Tall Boy Radio

#TBR238 - Living an Agile LIfe

Some people may have heard of Agile Software Development, others may even have heard of running Agile Business Projects. But Steve and Lynzie recognise Agile as a philosophy and way of life not just a project methodology. They have built a life based on that philosophy. They will be sharing 5 Agile life hacks that will help anybody to live a better life.

The opening music is "London Bayou" by Oscar Albis Rodrigues and the closing music is "BDS" by Lewis PIckford.

tallboyradio.com

Duration:: 1h 34m
Broadcast on:: 16 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

[Music] Welcome back to episode 238 of Tall Boy Radio. You know, as we go live, we've lost somebody, but he's back. He's backed up, bless him. Lord knows where he went, but he picks his moments as always. So, before I introduce our two guests, let's introduce the disappearing man of the moment. David, how are you? Very well, thank you. Sorry about that. I, you know, I realized I wasn't actually logged in. I looked at the login button, and that had the exact opposite effect to what I thought it was going to do. Actually threw me out rather than logged me in. So, yeah, hi, everybody. I guess. Indeed, indeed. So, just before we start, we'll say hello to our guest now. Stephen, you would just tell me that David's a man of tech. Do you want to revise that statement? Oh, absolutely. To be fair, I did say it's not correct. He corrected me. He did correct me, though, so firstly. Yeah, so we are joined, I think, for only the second time in 238 episodes by a husband and wife team domestic partners. I'm not entirely sure of the actual audience. I don't know. I'm scared to ask. So, Stephen, did you want to say hello first? Hi, yeah. Thanks for having us back on again. This is a bit different. So, most people who've heard the other podcast I did with you know it was all about living in a simulation, and also that sort of part two of that moved into AI and where AI is going. So, I'm sort of known as the geeky scientist of the pair of us, I guess. Over to you, Lindsay. Yeah, and the other half, Lindsay, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself? So, when you've joined us in the past and spoke on different episodes, it's been a very different kettle of fish. It has, really. I'm certainly not a geeky scientist or whatever you just described yourself as. I don't really know what I am, but the last two times I've been on here talking to you, we've been talking about witches, witchcraft, weird kings, people who've been investigated by MI5 for cursing naval ships, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, all of the weirdness from us too. I'm a geeky something, but I don't know what. A geeky witch, we'll settle with that for now. We'll find one of that statement's true by the end of the episode. Anyway, yeah, so this episode, we'll get it out of it eventually. This one that was pitched to us by, I think you've Stephen actually said he had this idea. So, do you want to explain to us then a little bit? Because this is, again, this is old. This is actually a first, so 238 episodes of Tallboy Radio. And this is the first one where the blurb has been written by someone other than myself. And to be fair, I couldn't do a good job of it as you'd done. So Stephen, do you want to tell us a little bit about your plan? Did you write a blurb? I mean, a little bit. Sorry, because I'll pass that past you, don't apologize. So, and I'm going to start with a little correction, actually, if that's okay, beans. Of course. So, what happened was, you said, having interviewed both of you on the podcast, how the bloody hell do you managed to live together? I think was the question that was raised. So, I said, well, we live together in a very unique way. We operate what's called an agile life philosophy. And at that point, I said, why don't we come and talk to you about it? Because it might help you have an insight house to people with obviously very different interests in life, from very different backgrounds, have managed to create a life that sort of works together. So, yeah, so we had to talk about agile as a life philosophy. And a lot of people have heard of agile in a couple of contexts. You might have heard of it from software development, because agile software development is a thing that been around for 25 years now, 25 years now. The other way you might have heard of it is it's creeped out of software into business. And people are often now talking about having an agile business. And we hear the word pivot all the time. How can we pivot our business? So, you might hear about agile business, but not many people have heard about living an agile life and an agile life philosophy. But that's something that Lindsay and I sort of, it's a philosophy that we adhere to. Fair enough. And I think that the question of how the how the bloody hell do we manage to live together is actually the central question of it is the starting point for most of those discussions really, isn't it? The reason I asked that is because people ask my wife that all the time. What's so much mean, strangely enough? I don't blame her. I thought you revealed it. It's really hard. Yeah, I know. I know. So, I suppose it's, it'd be, I suppose the best thing to do is tell you where agile came from. And I, Lindsay's, because I love this topic so