Join The Book Club in September: Implementing Lean Software Development

Set intention. Read. Learn. Apply. Or procrastinate. Your choice.

Aug 24, 2023

We are about to kick off a book challenge in September. Topics: Apply lean and lowercase-A agile learnings with your team, learn speed reading, have fun. DM me LEAN if you’d like to join.

Below is our plan for the steps we’ll be taking. The goal is to get you applying an impactful learning as soon as possible. You may get your a-ha moment so quickly you won’t even finish the book, hah!

The structure of our club:

Kick-off recorded videos by myself every Monday
You’ll get a buddy assigned for accountability. Your buddy will be the best buddy for you!
Live group zoom call on Thursday
An accountability group and asynchronous Q&A in my slack channel (go team #lean!)
Reading will be up to your own level of commitment and accountability held and shared with the group members

Step 1: Set an Intention—Pick your Problem

The tech industry is notorious for new things. New frameworks. New languages. New code. New products. But in reality we are iterating upon fundamentals and exploring nuances that have not been tried yet.

Your intention is the same: You don’t read to create new knowledge. Reading allows you to bring nuance to what you already experiences and ideas you already have. This understanding of a new approach on what you already had in mind is what shapes a deeper knowing.

Here are some examples of intentions that are easy wins for quickly going through a book:

I want to take 1 point from the book and adapt my process to become a better leader
My team is working on an important project and we are struggling with silence. I want to improve communications in our crucial next few weeks
I want to explain the book to my team, inspire them to read it
I’m skeptical and believe I already know this—so I’ll read it to ensure I’m not being too naive about what I don’t know
I never finish books, so I want to improve on that mindset in 3 weeks with Denis and never worry about not finishing books again

The important factor is that your intention provides value to yourself and your team. It should be precise enough so that you can identify it and small enough that you can conceptualise it with a few actions.

You may explore the differences between understanding and knowing in a previous CTT issue below.

Stop Blocking your Team's Intuition

Denis Čahuk

June 16, 2023

I’m a recovering left-brainer. Early in my career I thought confidence was fueled by understanding. Understanding topics. Frameworks. Languages. People. That seemed all fine and well in my head. But it didn’t bode well in the real world. I understood— but wasn’t confident in my understaning.

Read full story

Step 2: Optimise your Process—Improve your reading speed and recall

I was given advice and already-bought courses for speed reading. I sat in on for over 10 years, dismissing it as “cheating”, woo-woo nonsense. Then I went on a cruise with my mentor and met my peers of fellow entrepreneurs and impostors. The knowledge density and material was packed! And I saw first-hand how someone devoured an entire book in an hour. That got me hooked.

This challenge is partly an inspiration to recreate that moment for you. Below is a summary of the advice I was given that I now got to appreciate more and understand fully:

Time-Saver: Time is precious. You aren’t always reading a steamy romance novel. You want the relevant content for you. The hidden surprises and gems. Now. And then do the important things in your life. Speed reading allows you to read and comprehend information faster.
Knowledge Amplifier: Most people read with their ears, instead of their eyes. They listen to themselves subvocalise what they skim over at low volume. The eye movements are not conscious and completely automatic.
But knowledge and understanding is more like a Picasso painting, not a meme one-liner. Imagine the difference of looking into a rich painting vs. listening to someone describe it to you?
Boost Your Confidence: Get rid of that feeling of “I never finish a book!”. Read, explore, skip pages guilt-free.
Improve Focus: Speed reading techniques can help enhance your focus and concentration, enabling you to stay engaged with your reading material. It can be quite difficult at first and is definitely not a passive exercise.

Step 3: Absorb the A-ha moment you need to apply a change

Planning is half of success, as they say. Once you’re clear on your intention and have improved your process, it’s time to explore. We will go through strategies on how to best prioritise reading the book. This includes:

Things to watch out for
Topics to prioritise for your intention
Note-taking
Setting up your environment for reading
Reading with intention

The most detrimental way of reading is the attitude of “I have to get through this chapter.” That way you are optimising your attention for filtering out content and blasting through the pages instead of keeping an eye out for valuable information.

This is a bad habit and we’ll pay extra attention to it on our live calls. Active reading is closer to a treasure hunt!

Step 4: Apply the change

It’s all for naught if it ends up in your brain and you garbage collect it. Have no illusion—you will forget most of it at some point. The key to new knowledge is to ensure it leaves your brain as a byproduct of actions making old information obsolete by adding more detail to learnings. This is what makes understanding personalised, slowly shaping it into a deeper sense of knowing.

This will be the focus of our live huddles.

Are you ready to become #lean?

Reply with the message LEAN or DM me if you’d like to join. You don’t have a lot of time, we start September 5th (Tuesday) and will sync calls in the CEST/EST timezones.