JT Pedersen » Collaboration

Deadlines By Fiat, Agile, & Disaster!

JT — Thu, 03 May 2012 18:02:33 +0000

Increasingly, I find that ‘Agile’ is essentially a modern day metaphor for Communication. There are volumes of books on the topic. Strong evangelists and enthusiasts. Devotees to a new process. Yet, if you boil it down, it always reduces to Agile==Communication.

Earlier this week I had the privilege of attending the regular Ann Arbor Agile Groupies event. The focus was fiat deadlines lead to disaster. For two hours, we traded stories of how arbitrarily set dates led to all manner of disaster: destroying morale, missing delivery dates, being massively over budget, and/or delivery crappy software.

We should probably make sure everyone understands what a ‘fiat deadline’ is, so we’re all on the same page.

In software development (elsewhere too, just with different terms) there is a concept known as the Iron Triangle. In short, all projects (e.g. product being built) are subject to the same constraints. They are:

Scope
What you’re going to do. Specifically.
Resources
What you need in order to do it.
Time
How long you need to finish.

The triangle is rigid and within it is Quality. Delivering a quality product demands a tight link between Scope, Time, and Resources.

Scott Ambler writes a good piece, specific to software, in The “Broken Iron Triangle” Software Development Anti-pattern http://bit.ly/Juk4OR

Having laid the foundation then, a fiat deadline, is one set without understanding the inputs required to deliver. If management declares when a project will be completed by a specific time, without knowing or understanding the corners of the respective iron triangle, they have created a fiat deadline.

You’ve Seen It Before
Many of us have seen these situations. A team is working on a new product suddenly a new deadline is set. Or, perhaps the team is halved or scrambled. Or, the deadline stays the same but a ‘bunch’ of new ‘mandatory’ features are added. The variations are infinite. The result is invariably the same though: The iron cross becomes distorted, broken, and projects become late, over budget, and failing to deliver the expected features. Quality, customer satisfaction, and profitability all suffer.

One of Agile’s key promises is for development/engineering to be more responsive to never-ending change, mitigating damage to the iron cross. (A crude overview for those new to Agile…) This is done by working as small teams, in open-space environments, breaking projects into ever-smaller chunks (sprints) of work. To make sure everyone knows what is going on, members frequently (at least daily) do ‘stand up’ meetings, tell everyone else what it is that they are doing at the moment and maybe for the next couple days.

The problems, as this week’s discussion (fiat…disaster) unveiled, even when practicing Agile, all the same disasters can—and do—keep happening. While many crises are mitigated, the magnitude of ‘disasters’ still exist.

Why?
Through all of this, the key to success ultimately lays with frequent, transparent, communication. Product Owners need to let their teams know about what’s going on outside the company, and the potential changes that may occur. Development teams need to accurately forecast their work, and make sure the product owners understand their constraints and ability to deliver. Together, everyone needs to agree, to negotiate, what the project’s scope will be.

Failures to deliver on plan, on budget, as specified, and as promised overall, depends on everyone effectively communicating.

For instance, Agile purists will decry those who do ‘checklist’ Agile. In other words, teams ‘going through the motions,’ checking things off (see, we did it), but not really living in the dream. What’s the dream: For everyone to freely communicate, to minimize or eliminate surprises, so the end deliverable matches everyone’s expectations.

In the end, the team that has more, better, transparent communication, will outperform any lesser team. Whether they practice ‘agile,’ or not.

What are your thoughts? If you’re using Agile, thinking about these issues, then you almost certainly have experiences and an opinion. Leave a comment and let everyone know what you think!

image credits:
Diagram, JT Pedersen
Talking Guys, Rafael Marchesini
Hiding Face, Scott Liddell

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15 Ways You Can Be a Better Speaker

JT — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:12:28 +0000

In the past three years, I have spoken with a number of audiences. And I have found the experience to not only be rewarding but surprisingly enjoyable. For most of my career, I did not ‘avoid’ speaking opportunities, but neither did I actively pursue them.

Now, I look for opportunities to speak.

Following is a short list of lessons learned that have helped me be a better speaker. Perhaps they will help you, too.