much, I'll ramble for hours. So, I'll let Lindsay do the introduction to where agile came from. Thanks for that. Because you like my talent a bit. So, there was a bunch of middle aged white folks at the beginning of the 21st century who also happened to be software developers. And they met, you know, in a hotel, some way grammarist somewhere in the mountains in America. And they decided to come up with a different way of working on developing software. And they eventually took a few days and they eventually came up with this thing called agile. And it's all about getting rid of all the long and arduous planning that people feel that they have to stick to for, you know, their plans are written in blood and you have to deliver every single thing on them. So, Steve, you'll have to remind me, because I can tell the story in my weird and wonderful way that I'm not very good at remembering things photographically like you. But we value people over contract. Yeah, so it seems, yeah, so it seems that, like, we value people over contracts. We value functional code over written documentation. And the whole thing is we value relationships and we value delivering product that would be like customers. And that was what essentially it was about. And at the time, the only real way that people could deliver projects was using this methodology called waterfall. And waterfall is what most people learned if they went to project management school. And it was all about having a massive Gantt chart with loads and loads of goals and milestones in a critical path. And you had to start on day one, knowing exactly what you were going to deliver on the last day. So, that was a bit like starting off in 1999 or whenever it was with a vehicle with a complete idea that we were going to get HS2 by whatever date and it might be 1999 and it might not ever be 2050 or whatever. But the plan for that would have to be delivered come what may. So, but in Agile, you might start off with an idea to build HS2, but actually you might get a monorail from London to Crawley instead, you know, who knows. But something that was useful and delightful for people rather than something that cost a whole ton of money that nobody wants anymore. No, interesting, interesting. So, Dave, just out of interest, as a man of business, as a man of tech, is it something that you operate within your business world? Yeah, I mean, the way Steve explained it there with Waterfall and Agile, that's very much my experience because joking aside, but I've been in tech for an awful long time, not any kind of great degree of skill, more of the management project side of it, which probably just crossed over more into the challenges of Waterfall and Agile. And mostly, I've been working with small teams, trying to deliver a lot of stuff with very little budget, very little resources. So, Agile, it's almost Agile by default because you can have no other way if you've only got a handful of developers, and you're reacting almost daily to what's going on. So, it's a bit of a chaotic, but it's based more on Agile, because if you have Waterfall, you just never get anything done. I mean, we've been quite extreme in the current business early on. We just, we didn't even have proper testing or anything. We just had to throw it out, do it, get it live. And if it broke, we fixed it quick. So, it's kind of extreme Agile, really. It's a bit dangerous. We don't do that anymore. We're a bit bigger now, but that's how we did it. Play fair play. So, I'm curious then, this philosophy of Agile live, is it your philosophy that you've developed or something that you've adapted from elsewhere? In fairness, I suppose if you went and, you know, I was going to say Google, but you'd probably get more results if you looked in Amazon. You might probably get five or six books on Agile life, living in Agile life. I have to say, I've not bothered reading any, and the reason I haven't is this is something that Lindsay and I sort of, there are some things sometimes in life you come to naturally, and you don't need anybody else's writing to tell you you're right. You don't need anybody else's writing to tell you that it's something that works because you've lived the experience and it's worked. So, I haven't, I don't know if Lindsay has, she's the one who reads tons compared to me, but, you know, I haven't gone out there and we haven't borrowed this from any research as a couple. There will probably be people out there who do write something about big crossover of Agile into life from business. But it's not something, and perhaps it's something we should write a book about, I guess, at some point. But to make it easier for anyone who's not familiar with Agile and to do it in a nutshell, what I'll do is I'll explain the whole Agile process in about six or seven steps, and then we can explain how that translates over into our lives, into life, if that makes life easier. So, the way the Agile process, the way all the creation of anything starts, forget the Agile process, but the way creation of anything starts, you've got an inspired person with a vision of a future that they want to create, and whether that's a product or whether it's a situation, you've got an inspired person with a vision of an anticipated future. Then what they do is they gather some experts around them to help build that, whatever that might be. So, that is the