Thursday, December 26, 2013

Fail Fast and Fail Often

Fail fast and fail often is one of my main mantras which I use at least once a day if not more often both towards the people I coach as well as towards me. And I must confess, I failed again. But this time I was stupid enough to not see the signals. In my last post which is quite a while ago I announced that I start something new. And I failed badly for various reasons. It was once again a dialogue with Tom Graves via his blog which made it obvious to me. If you are interested read his interesting post about Starting Friction including all the comments. To be fair I actually already knew it without knowing, but the dialogue helped me to get it on the surface.

I really tried, but it blocked me. It blocked me in a way which made me stop blogging, which made me stop sharing public, which also made me comment less on other sides. The thinking process itself, how to structure, how to write made me fail. Fail badly. Now, during the dialogue with Tom I retweeted a tweet from Bert van Lemoen to Tom:
This was not at all meant negative, but perceived that way: 


I am sorry for that Tom, but it did enlighten me. Obviously the books are not (yet?) ready for me to start with. There is a lot more urgent and interesting things to do. Therefore I decided to move on and hopefully also find the energy again to share every now and then. Because writing my posts in the past never took long, but all of the sudden I started to think about writing and by that lost all movement. I do not know where this leads me to, but I know for sure that the idea of writing a book is for the moment history. It does not seem to be my medium to transport the message. Furthermore, when I look at my own reading it is quite obvious. Books about Enterprise Architecture never inspired me, Stories do the trick for me, fiction about people, emotions and such topics no matter what media (e.g. books, movies). Good stories make me think different and then I adapt and abstract it towards Enterprise Architecture and create just another (sometimes working) tool.

So, message of the day: Back to my strength.