15 Ways to be a Better Speaker

It’s about the audience, not you!
Focusing on why they spent money to hear you speak, what they want from you, what you can do for them, lowers your anxiety. Why? Because it’s no longer about you.
Study the topic of Presenting
Read their books and follow Garr Reynolds, PresentationZen; Nancy Duarte, Duarte.com
Avoid Crutches
Remember, PowerPoint/KeyNote are there to support you. Not, the other way around.
Do NOT memorize your presentation verbatim.
Make your key points through selected short stories whenever possible.
One. Idea. Per. Slide. Period.
Seriously.
Avoid Bullet Points
Whenever possible (see previous item).
No one really cares how many slides you have. (See previous, previous point)
Unless your presentation sucks.
Only use graphics that make your point.
Avoid gratuitous gimmicks like 3-D charts, fonts, and the like.
Using graphic imagery to support your point.
Full-bleed pictures (covers entire slide) with minimal text (<5 words?) can be very powerful.
Simple is best.
Simple does not mean preparation will not be complex though.
Pay attention to your audience.
Watch their faces. Watch body language. Adjust your delivery if necessary.
Be human. Smile. Relax.
People want to relate to you. Don’t be a stiff ‘corporate’ persona. Leave the can of non-stick Teflon spray at home.
Your First 30 seconds are important!
Don’t waste them by blathering through a self-intro; they likely know something about who/what you are already.
Get out from behind the podium.
Your audience wants to see you, to relate to you (previous point). Don’t hide from them.
Never stop learning.
Practice. Study. Study the topic some more.
Bonus item: Nobody is perfect.
Your audience does not expect you are either.

I really do enjoy studying, and doing, presentation. If you want some more quick insights, you can read some of my other related articles:

Audience Engagement
What I’ve Read Lately: The Naked Presenter
What I’ve Read Lately: Resonate

These are just 15 of the many little things I’ve learned over the past few years. Hopefully they’re not all new to you. Perhaps some will be new take-aways. The list could on much longer, but I’d really like to give you the opportunity to share your experiences.

What have you learned about presenting that you’d like to share?

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Who Needs to be In on Software Licensing Change?

JT — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 14:12:08 +0000

This morning I discovered an engaging article, “Making a Successful Software Licensing & Entitlement Management Project a Reality.”

The crux of the article is a focus on two groups, Product Management and IT, that need to be involved when deciding to make changes to your company’s software licensing and entitlement systems. (It was a mouthful, sorry ‘bout that)

Having spent a lot of time in licensing issues, ranging from contractual , to operational and support concerns, as well as helping drive technology selection, I felt some embellishment was called for.

Beyond Product Management and IT, there are two key groups that should be involved, which the article either omitted or ‘lumped in’ with ‘everyone else.’ They are Product Support and Operations.

From a Support perspective, it is important they are included well before deployment. Managing licenses, and their related support issues, can have a very strong impact on how your product’s received. Failing back end databases, licensing migrations, authorization paths, (enterprise) server authorizations, and the like are sophisticated concerns. If Support’s not involved, not trained, and not well-on board, you’re setting yourself up for CEO-level phone calls.

Deployment (licensing) technologies are ‘necessary evils.’ The challenge is to make sure your problems (need to protect yourself against IP theft), do not become customer problems.

Because of support issues, Support should be involved early on in the decision process. Their lessons learned can be invaluable and should not be ignored or overlooked.

As for key drivers in the process, I did find it interesting Operations was not considered a fore-ground player in the process. Quite often, Ops is involved because of cost of goods concerns, inventory management issues, and inflexibility meeting market demands.

Once the product (with its new licensing) goes to market, it is often Operations that carries the ball for making sure licensing processes are working 7/24.

Everyone will agree that constituent parties need to be onboard and work together. One addition I would make to the article, is that the key party being impacted should also be onboard. This is the person who will be directly impacted by revenue gains/losses/limitations due to licensing issues.

In many cases, this is the CEO his or herself. If s/he understands the impact, the odds are s/he’ll be a key supporter—driver even—of change. In other cases, that key person, the one owning the P&L, may well be the Product Manager.