team that are doing delivery. Now, it's the job of the team doing delivery to take that person's vision and translate it into concrete, buildable chunks. Now, in the Agile phrases, what you create is you create a whole list of things that you're going to produce, and that's called the product backlog. So, all the things that are going to exist in whatever this anticipated thing in the future is, they go in the product backlog. And then what you do is you set about delivering that, but you deliver it in small chunks, and those small chunks are called sprints. And then sprints run over a short period and have got very specific goals, and once you've delivered something out of a sprint, you've got an iteration, you've got a version that you can improve on. You review that internally and make sure you're happy with your learnings, and then you go back to the customer and you go, "Is that working towards what you wanted?" And then you just keep going around that sprint cycle, keep sprinting, adding more and more on, until you get to the point when the product has been delivered. And then you've got a happy customer with a product. Now, most people tell you in real life what happens is you get to the point the product is delivered, but during that whole process, you've developed a whole other load of stuff that they want to add onto it, and that becomes the next version of the product. And then you get the next version of the product and the next version of the product. So, we've got this idea of a product broken down into sprints. We work through those, we review it, and then once we're at the point of delivery, we go, "Is that the end product or is that just the latest release of the product, and do we start again?" And that's how our job works. So, applied to software, applied to business, applied to life. I'm with you so far. Let's be honest, it's better than the other episodes that we've had you on, 13 minutes in, starting to doubt my own existence. So, here I'm with you. We've lost 10 minutes longer than usual then, so we're doing well. We're doing well. We're doing really well. We're doing really well. So, that is the end, and you've got all sorts of ways that businesses complicate it, so they can make more money from consulting on it. You've got lots of ways that corporates abuse it so that they can fit the corporate model of budgets and everything else, but in a nutshell, that is the agile method of delivery. So, that's, yeah. So, and we sort of realized not too long after we got together, was it really? We sort of realized that we lived this philosophy independently, I think, and then started to realize that we both had a very similar philosophy. I find that interesting because, like I said, when I asked that question, you know, I wasn't being facetious, I wasn't being rude, although sometimes I do manage to do that without trying. Having yourself on and having Lindsey on, I find you both very, very different people. Again, like we said before, the fantastic guests to have on a podcast, because you do loads of preparation. You know, it's one of these episodes that David and I can almost sit in silence for and just let you two guys crack on, and it's wonderful. It makes our life very, very easy. Well, two very, very different people. So, with your very ultra scientist, everything needs to be understood and broken down and compartmentalized, whether that's AI, whether that's the fact that we're living in a simulation, whether that's your work, you know, that I kind of think I understand how your mind works. With Lindsey, the approach is probably, I would say, more, in my opinion, I would say, was more artistic in terms of taking, taking joy from the things in life, like, I was going to say, did you tell your artistic role? Yeah, I was very, I was very fat on my pronunciation, I promise you. So, no, it's stuff like witchcraft, which is the polar opposite. It cannot be, you know, for the most part, it can't really be documented. It can't, it's difficult to prove, and it's often questioned. So, yeah, I find the fact that you have a similar philosophy in life fascinating, because it certainly applied in different ways, although this is your opportunity to tell me that I'm wrong. I don't think that witchcraft is any more difficult to define the Steve's idea of living in a simulation. And if fact, in many ways, which probably is so much easier to understand and get your head around. Yeah. Like I said to you, before things, if I were to ask you, or anyone we know, would you be willing to put a curse on your child? I bet you're 100 quid that most people we know would hesitate to do that, because something in them thinks that's true. But Steve only has to get two minutes into a simulation conversation before most people are saying stop it, stop you, you're making me doubt my own existence, Stephen, I'm here, and I can teach myself. So, yeah, which is the more scientific you know. Did you just say you'd pay me 100 pounds if I let you curse my child? Because I've got two of them. I didn't say that. Which one? Both. I'm thinking 200 quid here. You did the wife as well, how much does the wife? Okay, 700 quid, I'm in. With the, I'm going to ask a question about agile within a relationship, because presumably you don't have a scrum master, just trying to throw words into you either now, or do you? I know sometimes we do. Because