speaker-0: So that's it.

speaker-1: Welcome to the fourth episode of our Surfing Chaos audio newsletter.

speaker-0: the chaos. And like other newsletters, this one's built for busy brains and moving feet.

speaker-1: And because we respect your time, we're gonna keep it short, sharp, and worthwhile.

speaker-0: and we're gonna keep it very sharp because we're gonna start with a little product commercial and I'm gonna be talking A little tip. A little tip? It is, it's a sharp tip. It is Noylent pens. I was thinking this week, now what would be my product pitch? And I would say that the most important product that I use daily is my Noylent Big One. And not only do I, this is what it's called, it's actually called the Noylent Big One. I'm not making this up and anyone that likes pens knows I'm not making this up. But it's not just a Neuland Big One. It is the 303 kind of light blue and it's a really nice little shadow pen. So if you're ever using a flip chart and you want to make your flip chart pop, you need to get a nice little gray washed Neuland Big One pen. That is my product commercial.

speaker-1: would like to just give these folks a little context in case they don't know that you do a lot of drawings on the flip charts behind you, but as a graphic facilitator.

speaker-0: You can call me a graphic recorder, you could call me a live illustrator, you could call me a visual storyteller. It really depends how much you want to pay me. ⁓

speaker-1: Okay, so he's got all these special pens that he's always drawing with, and now you know which ones to get.

speaker-0: This is it. you know, the great thing about these pens is if you get a Noylind Outliner, and we can talk about wedges and chisel tips and all different things, but if you go for an Outliner pen, once you've drawn or done all your writing, you can add your little grey wash afterwards.

speaker-1: and they don't blend, doesn't smear.

speaker-0: doesn't smear and that just if you whenever you're adding shadow by the way all you need to do is think left or right or top or bottom and then you add that in and it just yeah makes it gives you it gives you flip charts your posters a bit of an edge it makes them pop

speaker-1: What about if you use them on the vinyl static cling flip chart sheets? Do they work there too?

speaker-0: Noyland do do a different type of pen for white marker. Yeah, we could

speaker-1: We use the Copic markers and the problem with the alcohol-based stuff is that it starts to smear and blend into each other pretty easily.

speaker-0: It can and if you talk to lefties, anyone that's like a left-hander, sometimes it can be quite ⁓ tricky with white markers and things like that because you can end up rubbing the workout. I think that's why sometimes using a flip chart and using permanent pens, the noylins are quite useful.

speaker-1: All right, so you've talked about using your big one and rubbing one out, I think we're ready to move on to the next topic. So I've got some classes coming up. I have an ACSM on March 26th. I have a CSM on April 13th, a CSPO on April 16th. I'm also going to be adding another advanced CSPO.

speaker-0: We are ready.

speaker-1: And probably pretty soon, PMP and PMI ACP, I've got to get some of those back on the schedule. So if you just keep checking back, you'll be able to see those courses and come spend some time with me.

speaker-0: Fantastic, fantastic. So I suppose Dave, now that you've done your shameless self promotion, it's time to talk about what's on my mind, what am I looping about? And I would say, I would say that I want to revisit something that you were talking about in the first episode. And that was around the use of frameworks and methods and practices. And I've come to the conclusion that with a lot of the organizations that I'm working with, there seems to be a very hybrid approach, right? There seems to be a bit of agile, a bit of agile and a little bit of waterfall. combined and it's really more of a focus on tools in your toolbox rather than a checklist. What are your thoughts on this, Dave?

speaker-1: So I feel like it was hybrid about 10 years ago and that was supposed to mean having waterfall and agile exist side by side. I think we're moving towards a state where that barrier is dissolved completely. I mean, in my practice, I don't spend time differentiating between the two. I just reach into the box and grab whatever tool works. And I mean, I've talked about this before too. My hope for the profession is that people who do what I do develop skill and expertise in both areas. I think organizations have stopped thinking we should pick Waterfall or we should pick Agile. I think they're losing their ability to plan and they just want something that'll work. And the people around them, they'll grab whatever tools they can find.

speaker-0: Yeah. And I think this is sort of a bit of an add-on to the conversation we had last time on ⁓ skills over roles and more of a focus on being multifaceted.

speaker-1: There was another job study that I heard about this week where it was more sort of AI centric but the idea was that corporations are going to need to start focusing on people having like incremental skill jumps instead of like going and getting a doctorate. You'll go and get this one particular certificate or something and that'll give you a little bit of a boost and you'll build your career that way.

speaker-0: I like that. like that. Well, yeah, so we'll find out. We'll hear more from me when I go off to Scan Agile next week and find out what other people are talking about. there we are. We are now ready for you, Dave, to talk about Throne Burrow.

