 Hello mate, nice to see you. Cheers bud. Yeah cheers everybody. Cheers. Is there a Welsh word for cheers? I don't know, I'm scared to say it in this pub. Okay, so we offend anyone. We're in Wales. We're in Cardiff, Cardiff City, capital. We are inside the castle. One of Cardiff's oldest pubs. We're in the goat major. Is that a goat or is that an actual military round? No, I think it's, well there's pictures of a major with a goat on the wall. I know it's a big rugby pub in Cardiff from having been a student here. Like Google? But it's a brains pub. And there are a few brains pubs, obviously with brains being a Cardiff-based brewery. The goat major is one of the main brains pubs in the Royal Regiment of Wales. There's an infantry regiment. And it has a mascot of the goat town. And the goat mascot and the goat major. The goat major is a military rank and the goat mascot is a regimental goat. And there you go. You alright? Very clever. The soldier in charge of the mascot, this is the guy that's the goat major. Right, he's a corporal despite being named the major. That's a bit weird. There you go. There you are. I like the castle here. Yeah, we're touring. It's at the end of the city. No, it's the end of St Mary Street. So it's literally right at the end on Castle Street. Looking over Castle Street. Do you like a nice castle? What's your favourite castle? I know you don't do favourites, generally. No. Probably because I can't remember things. But we went to a cool castle, Tintagel Castle in Cornwall. Yeah, that was quite cool. Very good. And we went to one in Switzerland, which is really cool. So it's almost like an island on its own. I can't remember what it was called now. That's some fancy French Swiss name. A very nice arty picture of it. Maybe I'll find it and get you to put it on the podcast. You're drinking something different. I am. It's cider. And it is one of my favourites. What is cider? I agree. But you're some purists who disagree. No, I know. Surely there are still apples in it somewhere. It's Stofit Press and it's mixed berries. I've never had mixed berries stofit pressed before, but it's very nice. It doesn't taste of apples yet. It tastes of berries. It is like busy mobina. Cheers. And what have you got? I'm gone for one of their local, I think we've got a lot of choices there. So I've gone for Brains Gold, which looks creamy. It certainly looks creamy as it is settling. It is creamy. Yeah, slightly nutty. But only very, very faintly. Creamy, light, not too cold. Room temperature, a little bit low. It's nice. Definitely drink that. And we're not just cheering, cheersing ourselves today. No. Cheersing some of our patrons. We have some patrons. Yeah. Some followers who have almost brought us a virtual pint. Well they have. Yeah, they've donated some money to buy us a pint. So we're raising our glasses to Greg Pitcher in New Zealand. Greg, thank you Greg. And we're not quite sure how to pronounce this. David Gentry, we believe. Could be Gentry, but we're going for David Gentry. And he's in Georgia in the US. Atlanta, Georgia. Right, Atlanta is a city, Georgia is a state. We don't know where it is in Atlanta. It's a big place. Cheers, Dave. Cheers, Dave. Yeah, cheers. Anyone else? We'll save that for the next one. Okay. We'll cheers. Well, the next drink, maybe. Maybe the next round. So that's good. So yeah, if anybody wants to join in, become patrons, you get exclusive episodes. We're also recording these videos now, so you can see the video as well. The videos we'll be able to see. You can see the colour of my red pint. We'll be able to hear unreleased episodes. We've got some sighting feature. We've got some outtakes and stuff, some of the stuff that never quite made the cut. Yeah, we're going to release. Yeah, and our patrons will be invited to Patreon-only hubcasts. They're already out here. Exclusive. Anyway, so we're in Cardiff, working together again. We are. Probably turning the course this week. Yeah. Today is Tuesday. Tuesday. These days tend to blur into one another. You're struggling, aren't you? I can tell. There were points today where you were clearly flagging. You look tired. Tired eyes. With baggy eyes. Yes, tired. Lack of sleep. Getting to you. Yeah, it's accumulating. Is it? It's accumulating. Yeah, a little bit less sleep at every day. I remember I texted you the other day and I said, how are you doing? And you just said, generally we don't know how to answer that question. I miss your response. You know it's bad when I don't know how I feel. Yeah, I'm tired. And you were asking me some questions this morning. I just couldn't pull the fragments of information together in my brain. I've got a clue. So, yeah, you get stupider, don't you, when you're not sleeping? I think we've mentioned this before. I've certainly talked about this in a course before, but the correlation between tiredness and the effect it has on the brain is very similar to the effect the alcohol has on the brain. Oh really? See, I reckon the alcohol makes me smarter. The alcohol counteracts the tiredness for me. But they say driving the equivalent of driving at