you've also got prioritisation, and I guess when there's just two of you, is that any different how you would prioritize within this agile environment of a relationship as any other relationship would? I've got a bit of a story first thing before we answer that properly, but I did once ask Steve, not in the role of a scrum master, if he could do the dusting, because we had some guests coming for the weekend. And he said, yes, I can do the dusting, I will do it over the next seven days, 10 minutes at a time. Which under those circumstances was not helpful. Had we had a week, it was my really useful strategy, but yet didn't work on a relationship basis or getting the dog done basis on that particular day. And now I've forgotten what the question was. Yeah, well, we've always, we generally do sit down and prioritise our workload. And what are the most important things or the most, the things that we're going to get the most benefit from the most quickly, we prioritise on that basis, really. And that's why we live in a massively messy house. That what you've just said there is kind of a key to an agile process, particularly if you can go from within a business model. The most benefit quickest way to the most benefit, however you say that, grammatically. And your MVPs and things like that, you know, to get those outcomes the quickest. And you just said you live in a messy house and, you know, tidying up is quite a low priority, isn't it? So that makes absolute, unless you've got guests coming round for any but seven days. So that makes perfect sense to me. And is that generally then? So explain a bit more about the agile then. So if you, once you sit on your priorities, how else does that agile reflected something to the relationship? So should we talk about the process first, then talk about how we live the process. It's probably so good for that. So yeah, so the way the way we do our process is every two years we have a significant review of our product and our product is our life together. So every two years we do a significant review of the product and we go, okay, in the last two years we set these goals, have we achieved them? If there are goals that we've altered along the way, we understand why we've altered them and what might have done that. But every two years we sit down and over a couple of weekends we do some business prioritization, because we're fortunate enough to own a business together, though we do some business prioritization. And actually, one of the beauties of the agile approach is it means that if we want to play with businesses and play with different things, we can, because we're not locked into having to make it work. If we try a couple of iterations of something, it doesn't work, we can drop it and pick something else off the list. So from that perspective, we're quite happy to fail, as long as we understand why it failed, and we can learn something that we can put into one of the other efforts. In fact, we killed something last weekend, didn't we? Yeah, we took a conscious decision and we celebrated the fact that we killed something rather than having it hanging around us. Okay, we're not referring back to the previous podcast, I'm saying that we actually just took it off the radar, we're not doing that anymore. Yeah, so we do the planning and it sort of splits into a business planning and a life planning. And then at the end of that, we bring them both together and we create a mood board that is our guiding board for the next two years. And then we genuinely do break that down. There's a brilliant guy called David Heiner. If you ever want to talk to someone about setting and achieving massive goals, I can highly recommend bringing David Heiner onto the podcast, but he taught us something called the pyramid approach, which we use. So we set a big hairy goal and we break it down into the blocks that are needed to achieve that. And then what we do is we have regular updates over the interim period. So we'll do a review at three months and review at six months, review at nine months, review at one year, and we'll just do quarterly reviews of where we're up to in our life and business goals. And we tick off things that we've achieved. And we just operate in those two two-year product development cycles with quarterly sprints in between. It sounds a bit weird to describe things as a product, doesn't it? And I think it's probably quite useful to say that in our dial, everything is a product. So anything that you're trying to do, trying to build, trying to achieve, trying to make is a product. So your life together, or your house that you're moving to, or what's aspiring to get, is a product. So you kind of get towards the completion or the achievement of that product, just as you would with anything else. And the great life is a product. I guess the thing we probably formalize some things that other people do naturally without realizing it. So I mean, for example, the idea that most people move into a house believing, that's it. I've got my own goal. I've got into the house. And then they look around, and after a few weeks, out comes the hammer, out comes the paint, and they start to iterate, and they start to improve. It's just that we anticipate that and we go, we're probably going to want to do that. Why don't we build that in? And a lot of people feel that way about whoever they've ended up