(photo credit: Sachin Ghodke)

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Crisis, Chaos, Panic, and Its Corollary

JT — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 14:39:18 +0000

This past month, I had the opportunity to do some software consulting. It was an interesting environment. Everything was a swirl of chaos, panicked surprise deadlines, and daily crises. During one meeting, responding to the latest short-cycle deliverable, one person commented, “…we never have time to do things properly. Are we going to have time to do this one right…?”

The longer I spent with the organization, the more full my calendar became with meetings. Some meetings rehashed previous ones, others tried grappling with the latest perceived conflict coming down ‘from on High.’ Others were simply crises responses.

As an outsider, two core issues seemed to be very consistent. Yes, there were others, but two in particular. First was poor internal communication between groups. Second was a lack of clearly defined processes; everything seemed ad hoc, seat of the pants.

Most people tend to bristle when more structure is placed in front of them, when flexibility, creativity, even the ability to initiate something, is taken away from them. Yet what I experienced was an environment that begged, not for overbearing structure, but for a bit more than there was.

Perhaps 50% of my time was consumed helping the team respond to crises. Invariably, these ‘crisis’ activities stemmed from the organization not being aware of what other organizations were doing. The organizations had strong interdependencies yet upstream decisions were ineffectively, incompletely communicated with those being impacted downstream. The result, budgets being impacted by ‘unplanned’ million-dollar ‘surprises.’ Senior management of entire organizations being sidelined by the need to respond to the crises, and in turn their own staff.

Why the lack of communication? As a temporary visitor I can hardly claim to understand all the contributing factors. To a degree, they really don’t matter, right now, here, today. What was apparent to the observer, to me, was a lack of structured process. Whenever Organization ‘A’ made a decision, it was often done without downstream consideration, and worse, the decisions had no way of being effectively broadcast.

It’s an interesting corollary: Decisions made in a vacuum can often create explosive pressure.

Whether large scale, or small, professional or personal, we have all experienced the frequently negative outcome of decisions made in a vacuum. In some cases, it serves to illustrate why leadership is ‘lonely at the top.’ There are occasions where decisions simply have to be made, and it often rests on the shoulders of a sole individual.

As a percentage of the whole, that is the rare occasion though. The easiest way to minimize potentially negative downstream impacts, is to involve—to some degree—the other parties impacted by the decision and resulting actions. The annual family vacation is more likely to be successful, if everyone has a chance to at least provide input. The same is true at work. We can rush in, make hasty decisions, and be surprised by the results. Or we can engage people in a process, and have a reasonably confident expectation as to what the results will be.

Which do you prefer?

(Next article: Few Like Rules; Fewer Still Like Corporate Anarchy)

(photo credit: Audrey Johnson)

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Information Radiators–Which Do You Use?

JT — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 15:31:50 +0000

Information radiators. Hadn’t heard that phrase before last night’s Agile discussion. What’s an information radiator, the best example was cited by Helene Gidley. Helene used the example of the ‘thermometer’ charities use to show progress toward a goal. Driving down the road, in a glance, you can tell if there has been progress and how much.

We spent a fair amount of time discussing ‘information radiators’ in the work place. In software development arenas, these can include Gantt charts, pie charts, burn up or burn down charts, graphs of new bugs reported against bugs fixed, and so on.

While we all had good examples, some the group wanted to hear more about, others less exhilarating, there was one almost overlooked. Us. You, me, each other, we are all very powerful information radiators. A person’s body language, words they choose, tell us volumes and are easily forgotten in a world of charts, graphs, and tables.

As the discussion evolved, the group also spent time discussing radiators’ scope. Some information radiators are intended only for the workgroup level. Others need to serve mixed groups, at peer level in the same organization (developers|developers), or different hierarchies (development|management|executive staff). How information is consumed, distilled, and redistributed (if at all), is very important.