four o'clock in the morning when your brain's tired is the equivalent of being on the influence of alcohol when you're driving, so it's just as bad. It does funny things to your brain. It lowers your IQ, doesn't it? Yeah. As well as your ability to process and rationalise and compute things. Is it something like, you drop an IQ point for every hour of sleep you lose in the eight hours a day or something like that? Yeah, I believe that. I know if you're stressed, that's another factor as well. If you're in a highly stressed state, your IQ drops by about 20 points. Yeah. This is one of the reasons why you can't coach people if they're in a stressed state. To bring them back into competition, you know? Because they can't reflect, they can't rationalise very well. There's a ton of vision. So you have to ever have to have a better conversation. Yeah, just take the time to chill. Just having the right time to do it. Sometimes, equally sometimes, you just need to let people vent for a bit just to calm down. And just chill. And then they'll be ready to sleep on it. They say, go and sleep on it. It's not possible in my situation. Yeah, one of the things we're doing, we're going to do tomorrow is around decision making. We're trying to find the best circumstances for you to make better decisions. So we're working with a group of product owners. And product owners have to make hundreds of decisions every day. Probably didn't realise it. Well, most of us do, but product owners have to make a lot of decisions. And everyone will have circumstances where they generally make better decisions. And some circumstances where they make worse decisions. And a lot of people aren't aware of that. I know we're very different in that I quite like getting stuff done early in the morning, because you're more of a late afternoon person. So I'll get a lot of stuff done in my day before 11 o'clock in the afternoons. I'd much prefer to have it done in the afternoon now. So my web developer, Michael Tom, lovely guy, Tom Bedham is pretty good. I talked to him recently about this. He's got, I'm going to say personal trainer. He's either his personal trainer or his coach. I think he's also got a coach, a kind of professional coach. It's not you, by the way. And he was talking to me about this guy who's been working with him. He's told him or advised him to get up at five o'clock in the morning. I think it must be a personal trainer to try and adjust his day. So the idea being that you get up at five, and even if you're tired, you just get into that mode of getting up at five and doing something and giving yourself a list of things to do with that sense of achievement of having finished, no, a list, clearly a list of things by eight o'clock in the morning before anyone else has worked with them. You've achieved whatever that might be. So some of it might be training or running or living with Jim, but also some of it's work. So you have less guilt about working longer into the evening because you've done so much more in the morning. And he says that your body can adjust. It's just a matter of time before it adjusts. It becomes accustomed to getting up at five o'clock. And that's weird because at the moment, I think it's something to do with, that's probably easier during this time of year, which is around kind of Maytime now. It's getting a bit lighter in the evenings and in the mornings. I woke up this morning at five a.m. not because I was going to get up, but because the lights in the room were set so that my body woke up. So I could have got up, but I went back to sleep. You were at three snooze kind of like, I'd have a snooze. Three snooze? Yeah. It's like, no way. I'd be nine, ten snoozes if I fit. I usually wake up before the alarm goes off. I set them on, but it was very neat. But are you ever really asleep now? I like sleeping. I am a light sleeper. Godzilla woke me up this morning. But I'm just going to say something now. About getting up at five and doing stuff? I do like the idea. That's something that motivates me in a way. I love the fact that I'm getting stuff done before because you were awake. You've achieved a lot. I give you a sense of fulfillment. Right, yeah. And I quite like quiet as well. I mean, it's quiet at that time of the day. You get a lot done before the house. Just hear the birds and the guitars. So at the moment with the new Belly Noodle on baby, that's exactly what I'm going to have a little. You're managing to get stuff done at home. No, I am still getting stuff done. But I'm up earlier than normal. He actually sleeps really, really well. Just we haven't adjusted our routine. So he'll go to sleep at seven. And wake up at five, six. I don't know that. This is a pretty good stretch for a couple of months old. I don't need to feed him during the night. But that would be fine if we went to bed early. But you don't. But we still go to bed at eleven o'clock at night. So we get five hours late. So I'm getting up at five. And my wife can go back to sleep. She's pretty good at that. I struggle in some way to go back to sleep. And they're just lying there, thinking about