living with, anyway. So they think that they've met their perfect partner and settled down, and that's it for life. And then they realize that they hate them. And actually, that's built into the process as well. How the bloody hell do we live together? And we actually, as a result of being mindful of that question and that process, we don't actually hate each other. We get it all really well. Because we plan for life, not plan for an end goal. I'm scared to ask the question. So when you face challenges, so I know certainly if I suggested that my wife asked me to do some anything around the house, let's be honest with you. First of all, there's going to be an argument that's not going to be done properly afterwards. So how do you take each other to test? Do you do it? You don't take each other to test. I apologize for using that sort of rather perform through phrase. But you know, when you have issues, should we say with the other person's performance, how do you challenge it? UAT, clean, give me clean. What's UAT? Everything goes through UAT. Well, the first thing is in an agile team, the first thing you do is you recognize that everyone brings unique talents to the team. So what you don't do is you don't keep trying to get the other people in the team to do things they're not talented in. So number one, just know they're not going to do. Yeah. So instead of constantly trying to change each other's behaviours and modes of operating, you accept and actually you discuss. And then you discuss, well, actually, we both like our garden, but neither of us are ever going to do it. So we'll outsource it. So, you know, but that could, if we hadn't have had that discussion, would have could have been Lindsey constantly walking past going, oh, bloody hell, the garden's getting long and we're going, yeah, it is, isn't it? That's a scrum master role, isn't it? Yeah. Finding the right people to do the right jobs. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, but also scrum masters are specific questions, don't they? What have you done? For what you're planning to do? And what's the blocker? And what's the blocker? And if the answer to what you've done is nothing, then what you're going to do is nothing. That's something to work with. And that is fair that we have borrowed of the bits of philosophy. So one of the things that we both are fans of is Brene Brown's philosophy on communication. So she's got a brilliant philosophy where she'll say, can I just want to reflect on, I want to reflect back to you what I've just taken on. So what you didn't say it was, but what I actually heard was. So it's about having those sorts of conversations. And you know, I'm not going to pretend we're perfect and we don't get triggered because we do get triggered, right? Everyone gets triggered, right? But the fact for the matter is, we recognise when we're triggered, it's the fact we're triggered, it's not the norm. Yeah, and we're very good at showing up to the post-mortem, aren't we? Yeah. Yesterday was absolutely horrific. It all went horribly wrong. What even happened? And how do we move forward? So that then you don't get stuck in that situation where you find yourself thinking, well, you get into an argument and you're thinking, well, on February 17th, 1967, you said, such and such, and I'm still carrying it 50 years later or whatever. We don't have those because we're willing to show up to that post-mortem conversation. And because you're looking at it from a with the agile mindset, it basically means that something wasn't anticipated or specified to enough detail, or you didn't consider all the different angles that something could turn out. So if you always drill back to that, you kind of, I guess, you're taking out the emotion, the personality, you're saying, well, this is what we set out to do. This is where we ended up, why did we get there? Nobody considered this, or we didn't allocate a person to do that part of this process, and because of that, it all fell down. And if your mindset is thinking like that, you just, you can remove that emotion, which is a massive source of conflict in relationships, I guess. Yeah, and you still have the emotion. And sometimes that's a really hard thing to go through, and you still have the route, but yeah, going back afterwards, and after the emotion has passed, and we examine it, it's key, isn't it? Yeah, agile gives us a framework to deconstruct those clashes, and we can learn from that deconstruction, and we can move on. That's what it gives us. So, and the other thing is, I think, from my perspective, we're in a unique situation in applying an agile philosophy to our lives, because we're both at once the people with the vision, the customer, and we're also the delivery team. And it's the objective of the delivery team to delight the customer. So, you know, so really, we've got everything in our favor, because we know what the vision is, and we know how to delight the customer. So actually, it makes life easier to operate this way. Yeah, the most agile thing is that sometimes it's surprisingly delightful not to do the thing that you started. Yeah, I think this all makes an awful lot of sense to me. And I can just see it, I can just see exactly how a relationship between two humans, and if they both buy into it and understand the principles of agile, I can just see why it could just work, because