Two weeks ago, I got back on the ice after being off for four and a half months. It was great to be back on the ice and reminded me that I need to keep working on my skating.  When I skate regularly it improves, and the more days a week I do it, the quicker it comes back. I am not the best skater, and with lots of younger guys playing will never be, but I just want to enjoy myself in a fun competitive environment. 

When a much better skater has the puck and someone like me is trying to defend them, their ability to change direction quickly, and multiple times allows them to get passed. As I was trying my best to position myself so I could try to defend them, get a poke check, a stick in the way or somehow disrupt them my brain started thinking about some parallels. 

There is this notion that being agile allows you to adapt to situations. There is a project management practice called agile, in which the key principle is that change is going to happen, and the programming process should not only assume it but be able to react to it efficiently. For those not familiar with it, development for years was done in a method called waterfall.  This is spending months or years gathering requirements for what needs to be built, and then building it and delivering the project in one cycle.  It was akin to building a house, where someone makes a blueprint and then the builders build it. This of course is good, until between the time you get the requirements and get a product that things have changed.  

Along came agile, and said let us build stuff in smaller increments, and get feedback and change as needed. It was a drastic change. The parallel to hockey is think of a good offensive skater constantly stopping and changing direction based on what the defender is doing and making as many moves as needed to finally get past. The ability to change and adapt helps both situations and is an interesting way to relate the two. But there is something that few people talk about. 

For a hockey player to get that good at a prominent level takes years of practice.  The practice is not during game time. In many cases someone to get that good works at drills, gets skating lessons, goes to the gym, does off ice training and more all so that they can be a better player on the ice. The way we think about development or even business management is to give people some training, tell them to read or do online courses and implement it in a production. It is not years of practice, coaching and training. And doing the work outside of the day job really does not exist. There could be assumption that the person should be doing it themselves, but for a professional hockey player the practice, training etc. Is part of the job. 

I wonder if those who think about any change think about practice. Malcom Gladwell did say to be an expert takes ten thousand hours, but that is any skill including changing how you do something.  

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This Blog is a labor of love and was originally going to be a book. With the advent of being able to publish yourself on the web I chose this path. I will write many of these and not worry too much about grammar or spelling (I will try to come back later and fix it) but focus on content. I apologize in advance for my ADD as often topics may flip. I hope one day to turn this into a book and or a podcast, but for now it will remain a blog.  AI is not used in this writing other than using the web to find information. Images without notes are created using an AI tool that allows me to reuse them.