stuff that I could be doing. So I would rather get up and get stuff done. Which just means that I would then... I was looking forward to having lots of afternoon nap. Because I love an afternoon nap. But I haven't had as many as I would have liked. Unfortunately, you can't do that at a train course. That's why we're probably going to do our jobs. I don't know. You can cover me tomorrow. I'm sure we can work that into the curriculum somehow. Of how one of the learning objectives is based around nap time. Mindfulness. Yeah. And it's level. But you say about prototypes. But being conscious of when you're making a decision when you're tired. Yeah. That's against that emotional intelligence. But you make more negative decisions. Yes. That decision for tea. Have we talked about that before? Yeah. On a pubcast? Possibly. Let's go ahead and mention it again then. That was parole judges. Parole judges in the US. At the start of the day, they made... It was about a 75% chance that the person up for parole, that label title would be getting granted parole. And as that session went on, the sentence went down and down and down and down and down and down. So if you were lucky enough to be up first, you had a much better chance of getting parole if you were up just before the end of the session. Yeah. And then by the end after the session, the judge would go away and have a little rest and have a little snack. Yeah. It's also to do with your hunger level. And he'd come back and he wouldn't be quite as hungry. And he'd be less tired and he'd be refreshed. And the chance of parole went up to 75% again. Do you feel a much more negative state of mind? Because you're tired, because you're hungry, because you're stressed, you're generally made. A more negative, cynical, short-term decision. This reminds me of... This happened recently. We won't name who it was because that would be bad. Okay. It was a recent course where somebody fell asleep. Okay. And it's that classic post-lunch slot, which I think I was pulling the post-lunch slot on day one. And it was a quiet section. Nothing to do with the content? No, nothing to do with the content that was presented. But one guy just drifted off. Yeah. And yeah, I don't think... It was just a snoring. It was just a snoring. Luckily, it did snore. But I think, you know, it was enough that somebody else, other than me, in the group noticed it. You did? Yeah, I can say. I remember... I told... This is a story that me and Nige shared ages ago. And I remember Nige said that happened to him when he was in the BT once. And Nige used to go around and kick the chair. He'd kick people's chair if they fell asleep. I remember... You wouldn't mind me saying that. Because it's hard not to take it personally, but it's also... It's got a lot to do with... Your brain just... That time of day. Especially in a learning environment. Yeah. Kind of needs a break, doesn't it? Maybe that time is the way forward. I am... So... Teenagers have different... Biographies. Yeah. So this has been quite publicised a lot recently. And how, actually, teenagers going to school really early is a really bad idea. Yeah. They're much more awake later afternoon in the evening. Yeah. Their brains just aren't going to soak up as much information if they're going to go in early in the morning. Yeah. My 16-year-old daughter, she loved that study. She went to school and said, Look, scientists say we should be coming to school later. But they didn't agree. I think there's a lot to be said for flexibility. We do know a lot more about ourselves than we did when we designed things like the working day in the school day. So, why? Why not? It's still based around an antiquated kind of factory-based day, isn't it? Yeah. The factory opens at nine and closes at five. We're kind of clocking in, clocking out. Which doesn't work in every environment. It's crazy, isn't it? We just do things because that's the way they're done. Yeah. I suppose that's one of the benefits, really, of globally dispersed teams. It does give some... And I always used to encourage some degree of flexibility on working. And you get more overlap. You adjust working hours to when people... A lot of the developers I used to work with used to enjoy working evenings. And so they'd go home and they'd carry on. Because they could all dial in remotely from home or whatever. Dial in. Dial in in. On their 50s it's a chemo then. Using their RSA IDs. What are they called? RSA. The most secure access. Yeah. Those are the days, mate. No, they were. And they weren't. Really weren't, they weren't. Rose-tinted glasses and all that. Rose-tinted pint. Yeah. But yeah, in terms of, it amazes me how much we say about the brain and struggling with tiredness. How many projects, the horror stories that I used to get involved with, where long hours was just, was punishing, was like... Not really for me, because I wasn't probably doing some of the more critical coding or the critical release, but making changes in production in the middle of the night. It's never a good time to do that. No. When you're tired. Yeah. When you've already been working