you're both operating from the same model, you're both going through the same process, it just makes perfect sense to me. See, for me, it's interesting because our whole culture around marriage, marriage is probably the most agile contract you'll ever have. It's written on one piece of paper called a certificate with no other sub clauses. You've said a few words to each other as a contract, that's about as agile as you can ever get, you've given the perfect starting point to live an agile life together. However, that's when it ends, because the contract has a very clear end goal in mind, doesn't it? You sign that contract when you're 25 years old, or 35 years old, or whatever, we've fully signed up to the expectation that you're going to live together in marital bliss and until you both die at the age of 90 or whatever, or 100, and nothing is ever going to go wrong. And then six months in, something does, you can't cope with it, because you didn't sign up like that. It's a one step, waterfall planner, isn't it? Or two step, get married, three steps, get married, one other's dies, the other dies. That's basically it, isn't it? I don't know, I think I did it right. The first time around, get married, get divorced. See, that's more agile, and then be open to the next product, the next iteration. And that works, as long as you're prepared to take the learnings from the first into the second product development. You see lots of people on their fourth, fifth, sixth marriage going, I can't understand why I can't find the right person, having lived their life exactly the same way through all five marriages. We had an area manager, you always used to continually say, if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. God bless you. God bless you. Yeah, yeah, bottom. You just got very lucky, mate. Yeah, the second time, no, I'm sorry, I'd say she got very, no, I wouldn't. So move it off. You're lucky anymore, given that it's a birthday. No, no, I will pay for that later. I will pay for that later. It's okay. It's not the worst thing I've done recently, just me. You are, I'm going to be so much cooler. So, this, I want to know, I want to know, I want to know how this happened. I'm trying to get my, I am probably somewhat of a, I don't want to, I don't want to use the phrase drifter in life, just in case anybody from words watching and they get it on. I'm very much somebody who will go with the flow. I'm not going to say I never upset the apple cart because the wife, I'll tell you most definitely, that is not the case. But I don't know if I am, and Dave won't be too surprised by this statement, disciplined enough to go along with that or be held to account for all my nonsense that I, that I inflict on my, my, my wife, my marriage and my, my children who I would consider cursing most days. Well, we, neither of us are, I wouldn't, Steve, you're probably more disciplined than I am. And in fact, I am undisciplined from the very moment I open my eyes, if I open them in the morning. The, my most hated thing in the whole world is actually getting up out of bed. But neither of us are especially disciplined. Steve has got the attention of a mat. I, I cannot stand to be told what to do. And yet somehow this works for us. And, and I think when we, when we first got together, we came from two very different worlds. We lived in different parts of the north of England. Steve, if you don't mind me saying, had, had to come out of a, a long marriage. And I, I had come out of a short, what recently come out of a short marriage. And, and we met, and I was living in a flat. Steve had a house and dogs and all of those kinds of things I had, my son. And, and somehow we, we decided to kind of meld our lives together, but we had to start in an agile way because we came, we were coming from two different directions and we didn't quite know how things were going to pan out. So we, we decided that we were going to rent a house rather than buy one and mix our families in that way and see how it went. So we weren't committed to a 25 year mortgage or, or whatever. And also my, well, our son is, has autism. And he was at a point in his life where he was just choosing what he wanted to do. He was moving from a sixth form college to a, to another college didn't know what course to choose. So there was loads of things, loads of uncertainty and loads of kind of plans that had to be made and we didn't quite have a firm direction for them. And because he has autism, there are some really struggled at school and was told by various teachers that he should go into social care so that he could be a care worker and not to bother doing a levels, not to think about going to university. But he, he decided that actually it really liked to try and go to university and try to live independently because it was also assumed that he wouldn't be able to live on his own and learn kind of domestic skills and executive functioning and things like that. So part of bringing our two households together was finding a house that he could learn to do those things in as we kind of got to grips with living together. And so we found a house that had, that was two houses knocked into one. So it had two kitchens, two bathrooms, two loads of bedrooms, etc. And so Jacob could have his own house and start to try and live independently whilst having that absolute safety net of being