team or department. There is one major problem though. You haven’t taken a single course in “Management 101” or “Leading by example”. Let alone regulations, benefits of diversity or …well, you see the problem. As you can imagine, your competence curves takes a major hit. After all, you spent all those years learning how to build bridges and whatnot.

Except this curve is not true any more. We don’t get to spend 40 years honing our skill set (or just one single role transition as described above).

Thomas Jones, an American professor at MIT, tried to estimate the “half-life” of an engineer. Or more correctly, he described the time it takes for half of your knowledge to be out of date and in dire need of an update4. He arrived at the figure of ten years. But yet, his estimate stems from 1966… Today some believe this knowledge decomposition to be less than five years. A software engineer comes in even lower — below three years5. This is all the more jarring since it usually takes half a decade for studies at university.

Principles of career

The Peter Principle6 states that “managers rise to the level of their incompetence”. They stay at this level that they cannot handle. He argues that we promote people on the basis of their performance in their current role, not the new one. This applies to us all. Whatever worked before, we will try again until we no longer can perform adequately for a given higher position. This is when our careers stop. This does sound bad, but it still was the “golden” days of working. At least we hade some time to prepare for that new level of responsibility.

Enter the Dilbert Principle7. The cartoonist and author Scott Adams believes that corporations tend to promote the least competent people to management. The intent would be a way of minimising the damage that they might inflict on the organisation. It is a good dark joke, but with a grain of truth to it. A friend of mine described how she and a group of friends decided to start a company directly after graduation. They went around the table and dispensed the responsibilities. At the end they still had one role to fill and no takers.
– Oh, I can be the CEO then! If no one else wants it, she exclaimed.

We have entered an age where not even prior experience is needed. This of course has its upsides, opportunities come quicker than ever before. But still, it can be hurtful to learn on the job with real people as guinea pigs. My friend? She worked for five years as the CEO making the company grow. She learnt a lot.

The linear progression that was the norm during the Peter era, is now more akin to jumping stones. Back and forth, it can be hard to make out a pattern on certain people’s CV’s, but it usually is there. It could be a wish to change the world somehow somewhere. Or that you follow your friends as you evolve through different companies. The more extreme will end up with roles as plentiful as badges on a scout’s uniform.

Where does this leaves us?

Our knowledge that we built up in school will deteriorate — no matter what. We shift roles a lot more during our career.

We need, and are being forced, to make this the new default. Life long learning is a must. Schools must teach the art of learning — not just the various subjects. Organisations must search for new career paths that allows us to try out different roles. It can be done in a more safe way than the current drive-by-appoint-and-forget our new managers. Why not “CEO for a week” apprentice? Or “Undercover Janitor”?

Most importantly we need to incorporate learning as an ever ongoing — and fun — part of our jobs. It has to be a joy to evolve, otherwise we can’t keep doing it. It will just be too hard.

Thomas Jones also estimated how much time we need to invest to keep up. Over an engineer’s professional life span (s)he would need the equal of two extra engineer degrees beyond graduation8. That’s a lot and hard to comprehend. Translated into a work week, you would need to spend around half a day. Let us adjust to present half-life and to software engineering. We are looking at a day’s worth of learning — each working week of the year. Tough, but also some serious fun in my eyes.

That much learning on the job is tough to come by. Chances are that you toil away in a company that is not ready or willing to spend that much “not working”. I’ll dive deeper into what you can do about this in future blogs.

All doom and gloom for the “old”?

At the start of this blog I was a bit harsh about the life expectance of old developers. Are we obsolete by the time of 45? Absolutely not!

A survey looked into the effectiveness of different generations9. Turns out that the older generation (40-50 year olds) came in slightly better than the youngest generation (20-30) by a couple of per cent. The biggest differentiator was the ability to avoid making serious mistakes. So keep learning, keep harnessing those experiences. It will make you better as we all grow older.

  1. Swedish: blivande f.d.
  2. Assuming university level studies and, yup, I am counting parents as well.
  3. My apologies for being rude in making my point, of course old people learn 😉
  4. “Technical Obsolescence”, IEEE Spectrum http://xplqa30.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=5216873
  5. “Lifelong Learning for Engineers: Riding the Whirlwind”, National Academy of Engineering https://www.nae.edu/Publications/Bridge/LearningforEngineers/LifelongLearningforEngineersRidingtheWhirlwind.aspx
  6. The Peter Principle of promotion, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
  7. The Dilbert Principle, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
  8. “An Engineering Career: Only a Young Person’s Game?”, IEEE Spectrum http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/an-engineering-career-only-a-young-persons-game
  9. Darn, I know I have that article somewhere!While I’m looking, please enjoy “A Sharper Mind, Middle Age and Beyond”, NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/a-sharper-mind-middle-age-and-beyond.html

’98 and the Spreadsheet

December 14, 2016


Some IT Skills entered into an Excel Spreadsheet.

Some IT Skills entered into an Excel Spreadsheet.



I just didn’t know much!
















What happened then?








Key take-away




What – two years already!

November 30, 2016


I could blame a host of things; I’m not.


I’d love to get your feedback as I go forward.