I recently finished the book “Notes to a Software Team Leader: Growing Self Organizing Teams” by Roy Osherove.

This book has been advised by Simon Brown during his “Agility and the essence of software architecture” ‘s talk at the Craft Conference in Budapest (you can find an abridged feedback here).

Simon was referring to this book as it contains useful recipes and tips on how to move from the survival to the self organizing team phase and what kind of leadership style you need to adapt during this multi steps process. The final goal being having a team that did learn how to learn and which is mature enough to bring software architecture back to its developers.

Even if all this was very interesting, what was really inspiring for me in Roy’s book, was something I did not expect to find in it. It took me by surprise ;-)

Throughout the book, Roy speaks about the comfort zone. That zone where we are taking no risk, avoiding the changes. That zone we don’t want to go out because we have fear of the unknown.  The fact is that we’ll never grow that much staying there…

In the Learning to learn chapter, Roy wrote something that really striked home:

I think the true power of learning is to realize this simple fact: ravines eventually end and you are left with new knowledge. If you know this, you can start doing something incredible: you can begin plotting out future ravines that you might choose to fall into. You can plan your life as a series of learnings through ravines that you have carefully calculated to benefit you.

Climbing those ravines might hurt a bit but I’m quite sure that what you’ll see when you’ll look back where you were before, is worth the look!

Read that book and go where the magic happens!  :-)

Thanks Houssam for the picture!