able to come through to our side of the house and say I've burnt my dinner or I don't know how to do this or can it help me? And we'd always be on hand. And so that was our first foray into unintentional adult really, wasn't it? It was about two years sprint while it was at college. Yeah, setting up an opportunity to test or to see if you would be able to learn to live independently and you've completely smashed it, didn't you? Absolutely, brilliantly. And within a couple of months he was doing more housework with me. And yeah, burning his dinner. But learning, learning all the time. And within, at the end of that two years sprint, if you like, he went off to university and Manchester and managed to live completely independently and get through the pandemic and have some relationships of his own. And now he is just finished master's degree as well. I just know someone else who doesn't like being told what to do then I wonder where he gets that from. And actually, we've just finished a sprint plan with him that we're doing a sprint now between now and middle of next year. And he's now got a plan sprint plan to deliver him in Japan teaching English as a foreign language. And we've literally just finished that sprint planning within last weekend. Because he's now in this sprint planning mode as well. Yeah. And this is the kid who who couldn't pass his master's essay and didn't learn to write until year six and stuff like that. And it's always be the case of right this year, we're just going to learn this one thing. If nothing else, we'll just learn this one thing. And then next year, we'll do something else. Or we'll do this for a few months and then try something else. And it's worked. And it's worked for all of us, really, because actually, living in that house gave us the space to kind of make some plans for where we wanted to be. And now we're in this sprint of living in a spooky 400 year old house that smells of mushrooms. And then the next will be something else. Wow. I mean, in terms of an advert for a product that works then, that's it there, isn't it? You know, when you when you see how that pays up, break it down into what you want to achieve. Dave, I'm curious. You go, I know, Katherine, do you think this would work in your relationship? Oh, God, I don't know. I mean, I guess we we do elements of it anyway, but certainly not not this structured. I mean, we kind of know where we're going. We kind of we do plan. We do anticipate quite a bit about what we want to do, how we're going to spend money and things like that. And, you know, with the kids as well, try to factor in their options where they're going to go. So there's it's kind of going along that way to an extent, but certainly not in any kind of structured way. If we try to formalize it, I think it would probably work because, I mean, Linda, you just said you don't might be told what to do. But actually, the whole point of agile in this in this concept is you're not being told what to do. You're sitting down having a conversation saying, where do we where do we want to get to individually? Where do we want to get to together? What are the steps to get there? And if it changes on the way, that's all fine. But you understand where you're going to go and how you're going to get there. So it's not one person telling the other person what to do. And to answer your question, I think that yes, I think it would, because I mean me and Catherine, we've been together for 28 years now. So you can't really be together that long and be happy if you don't already work together quite well. So to translate that into a more structured agile thing, I think, yeah, I think that it'd be possible. In fact, I will have a conversation with the next time we're wondering through a field or something, when you're having those kind of conversations and no distractions. Because I think it's very interesting. I can totally see from the moment we started talking about it, because I understand the agile background. I'd tell this to see how it can fit and how it can work. And then with Jacob, with your son, I suppose, autism, I know there's lots of different strands of autism, lots and different impacts on people. But one of the most common threads is having that structure and knowing what's going to happen and when's going to happen and why it's going to happen. So I can also see why it was slot in well there as well. So yeah, so Lindsay had come to living an agile life because every year, it was what's the next challenge with Jacob that she was going to have to deliver. What was the next version of the product of Life with Jacob about? I'd come to agile through literally, I'd worked in IT all my life. And if you're not prepared to reinvent yourself every couple of years as new technologies evolve, then you've got no chance. So you naturally take on that approach that nothing is permanent and you're always developing something. Well, Steve comes from the IT and tech world. I spent 20 years working for the NHS and you made a comment earlier about having no money and no resources. And most people who work in the NHS will recognize the feeling that you're asked to deliver something big and delightful as it were with nothing more than a pen in the back of a rather glove or a paper towel to write on. No money, no overvending money, no hope of any extra resources, but somehow you've got to