five, six, seven, eight weeks. It's never a good time to do it. Definitely, definitely a big link there with the... It's a self, it's not self-affirming, but it's self-reinforcing loop. You make more mistakes therefore you need to work longer to fix the, but you're going to be more tired. Consequently make more mistakes. Yes. So what's the cure? What's that what you're going to do? How are you going to cure your sleep? What's your strategy? Well, so I need some time off. And my problem is it takes, there's quite a lag time before I can free my sales. That's because I'm booked up so far in advance that those commitments that I thought I could do I have to see them through really. Some of them, some of them I could change. But yeah, I think generally leave it quite a bit of time in the summer where I can just relax and watch some cricket and go to the seaside with family and things. So I'm looking forward to that where I can reset a little bit really. I just come back for a weekend off as you know well know, just took a long weekend. And it was one of the I think one of the things that increases stress these days is for me is is the plan, is the calendar. It's seeing, it's trying to find a gap. So we had a weekend off we went to centre parks for the weekend and we literally we didn't we compared it to when we first went to centre parks where we scheduled ourselves to the hills basically had something to do with the kids every hour. That's getting from one part of the park to the other. And this time we went for four days because we live locally to it, it's not too far away. And we just said we don't know what's going on. We had a rough timing that we needed to get in and get out. But we just said see whatever happens. And it was really nice just not to have a schedule to work just to completely free ourselves. Times to be somewhere, we didn't have to check our phones for where we had to be or where we had to stop. We did stuff but we decided to do it on the spur of the moment. Okay. Did that restrict what you could do? Were there things that you couldn't do because you had a plan? Not really. We investigated a few things that we turned down but there was nothing that we'd chosen to do late but then we had to forfeit because we that was probably one of the benefits it wasn't that busy we didn't really feel we lost out but it was just and the kids really appreciated it because we just did stuff played cards you don't have to schedule that that's the kind of thing and the kids have come back and said that they really enjoyed it. The cockings, no. Sevens? Sevens. Sevens? No. Yeah. In a round you have to put cards down in sequence in four suits and you have to fill the card and we played what else did we play? Three blind mice I need to educate you on card games mate and as my daughter my daughter said in her words stripped down naked it's called stripped down naked but she calls it stripped down naked which is funny so yeah we've told the kids as well no TV no Xbox back to basics no woods trees, card games, barbecues it's nice it's nice to stick it right back it's good I felt better, I felt rejuvenated a little bit. What others has to be? What others is on the board? Yeah Not looking strong from Carrie and me all this time Strong shoulders mate. Yeah What else is going on? There's Agile Austin at the moment isn't it? It is but we should call him Agile Austin Scrum Gathering Austin. So as we record this we don't know when this will go out but as we record now time difference was about 5 hours so they're in kind of mid part of day 2 which I assume is open space after we threw it away in London they've brought it back for Austin so we're wrong so yeah they're doing that today day 2 or 3 so hello to Nigel I'm sure we've texted Nigel but he's over there at the moment Cheers Nigel Yeah Hopefully passing the good word on I hear the keynote went well I think so if you didn't know the keynote was Daniel Pink Daniel Pink author of Drive and a couple of other books he's got a new book out as well but I didn't realise he was some kind of what's been a writer for and he read that book he's got a very he did a good TV show as well I'm trying to remember what it was called it was basically about psychology it's like social psychology experiments what it was called now but it was quite good, quite interesting but it's nice that I know from the tweets I've seen that Howard the sublet chief protector of the Scrum Alliance has been re-emphasising that the Scrum Alliance is now trying to maximise impact not revenue and I think that's a good sign when they get a speaker like that at a major global event like that that's a... not cheap old amount and that's what these galleries should be they should be inspiring, they should be great speakers something that we tried to change in London and I think we we started that process of moving of trying to bring in bigger budgets bigger speakers, better speakers especially for keynotes and inspiring talks so I'm going to partially in a limited way take some credit for that and you should make you're a part of that you should give yourselves a credit