Finally, there is the concept of collocated teams and organizations with very geographically dispersed work groups. The radiators we pay attention to can vary wildly. Some remote contributors had key contacts ‘in the office’ that kept them up to date. Others rely on IM presence indicators, while in one extreme case, an individual’s company actually has remote robots. The remote staff actually use a robot, controlled by a joystick in their home office, to ‘drive’ themselves into a person’s office to conduct a discussion. Me, I’m happy with IM, thank you very much. The robot is cool, but…

So, questions bare asking: What do you use as an information radiator? What works for you, in your line of work? What might you add that could contribute significantly in your workplace?

(photo credit: Rafal Krawczyk)

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Do You Have: Social Media Paranoia

JT — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 20:54:07 +0000

This past week I enjoyed a discussion about how companies are making use of social media. Or, not. It seems fair to say based on casual observation and reading that the majority of businesses still don’t get it. Or, at the very least, they’re not actively participating which is effectively the same thing. You have to participate before you can ‘get it.’

The catalyst for discussion was a Fast Company blog on, “What Should CEOs Tweet?” One correspondent commented that his own company blocks social media and actively discourages it totally. He said they even had to watch a video discussing the ‘terrors’ of social media.

Paranoia can indeed be good. After the Wikileaks indication that the president of Afghanistan’s ‘paranoid,’ I thought, "…and I would be too, if I had every gun in the region pointed toward me at some point." Probably why he hasn’t been assassinated yet.

More to the point though, I believe social media is here to stay now. Based on my observation and reading, it appears the majority of businesses still don’t understand social media. Or, at the very least, they’re not actively participating. Which, really, is the same thing. You need to actively participate in social media before you will ‘get it.’

Folks, social media is here to stay. Be paranoid if you wish, bury your heads in the sand. But realize it is human nature to want to share or broadcast information as far an wide as possible. It’s been true since stone tablets, papyrus paper, Gutenberg’s press, telephone, fax machines, and more recently, email. Every major evolution has let us make available more information, more freely, than before.

Fighting Social Media is like yelling at the wind!

Seriously, social media because of it’s broad appeal, breadth and depth of reach, is too entrenched to go away. Rather than yell at the wind, businesses need to learn how to harness it, or at a minimum, live in harmony with it.

There are two popular books out right now. On a more personal level is Chris Brogan’s (and Julien Smith) Trust Agents. The other is Charlene Li’s Open Leadership. For businesses, Open Leadership is a practical, pragmatic, and far-reaching discussion about how to integrate it into the fabric of existing companies.

If you’re in business, you cannot afford to ignore social media. Being an emu (think: ostrich) will only be helpful in letting your competition finish eating your lunch and then going on your vacation.

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Leadership Demands Team Coordination

JT — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 20:56:52 +0000

Does it not?

Read Dan and Chip Heath’s article in Fast Company today, “Team Coordination Is Key in Businesses.” Quick overview, they used three real-world examples emphasizing their point. In short, while you can do brilliantly, alone, for an organization to be successful you simply must work together.

It’s likely you have experienced situations where, even when individuals performed their roles just fine (admirably even), the main activity itself failed. If everyone ‘did their part,’ the odds are it was a lack of coordination causing the failure.

This is something hard to teach, often learned only through painful experience. Early in my professional career, I strived to be the brightest star, or the shiniest tool in the tool bag. As my horizons moved beyond being an individual contributor, it quickly became clear how important coordinating with others was to my—or my teams—success. How often do we each tend to work hard at being the ‘star’ rather than making sure we fit well with others?

Which is more important? The saw or the saw’s tooth?

Military boot camp teaches this in dramatic fashion; some lessons are by design, others not. One such example struck me after lunch one day. I had just returned to the barracks, double-timing it down a 10’ wide sidewalk. At an intersection I had to stop for traffic to clear before crossing. Later, as part of an 80-person company, I was marching back down that same side walk, in lock-step with the cadence being called out. As a polished company, a team, it felt as though there were nothing that could stand in our way. I almost felt like daring someone to stop in front of us at an intersection!

Later, I was the senior sensor operator on a naval aircrew, tracking submarines. Successfully tracking a submarine requires the utmost in fever-pitched team coordination. The best crews have sensor operators, pilots, a tactical coordinator, and navigator almost reading each others minds—communicating freely—and anticipating each others needs.

