A Heedful Programmer...

• Sees actions from team's POV
• Communicates openly, deliberately
• Constantly refines actions based on feedback

Background

• Karl Weick
• Aircraft carriers
• High complexity, high reliability

Heedful Interrelating

• Collective mind
• Connections between your team
• Handle unexpected problems

How do we become more heedful?

Share knowledge

• Don't silo
• Some problems need MULTIPLE experts
• Pair frequently, collaborative code ownership
• Shared responsibility for being aware

Heads up, Blinders off

• Bring in newcomers that will question process
• Welcome new ideas, don't dismiss as "that's the way we've always done it"
• Be mindful about what you are doing
• Hold retrospective and take action

Pain Driven Development

• If it hurts, do it more
• Force yourself to get better
• Or at least make it obvious that the process is out of whack

Have a pow-wow

• Shift from documentation to stories
• Talk about a feature as a group
• Bust out the white board
• Rely on each other to fill in details that cue retrieval

Warm Fuzzies

• Safe environment for questions/presenting
• Accepting of ideas from everyone
• Encourage community involvement
• People aren't resources
• Removing people from social interaction removes them from collective mind

Use process to build trust

• Use trust to remove processes that suck
• Independence => Expertise => Independence
• Constantly refining and retrospecting to find emerging patterns

Are you habitual or heedful?

next_week = clone(this_week)

next_week = retrospective(this_week)