now again pack yourself on back one for our patrons though do you know whether any other sessions about any other speakers apart from him that they brought in from outside the community there was the inventor of the hashtag which sounds like some kind of fictional if I was on a game show and I was trying to be funny about my job or my claim to fame that's what I think I'd say in two lives one truth or something but apparently there was a man who invented the hashtag from a Twitter, I assume from a Twitter and I think he's one of the keynotes and what's the message there? I don't know anything about that one I don't think I'd perhaps I'd dreamt that I'm not sure it'd be a funny dream but I don't know so I assume that's one of maybe today's keynotes or I don't know who the third one would be if they're just going for three three keynotes maybe it's a surprise or something I don't know yeah so that's in Austin at the moment Chris Macina invented the Twitter hashtag there you go it's your designer who first proposed that Twitter adopt the hashtag explained why you never bothered to apply for a patent on the idea can you do that? can you patent the hashtag? no someone patented the let's get ready to rumble let's get ready ready what are the words? when someone enters the ring it's a bruisey buffer Michael Butler every time someone says that someone gets money crazy isn't it? unbelievable Jeff I'm going to see if I can find the schedule I got caught on this today do you say schedule or schedule? I say schedule schedule's American isn't it? I caught when I was editing with the last podcast I caught myself saying schedule and it was immediately followed by someone saying schedule that felt a bit silly it didn't feel silly hmm it's not mobile friendly it's got one on the website the Gathering website it's not friend friendly it's not mobile friendly so that's dead what else is going on? what else is going on mate? emails message too shit isn't it? think about anything else? any minds? what was the stuff coming out of our product owners? troubles to day? Oh yeah what could be talking about It's amazing, so we play with some story cubes today, so it's kind of the end of the day, a bit of an activity around that, just to emphasise product owners as storytellers rather than story writers. And then there's some genuine kind of joyous laughter. Yeah. Yeah, I think they were quite hesitant to start with, weren't they? But they really enjoyed it. Those people didn't. Jennifer and I think it was a bit childish until they did it, until they were happy to go with the idea that you're not going to be ridiculed or judged. We genuinely enjoyed it. So it's kind of nice when they finish on a positive. We were asking some questions, there was a lot of questions about stories and how we were asked about whether there was just a sort of missing interpretation of what was the difference in a story and a task. And that idea of developers breaking down a story into smaller stories, but they're not valuable, they're just their tasks, like integration tasks or something like that. Which isn't a story. It's not valuable to the user or the product owner, I think, about how stories have become very, very mechanical and solution-focused rather than exploratory. When you said it today, when you said that the worry is that agile is becoming a user tool, that it's an enormous assamus with the writing, the task, the activity of writing a user tool. And I'm worried that maybe even a lot of product owners in that room today talk about being tired, you talk about being stressed. That's not the best use, in my view, of the product owner's time is writing user stories. And rather talk about one story than write three. Yeah, if you're spending, if you're tired on writing stories, it's time to start questioning why you're writing. Yeah. Why not? Well, we're also talking about whether, somebody asked us what our opinions were about internal stories from, say, marketing. Would you write a story from the perspective of marketing? Yeah. Of course you could. But equally, another way of looking at that is that the marketing aspect is part of the definition of done. So not everything in your product tackle needs to be stories. No. It's become a bit of an obsession. Yeah. A bit of an industry. It's similar kind of, you know, it's sort of people just grab onto something, don't they? That desire for certainty and standardisation and pleasure, if you like, is too big. Living in that uncertainty, should it be this, should it be that, maybe we could do it like this, maybe we could do it like that. Maybe we could make a decision here at the time. It's too scary for some people to do it. You made a good point today as well, that those types of acceptance criteria, objective test of all criteria are great if you know what the outcome should be. Yeah. But we shouldn't have given when then. Yeah. Which is a very, like you said, very simplistic. Domain. Or an obvious domain. Then you can do that. If you know what the outcomes are. So if it's like, if you're testing algorithms, if you're testing calculations where there is