Articulation

This was an interesting conversation with my 11 year old and 5 year old daughters about 'articulation'.

Younger one: I was bullied in school today. Do you also get bullied akka (sister)?

Elder one: Bullies are scared of me because I can convincingly articulate the sequence of events that happened with the bullies, to the teacher. So they never come near me.

Younger One: You are a tattle tale.

Elder one: No. I confront them first. Only if it doesn't work I use my articulation technique.

Me: That's interesting! In corporate,  we use our  articulation  skills not only to deal with bullies, but also to build a good rapport with our sub ordinates, peers, management and customers. The better we articulate our ideas/concerns honestly to them, the better relationship we build with them. 

To sum up, you are a typical corporate material 😂

Elder one: No thanks!

Dreams - Part 1

Here, I am not talking about the ambitions or goals. I am talking about the real dreams we see when we are asleep. To be honest, most of the times, I end up forgetting my dreams, when I wake up.

However, there are dreams that will never slip out of my mind. Whenever a problem runs deep within, and I am unable to solve it for a few days and it keeps troubling me, the solution appears in my dream. This has happened several times and I will talk about one such instance here.

Ping Fails!

Many years ago, when I was an entry level automation engineer, I joined a new team with not many seniors, who could help me technically. I was good at scripting and automation, but not familiar with networking. After writing all my scripts, I saw that there were a few failed test cases due to the ping failure to a server. I explained my problem statement, to as many people as possible including my mother :).  All of them gave me emotional support, but my journey was lonely. It was me and my problem and there was no body else in that world. I had sleepless nights sitting alone with my problem. One night, when I happened to sleep, I dreamt of getting lost on my way home. I called someone to ask for the 'route' to reach home (I have called my husband several times in real life asking for the route after getting lost, and I still do it. Lol).

The Route

When I woke up, I could recollect each and every thing that happened in my dream. I felt like somebody hit my head hard with a strong hammer and said the word "Route". I got up and shouted, "Perhaps, the ICMP packets lost their way to the destination server, because they did not know the 'route'." ; thereby waking up my husband who was terrified (lol). I ran to my computer and connected to the VPN. Working from home was not common those days. My husband was wondering what I was upto, during such early hours, even without brushing my teeth :). With the little knowledge I had about networking and lots of research on the internet, I found that the "route" to the destination server was deleted by a script that caused the issue. When I added that route, 'ping' succeeded. I was on cloud nine. I did not invent anything new. I was not going to get a 'Nobel Prize' for this. But it was definitely my small 'Eureka' moment. 

Eureka Moments

Perhaps, we all have felt our own small Eureka moments resulting from our dreams. When I think about it, this doesn't happen every time. It happens only when a problem enters deep into our subconscious mind, that it tries to fetch the data from some where within and gives it to us through our dreams.

Has the data always been there, deep within and we had missed to pick it up, that it comes out through our dreams? Or is the universe conspiring to bring the data to us because of the strong intensity of our thought? I do not know. But it definitely feels good.

It Is No More The Book I Knew

This interesting conversation between two characters, from an inspiring Korean series about books, authors and publishing, made me reflect a lot about the books I had read in the past.

Character 1 : It is an old book, a very good one. I kept reading it again and again, when ever I was happy, sad, tired etc. I had even gone to the extent of memorising the lines from the book. But off late, the book looks different to me. It is no more the book I knew. I started realising that I had missed a lot of lines or even missed to read between lines that conveyed strong meanings. Why does the book behave strangely off late?

Character 2 : The book has always remained the same. Perhaps, you (the reader) have changed. That is how good books are. 

This conversation was so relatable that, it reminded me of several good books. But the one that stood out was, "Tuesdays with Morrie" which struck different chords when read during different times in my life - 20s, 30s, and almost 40s. Do you remember any such book?

Root Cause Analysis and Empathy

 

Table Review

It was a post lunch session and I was one of the reviewers in the table review with the development team. The purpose of the activity was to find out how a bug escaped our development and testing process and reached the customer and also to find out means to prevent them in future.

My 11 Year Old's Observation 

We reviewed the 5 why analysis done and discussed in detail about the bug that slipped. When the meeting was over, my 11 year old who was keenly observing the conversations told me, "I will never enter the corporate world". I asked her, "Why?". "You are making developers feel guilty for a bug that slipped. They are already guilty. Why do you ask so many 'whys' to them? Imagine how they would have felt."

Paradigm Shift

Suddenly I could feel the heat on the other side of the table. How much offended they would have felt, that they even become defensive at times. They put their heart and soul into the feature. A customer bug would have pierced their heart and this exercise would have hurt them more. 

Purpose

However the purpose of this activity is not to blame a team or a person, but to come up with innovative methods to prevent similar issues in future. Continuous improvement is not only applicable for software development, but for everything under the sky. It is the only way to keep up the quality. Innovation and improvement are the keys to quality and success. 

Taking the Developer's Side

But wasn't it my duty to make the developer feel at ease and explain the purpose? When my 11 year old could empathize with the developer, why didn't I? The reason is that, my daughter is a recent developer herself and it has been a long time since I was a developer. She would always request me to test her coding projects, and a bug in her project is the last thing she would want to hear from me. :)

Lessons Learnt

Finally I learnt these precious lessons from my 11 year old. "Understanding the purpose of an exercise by all involved parties is more important than performing the exercise itself. Also, empathizing with our colleagues is an important trait to master while working in a team, to get the best results." 

Later, I explained to her the purpose of this activity and told her that this is not specific to corporates. I went ahead and told her that  'Continuous improvement' is applicable for everything under the sky. 

I am not sure if my little one ("What?? I am almost a teenager and you call me your little one?" lol) agreed with me, but I definitely learnt a lot from her :)