Just as incredible as coordinated team’s successes can be, their failures can be every bit their equal. One mission pitted us against a friendly sub in a training exercise. At the time, we were the Wing’s top-ranked aircrew. For over an hour everything was going beautifully. Then, ironically, the ‘tacco’ or tactical coordinator ignored requests for an equipment change. He ‘felt good’ with the situation, ignoring his team’s repeated requests, until finally it was too late.

The submarine took advantage our complacence and disappeared. After a half-hour trying to re-attain the target, it was clear: all was lost. It was a perfect example of how, if just one person drops the ball, if one crewmen thinks they’re the ‘star’, an entire mission and $100Ks can be wasted in an instant.

More recently, in the real world, my team was struggling under the burden of endless ‘fires.’ We were performing our own tasks without problem. Internally, I knew my team members were all doing their jobs. Yet, we seemed to never be able to damp out the fires.

We created a list of all the major points of interaction between our team and others. Things like sales people reaching to individuals for special requests; project timing pressures; customer requests; equipment failures; and, the like. Then, we created a matrix noting how often each problem occurred and the time involved with each incident.

Surprisingly, the most ‘visible’ sources of problems had the least impact. A relative ‘sleeper’ turned out to be how we managed change requests. The process was dated, lacked key information, and allowed too much informality (e.g. tracking). After redesigning the change request process, the team met with external parties to educate them as to the need, the mutual benefits, and the new process itself. Four months later, as changes worked through the system, we finally noticed that, yes, the wild fires were starting to subside.

Not too many of us are able to succeed entirely on our own.

A team, no matter how big or small, can only succeed if everyone talks with one another, coordinating their actions. In the end, a well-coordinated team looks as if it were one.

Photo credits
Wood texture: Rosille
Wood stack: Marta Sobo

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Incredibly Useful iPhone Apps

JT — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:01:07 +0000

Even though I’ve had my iPhone for quite a while now, I continue to be amazed at the sheer range and depth of application offerings available for it. Even when there were ‘only’ 20,000 apps available, there was always something available to solve the need of the moment. Now there’s over 133,000 apps, the sky’s the limit.

One of my favorite examples was while having coffee with my friend and minister. He was bemoaning the fact he had the Bible installed on his smartphone, but that it wouldn’t let him read anything past about Matthew or Mark. Sure enough, I was able to find, download, install, and show him a copy of the Bible on my iPhone, with 6 translations, in about 2 minutes. There really is, an app for everything!

So here are some of my own ‘top’ apps for the iPhone, based on my current activities:

Air Sharing Pro
Incredible tool and perhaps the most powerful app I have on my phone. As a WiFi accessible external drive it provides conventional foldering and document viewing not otherwise available on the iPhone. It also functions as a web server, complete with login capability, letting you do file sharing. This is useful for teams needing an impromptu workgroup file server, perhaps while preparing demos out of a conference/hotel room, or coffee shop. It even let’s you send document to a printer if configured. And, I’ve only scratched the surface…
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Bing & Google Search Apps
These apps are very similar tools for streamlined use of their respective services. Both let you either key in your query or use voice input. Even though they have strong similarities its interesting how different hey are.
- Google’s search app loads noticeably quicker. Raising the phone to your ear, it automatically switches to audio input, then starts ‘thinking’ as soon as you lower the handset again. Works very well.
- Bing’s search app take longer, but it has a far more pleasing interface, showing you Bing’s daily image. One thing I really like is Bing will accept voice input via my Bluetooth earpiece if I’m using one—Google will not.
- I enjoy using Bing’s search app more. If I’m in a rush, I’ll use Google’s.
  .
Tweetie & TweetDeck
Here’s a pair of well-recognized tools for Twitter users. As with the search tools, which you use at a given moment depends on the moment.
- TweetDeck is hard to beat. Very functional, syncs your search/list/group columns with TweetDeck on your PC. While it is very good in its own right, being able to have a PC-equivalent version, that you can sync columns with, is very effective. Good for extended use.
- Tweetie is also good though not as feature-rich, making for a much quicker launch. There are times when you want quick, simple, and effective. If all you’re planning to do is a tweet (or two) and then move on, Tweetie’s the way to go.
  .
The Weather Channel
What’s to say. Works well, delivers more weather info in the palm of your hand (e.g. hourly or 10-day forecasts, animated radar, and more) than you could get 5 years ago watching TWC for an hour. Want entertainment, do multiple refreshes during a major spring storm, and watch the 10-day forecast go wild:).
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Facebook / LinkedIn
Current iterations both work much better than earlier; especially in LinkedIn’s case.
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WordPress 2
If you use a WordPress blog (self-hosted in my case), this is a good-to-have. Supports creating Posts and Pages. Most important, let’s me manage and reply to comments while on the move.
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WiFiFoFum (WiFi Scanner)
This delivers a basic WiFi ‘scanner’ functionality to your iPhone. Useful in scanning relative location of WiFi hotspots in your vicinity. Provides both tabular and radar display modes, and whether they’re secure or not. Can be helpful getting a better picture of ‘what’s around you’ than simply looking in the iPhone WiFi table. You can also use the app to connect to an identified hotspot without having to go through the iPhone’s own WiFi settings interface.
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Bump
This is similar to the notion of ‘beaming’ contact information to others’ phones at a meeting. Both iPhone users must run Bump on their phone. The sending party selects the contact info to share, and then they ‘bump’ their phones together. Neat idea, fun when it works, which isn’t often enough for me. Worth a mention though…I’d like to see the concept work better.
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Share your favorite iPhone app with us. We’re all on the outlook for useful apps—half the battle is just knowing they exist.

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Is It Agile or Software Anthropology?

JT — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:50:18 +0000

Monday night I had the opportunity to attend an Agile Groupies meeting. It’s a semi-regular gathering of folks (developers, business analysts, product managers, etc.) interested in a specific approach, Agile, toward software development.

For those of you not familiar, Agile development focuses on smaller development teams, working on smaller deliverables, in highly iterative, somewhat less structured approach. Part of the thinking is that if you are delivering in smaller, more discrete ‘chunks’ of working product, that the overall process will be more ‘agile,’ more adaptive to ongoing change during a product’s overall life cycle. The idea is to move away from ‘heavy’ less flexible disciplines, and back toward lighter, freer, approaches.For this meeting, the discussion focused around panelists discussing how Business Analysts work with the development team. At a very high level, a Business Analysts (BA) represents customer needs, and formally crafts the requirement documents (we need the product to accept X as input, look like Y, and output Z).

The discussions were interesting. The challenges varied by size of the organization represented, including how well BA inputs truly communicated what needed to be done, as well as where Agile methods frequently had been seen to fail.

What I’ve found is that Agile development meetings tend to migrate into a discussion of how organizations communicate internally. This meeting was no exception. Key issues were quality of BA deliverables; Development’s keeping track of dependencies; mapping work against planned deliverables—either within a team or when working with other teams; and, anticipating or working around structural ‘platform’ issues.

The recurring theme though was—how individuals and teams communicate—in order to overcome their difficulties. The examples are really not significantly different than with any other software development team. The quality and completeness of BA deliverables (including acceptance specifics), development estimation and progress tracking, and including such things as user acceptance testing (or lack thereof), are the same regardless of the specific discipline(s) used within a software organization.

The key to success is clear: Smooth, rapid, delivery of a product demands effective, clear, and complete communication between all involved parties. It is better to risk over-communicating than the alternative. And, only through frequent communication can teams hope to adapt to change (they need to know about it).

Maybe we should call these Software Anthropology meetings.

(image credit: Artiom (Artem) Chernyshevych)

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Dead Pecker’s Corner

JT — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:59:02 +0000

Leadership opportunities can be found in all kinds of places. Sometimes they pop up in the most unusual of circumstances and you adopt the role without even thinking about it.

Not too long ago, I led a group of motorcyclists on a ride. We started out in downtown Asheville, North Carolina. Traffic was heavy enough that even with GPS, safely and correctly leading the group through the lump of spaghetti masquerading as a series of closely clustered interchanges proved challenging.

