If life were a game...

It's been about 8 years since I got my Agile training from James Grenning and started an Agile Pilot with my team. Right from the start I was super keen and got people practising TDD and Pair Programming even though I didn't really know if that effort would pay off. I just knew we had lots of problems with the old way so I wanted to embrace the new. So I'd run my own little sessions with the broader team in Sydney sharing Agile concepts and ideas. Giving us a chance to discuss things and keep learning long after James had left. But often I would present new ideas and a few people in the group would respond "oh of course, that's just common sense". Initially I thought it was great as they were embracing these ideas as valuable even though it was not what we were doing before. But after a while I started to get frustrated because they we're not really listening. If some small part of a concept fit nicely with their "common sense" then they took ...

I'm sure you've heard the expression "It's an Art, not a Science". You may have even used some version of it yourself. I think I hate that statement. You may have been (or likely will one day) go to the hospital for an operation. And may expect to be put under a "general anaesthetic". But how does it work? You'll take something else to put you to sleep but how does this other drug stop you from feeling pain that would otherwise shock you right out of any deep sleep? They've been used in medicine for 150 years so this should be a simple question right? "Advances in cell biology, genetics and molecular biology have transformed anesthesiology into an active area of research. Scientists have largely abandoned the idea that anesthetics work by acting on fatty molecules in cell membranes. The bulk of the evidence now supports the idea that the drugs target specific protein molecules embedded in nerve cell membranes and interfere with neurotransmis...