a known expected outcome, then fine, it works. But if you're testing or if you're trying to experiment, hypothesise, probe, you don't know what the outputs are yet. No. So it's harder. It's a lot more difficult to test definitively, objectively, in a data-driven way maybe. It's a lot more subjective and interpretative. Is that a word? Yeah. Yeah. But if that's the environment you're in where you can't predict the teacher, you can't know what it is until you see it or know what it isn't until you see it, then there needs to be a lot more explosion. But that was my kind of frustration with it. Obviously, I wasn't there and they weren't my intention. They weren't my invention. But I believed the intentional stories was to be that collaborative exploration and emergence rather than trying to predict things in advance and write it down. Yeah. See, that was interesting. And we also talked about how value is not a one-dimensional thing. It's a multifaceted concept. Yeah. And they've made multiple different things. So value isn't just about am I making money. It could be am I reducing risk? Am I gaining new customers? Am I getting return on my investment? Am I reducing the attention of them? That could all be value and knowing what facets make up value and which customers and which users and which besavers is a big part of the product owner's job. And connection with tiredness there? Other than the fact that we were teaching that at the end of the day. Connection with tiredness, I think? Yes. Go on, make a leap. So when you're tired, well, when you're stressed, when under pressure, you revert to what you know. You revert to your defaults, your title. We all have our defaults. We all have our preferences. We all have our sort of lazy mode, you know, like, where you're not really putting the mental effort into it. And you also buy it. Yeah, also buy it, yeah. And I think autopilot generally defers to the more simplistic, simple, robust, rather than resilient, creative, exploratory collaborative. And so in most situations, when we're tired, we'll take probably an inappropriate response. Easiest, quickest response. Yeah. And when your work relies on collaboration, collaboration requires energy. It requires positive interpretation. It is exhausting, I love it. Yeah, it is. It's not us. I just wanted to say that it's, I don't know if you can do it day in, day out, sustained, but in a fully creative space. You need to slow your brain down to different pieces. So, yeah, trying to collaborate on an empty tank is difficult. Generally think more negatively of people, which is exacerbated if you're not physically with them. So, yeah, tiredness will reduce your interpretation, I think. We would talk about this on holidays, this weekend, with my family. We were trying to, we were talking about, obviously, families, we know each other quite well, as you can. My lad, Owen, who's seven, works on the same, he works on a hangry basis, so if he's hungry, he doesn't shout on screen, but he becomes quite irritable and quite grumpy, it's all sulky. He will just shut down. It's a bit like me. It's been in my life, doesn't get hangry, but she's such strong as when she's tired. Tiredness is the thing, but she's not having enough sleep. Also, she's cold. So, she generally struggles in her body and brain doesn't work well in decision making on a coldness basis, which I thought was interesting. So, your environment kind of is so, can affect you so much more than you realise. No, the coldness is down to room temperature as well. Well, yeah, it's your body going into protect mode, isn't it? It protects your vital organs, taking blood away from extremities. And you've mentioned this again in other courses about the ceiling height. How much that can have a bearing on. Higher ceilings expand, you're thinking, whilst lower ceilings increase its focus. Yeah, vitamin D, sunlight, fresh air, that one helps. Yeah. Oxygen tax, maybe we should have oxygen tax. Oh, haven't we? I walked past, I was in a shopping mall yesterday and I walked past, basically it was a drip, an intravenous drip. No, it was vitamin water. So, you could have vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin D, just intravenously. And I know there are services out there where if you've got a hangover, they'll come and IV drip you some fluids to rehydrate you. What's words about it? Yeah. And maybe that's something, that's something I need, I need to invest in, I want to come do that because I don't need needles, but I could do an oxygen tank. That might work. That's worth investing in. Can you buy those? Can you just get another oxygen tank? I don't have to. A bot camera with a lorry just comes up. Yeah, anything on the dark web, quick. So, I'm told, the dark web. Anyway, we've talked for long enough. Yeah, get to your empty points. Thank you for listening. Just to remind you, if you want to become a patron of the pubcast, go to www.patreon.com or slash the agile pubcast. More details on that and all the content you can get access to. If you'd like to buy us a pint. But other than that, mate, thank you very much. See you soon.