15 minutes, and I’ve already had to make a half-dozen impromptu leadership decisions—each one with 5 friends mentally critiquing my every move.

So about 10am in the morning, we’re somewhere north of Asheville, as our small group begins to work its way westward. We’ve left the big city rush well behind us, we’ve unwound ourselves, and eventually roll into a small town that the crush of time seems to have left alone. It’s the sort of town where everything’s almost sleepy, peaceful, with that small town ‘clean’ about it.

The main intersection has a store of some sort on one corner, a gas station on the far right corner, and sidewalks, street, and parking lots seem to be one integral piece. No rudely intruding curbs. If it weren’t for the concrete sidewalk, you’d not be able to tell where the road ended and parking lots began. It’s the sort of town where everyone is mindful, polite, and big curbs aren’t needed for the sake of enforcing civil obedience.

It really had been an absolutely beautiful morning so far. The days at this year’s HSTA Sport Touring Association Rendezvous had quickly become routine: ride early, because by lunch time the energy in the clouds would build up, darken, and the second half of the day would have you riding through a very dense atmosphere…the sort of density you wear as opposed to just ride through.

So here we are, blue skies, some fluffy white clouds, and the heat of the day just starting to make itself known. We’ve all fueled up and rolled our rides off to the side, out of the way. Relaxing, standing in the hot sun, I note there’s this group of men sitting across the street, lining a stone wall, sitting under the only readily available shade to be had.

After a bit, keeping to ourselves by the bikes, it occurs to me: Why am I standing in the sun like this, I’ll just mind my business, and go sit down on that wall under the trees.

So it’s only about 30 feet from our bikes to the shade. As I meander over and start sitting down, one of the fellas starts trying to stop me from taking a seat. “Hey, you don’t want to sit here…” He’s the chap, fifth from the left in the picture.

Sometimes, you just need to take a risk.

So here I am, sitting a couple feet from the last guy in the line, and this friendly looking fellow stops in front of me. Leaning over, just loud enough for the others to hear, he says, “I tried to stop you from sitting here. You know what they call this don’t you?” Looking down the row to my right, I see this line of older guys all leaning past the one in front, looking at me. “No. What?”

They call it Dead Peckers’ Corner.

I just couldn’t contain myself. I burst out laughing. It only took a second, looking at these older guys, to see just what he meant. We introduced ourselves briefly; I sorely wish I could remember the chap’s name. These guys were all here, enjoying themselves, sitting, chatting, and enjoying the morning.

This chap, we’ll call him Bob, proceeds to tell me how the oldest among them is well through his 80s. Bob seems downright proud to let me know it’s the locals who’ve labeled the corner Dead Peckers’ Corner on their behalf. So there lays part of the story.

Now, see, it’s real comfortable in the shade…

I called across the street and invited another of our riding party to come on over. After all, it’s comfortable and cool, why stand in the sun? So, we’ve all been laughing, and he comes on over. Sure enough he takes a seat and up pops Bob, “I tried to stop your friend… You know what they call this here place now, don’t you?” “No, what?” A whole new round of laughter burst out welcoming the new member to the club.

One, by one, we encouraged all but one of the group to come join us. Each time, the cycle repeated itself. I figured if we all seemed to be having such a good time, I’d eventually get the entire group to come have a seat. Yep. Except for that one hold out, Hal.

So, here’s four of us, all sitting on a wall with silly smiles on our faces. “Hey, HAL, come on over!” Now, at this point, why he’s still standing all alone in the sun I’ll never know. Sure enough, with a hint of guardedness on his face, Hal comes on over…

It was a truly special moment for all of us. We got to enjoy a nice seat in the shade, join a respected local club, have a friendly joke at our own expense, and a great laugh. It wasn’t just me, I suspect there’s a reason I’ve had a few requests for the picture…

If it weren’t for being willing to take a risk, albeit a teensy-weensy one, along with the ability to convince others to follow, a great time that was…would have never been. Being a leader isn’t just about title and position. Most often, it’s about seeing an opportunity and being open to take advantage of it.