About Me

My Story

I grew up on a Hebridean island off the west coast of Scotland. It’s beautiful, but don’t be fooled that the pace of life is slow and quiet.

There’s a lot of work to do. Many locals work more than one job, especially in tourist season.

It’s fishing country. And whisky country. And most people volunteer as well.

An Agile-Coded Archipelago

Locals are self-reliant, economical and collaborative. You can even encounter Lean Six Sigma practitioners in the pubs.

Information gets shared face-to-face. Processes devised in the cities tend to get ignored or subverted if local knowledge can implement something more effective. The weather can render long-term plans defunct. And people help one another out whenever it’s needed.

It’s Agile by default.

As well as working in the food and drink industry as a teenager, I worked in fish farming and local journalism, learning skills I didn’t realise were going to help me out in my later life profession.

With a father in the navy, and many relatives around the world, I also wanted to explore.

Moving Away

I went on to get an Undergraduate MA (Hons) in Politics from the University of Edinburgh with two additional years’ study in Arabic thrown in. It only fueled my desire to travel much further.

I signed up for a two year conservation expeditition to Sri Lanka. There I spent long days training local students in scientific techniques, gathering research on local communities and documenting data on local biodiversity to highlight the need to protect Dumbara Kanduvetiya (the Knuckles Mountain Range) amid the threat of deforestion.

The jungle remains protected, the communities safeguarded and some of those students are still at work, protecting the magical biodiversity in those beautiful hills.

I look back at this time as my first real coaching job, even though I didn’t realise it in the moment.

Assessing and Forecasting

I then moved on to the world of international security. I started as an intelligence analyst, specialising in armed groups like the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Somali pirates and al-Qaeda.

I was based in a small office in the Lloyd’s of London building, advising insurance underwriters in a historical but also thoroughly modern working environment.

I also had the profound privilege of working regularly in Baghdad and other parts of the Middle East to document violent trends in real time.

Transition to Tech

Despite being completely non-technical, I had a passion for scaling products using tech solutions. This resulted in me being given a neglected information portal to run.

It was a repository for up-to-date intelligence on developments around the world but wasn’t being treated as premium, whereby I saw it being a global market leader.

My CEO agreed (when others didn’t) and made me the Product Owner, before I knew what a Product Owner was. I was given a development team from a partner insurance broker and we got to expanding its capabilities.

Extreme Applications

This expert crew of coders, testers and designers very patiently coached me on product ownership, eXtreme Programming (XP) and how to scale develop incrementally. And I stole every facilitation technique they taught me to take back to our intelligence department.

It turns out that XP works for intelligence analysis as well as software development. Don’t forget that writing is coding and coding is writing.

And if you agree that software development is in the cynefin domain of the complex, then I hope you agree that intelligence analysis, and the forecasting of human behaviour at scale, is also archetypally complex. No wonder XP works so well in the field. I hope our governments are paying attention!

From then on, I was hooked. I realised that the deliver of technical solutions was supercharged when you got the human elements of collaboration configured correctly. It spoke to my roots but pointed to an exciting – if occasionally daunting – future.

So I retrained.

It wasn’t a quick or easy journey, and it was hindered by my mental health issues, but I persevered because I had a north star to focus on.

I realised that I didn’t want to be a Product Owner for a global intelligence product anymore. That was too niche and triggering.

I actually wanted to be part of the human side of things. Then someone told me that I would make a good Scrum Master.

That was the game changer

Suddenly I saw something that looked like the shape of me. It seemed to speak to all my values, my characteristics and my behaviours. It was what I wanted to be when I grew up.

So I started building expertise.

I moved into the world of startups. The chaotic, frenetic intensity of constantly learning, with the added pressure of wondering who will pay the bills.

I studied, trained and got the qualifications.

In my spare time

I even took the various learnings to my volunteer work. I’ve been a committee member of the Highland Games on my home island for years. I regularly find myself in the position of Lean Agile coach for the charity.

I faciliate our yearly retrospective. I coach psychological safety in our meetings. I’ve turned old-fashioned paperwork into digital information radiators without upsetting the community elders too much in the process (not easy – especially the ones in my own family).

Returning to Corporate

Professionally, I got a job at the UK government’s startup incubator, then moved into finance, getting a job for the only bank with a branch on my home island.

I noticed that in banking you often face the blocker of “we can’t do that here because we’re regulated.“

I usually wasn’t satisfied with the opinion. If someone from the regulator had been in those conversations, in nine times out of ten they would say “actually that sounds sensible and would benefit the customer. You’re good to go ahead and do it“.

So it dawned on me that both banking AND regulation needed to be more Agile – that is, they need to be collaborative to get the best outcomes for the public and the economy.

So I got a job at the regulator and started working towards helping it become a smarter, more responsive, adaptive and Agile organisation.

Agile regulation is so niche that it felt like many of our innovations were truly groundbreaking. Agility with a regulatory flavour. Some things were standard Agile, others were slightly tweaked for situational nuance.

As well as coaching a brilliant team of data scientists and the DevOps specialists who configure their platforms, I also run the Agile Community of Interest, open to all, with (sometimes irreverant) webinars, workshops and open discussions. I help manage the organisational Agile wiki with knowledge articles, videos, links and podcasts.

I also run an internal, two-day Agile training course open to all colleagues to help people from all backgrounds and job titles understand the basics of this amazing and surprising world that showcases the importance of human nature if you want to get your tech right.

In Conclusion

I’ve had all sorts of angles of experience to the one thing that I want to focus on: human collaboration in the world of work. The various challenges and traumas I navigated along the way do not define me, and they should not define any of my readers.

I want us to make things better – which means I want you on the journey too!

So let’s go. Read on if you want to know more. Look at the support page if you need some help getting personally optimised for your future self.

And you are always welcome to leave comments or send me an email if you have any questions, feedback, suggestions or otherwise.

Let’s go!