speaker-1: Throwing bones? right. So as a lot of people know, or may or may not know, I've been looking for a gig for a while. And it's a very challenging thing to find a job right now, even if you have decades of experience. But so I spend a lot of time paying attention to kind of what people are saying. And you know, for a while, people have been complaining about getting through the ATS agents. Those are the things that screen your resume when you submit them. And what I heard recently was that people have now figured out how to manipulate their resume so that it prompts the ATS screener to promote their resume higher up in the ranking so it gets looked at first. that whole system is being corrupted. People are figuring out how to game it. And I have also heard that on the recruiter side, one of the struggles now is that they're getting resumes for people who don't exist. The person that shows up for the job interview is not the person who submitted the resume. Or there's also rumors about foreign actors submitting for jobs as well. that whole system, which has gone through a really short cycle of trying to optimize how we make sure we find valuable candidates, is starting to collapse around itself. And I don't know how soon that will change, but I have now encountered two different groups that are focused on trying to bring the human aspect back into recruiting, which I am looking forward to very much.

speaker-0: That's it. mean, and that's a very interesting, relevant future trend, isn't it?

speaker-1: ⁓ One more thing one more thing. I did have an interview where I got interviewed by an AI agent and It was awesome. It was a great interview. So it's not all bad. There's some people what? No, I mean it was responsive to the things I said it picked up on specific like software packages that I talked about and asked deeper questions And it had a friendly tone to it. It didn't feel like I was talking to a robot it it it was great

speaker-0: I'm We will maybe talk about this in the future, but my wife and myself, we were talking about how within chat GPT now, it can support with learning. you can prompt, can prompt you to ask certain questions. for children, but it won't give them the answer, but it will say what they will help them evolve their thinking. we'll, you know, I talk about, know, cognitive atrophy is on the increase because there's a lack of usage. So it would be interesting to see how those two evolve over time.

speaker-1: Well, I think it's that whole thing about is it augmented intelligence or artificial intelligence? Your whole anti-robot stance is based on it being artificial. I think if you can find a way to use it to augment you, test the things that you create, like we were talking about before we started recording, if you have a vision statement, have the AI challenge it and find the holes in it. mean, things like that, it can strengthen you if you use it that way.

speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, some really interesting things. And it's not new. Nothing that we're talking about is cutting edge. I was watching ⁓ a panorama documentary a few weeks ago, and it was sort of talking about the fact that in the 1950s, there was a census of around 270 jobs. And even then, they were worried that robots would take our jobs. And what was interesting was there was only one job that disappeared and that was the elevator operator. And I think the point being that throughout history, new technology has expanded the economy and it's actually creating new jobs. So that was one viewpoint.

speaker-1: mean, you lose the elevator operator, you're going to have more repair people coming in to fix the thing when it breaks.

speaker-0: There we go.

speaker-1: Right. now it's your turn to promote your upcoming stuff. People should know that we're recording this the day before you go to Scan Agile. So, Stew will be back from Scan Agile and tell us about that next time.

speaker-0: I'm glad you reminded me of my tense, my tenses. ⁓ Absolutely. So yes, so coming up, I have a CSPO, a virtual CSPO on the 20th and 21st of April. And I then have an ACSP on the 22nd and 23rd. So you could get yourself ⁓ a week's worth of product thinking and getting deep with that product ownership. accountability. ⁓ And then I'm also very excited to be running my first Visual Thinking for Collaboration micro-credential on the 28th of April. And as I was saying, I am going back to face to face and I'm going to be running a face to face CSPO in Birmingham on the 11th and 12th of May.

speaker-1: And I taught face to face last week and it was fricking awesome. So, so cool to be in a room with people doing this stuff. It's such a better experience for everybody. All right, so we've got to do a little promotion of the book now, of our book. What's our book called?

speaker-0: Number one is coming to save you.

speaker-1: The power-ups to help serve the chaos. So this is from the very back of the book. And this is part one of our power-up hacks. So it says, everything is temporary, whether good or bad, it won't last forever. And there's always something you can learn from change and how you respond to it. Even when it sucks, find the thing that will make it valuable in the end. I think that's really important. No matter what you have going on, when something crappy happens, there's a lesson in there. And if you can find that lesson, Find that thing to take away, then even though whatever happened wasn't exactly what you wanted, you got something from it that will make you richer in the future. I think kind of reframing that stuff, always trying to look for not necessarily the silver lining, but the takeaway that you're going to get from that I think is a really important part of staying positive in this dystopian work hellscape that we're all living through.

speaker-0: It's a crazy world we're living in right now, my friend, and so I think that's a nice end to that.

speaker-1: And what would make it even less dystopian and hellscapey is if you wouldn't mind going and giving us a thumbs up or a like in whatever podcast app you listen to, let people know that this doesn't suck and then we'll get more listeners.

speaker-0: it suck less. Thank you.

speaker-1: or more. Thanks for listening. ⁓ Serve the chaos.