deliver something. So yeah, two different worlds, two different working worlds and then a different kind of lived experience, I guess. Yeah, and we are sort of exploring sharing this more with people. I mean, I got asked by someone a few months ago, does an agile life philosophy stand for anything? Of course, being very glib, having come from a professional speaking background, you've told that you've got to have an acronym for everything. So being glib, I said, well, actually, if you want to think about agile as a life philosophy, it's about achieving goals and improving life in empowered way and empowered way. So achieving goals and improving life and empowered way. So achieving goals and improving life empowered is probably the... I like it. Do you love a good acronym, David? Yeah, I do. You know, you say, you know, should you share it some more? And, you know, my brain is sort of thinking that, you know, a lot of people go through couples counseling or marriage counseling because they can't work together. And for a whole bunch of reasons, obviously, but fundamentally, I would imagine most people is because they don't have a shared plan and they don't act in a progressive way to review it and to adjust it as they go. Instead, they become entrenched and they argue they fall out and they fight and things get out of control and they end up in counseling or separate or divorced or whatever. And I've never been in marriage counseling, by the way, but I'm just going by what I think. Well, I think he's got some moves to talk. You're the other one that sat there and basically said, I'm crap at this. I don't do this. I'm not very disciplined. Don't do DIY. I'm on the podcast on the wise birth. They have the worst things on that. And that's just in the first five minutes. It's going well. I said I've been happily married 21. I mean, my for 28 years, my for 21, but happy for 28 years. But I think as a structure to life that could run alongside, we'd place be an alternative to that kind of marriage guidance, counselor's things. I think there's a lot of mileage in a roommate. I think for me, I find it interesting because I actually think one of the reasons I know it works is because Lindsay and I pretty much did the same things living in our job life independently. But actually, you could live an agile life as a person on your own. We just happen to live it together as a couple. But I think you could live this approach because again, I'm shocked. I'm always shocked that people don't get this. People don't get that everything is a product. Everything is always going through upgrade. Everything is constantly moving and changing. Yet we try and live our lives in these fixed bubbles. We all want this constancy that somehow reflects stability, and we're all trying to chase this stability. My view is if you're going to live with constant change and uncertainty, why don't you put a structure around it so that you can live with it? It's just a message that allows me to live. Sorry, David right at the beginning, you mentioned a concept of MVP, and we didn't talk about him. MVP is a minimum viable product, and I like to think about a minimum viable day. Those mornings when you wake up and you think there's actually no point in getting out of bed or everything's too overwhelming. As soon as I get out of bed, I'm going to have a thousand chores to do. Everyone's going to want a piece of me, just don't want to do it today. I ask myself, what's my minimum viable day? What does it look like, and is it literally getting out of bed, cleaning my teeth and putting some pajamas on and making it as far as the sofa? That might be the minimum viable day until 10 o'clock, and you might feel a bit better by doing that, and then you can add something else into your equation and something else. But also, we're having minimum viable days together, and if you're not feeling it, you're not getting along on a particular day, what is the one thing we can do today that we'll make today as all right as it can be? Let's sit together on the sofa and we'll have a cut off for 10 minutes, and then see how we feel after that. What's the one thing we can do? Because it's always Steve's favorite saying, your favorite saying is there's always one more thing you can do, isn't there? Yeah. But there's always one thing you can do to get back on track, and it might not be the be all an end all, but that one kind of for 30 seconds even is the start something, it's the start of week in a connection, or making peace, or reminding yourself that even though things are hard today, we're together, and we will reach the end of this day. That's our play. One thing I'm curious is this wouldn't work unless you were both entirely bought into it, would it? If someone was more bought into the idea than the other, the other was a little bit, yeah, go and give it a go, we'll suck you and see. It wouldn't work as well, would it, do you think? I don't think so. No. And that's a very quick answer because I think that Agile or what we've described is pretty much about accountability. And if one person isn't brought into being held accountable, they'll feel very foregrudging about being told what to do. And if you're not both willing to be held accountable, it's not going to work. Just like if you have a team of 10 people at work and you're working in an Agile way, and one of those people refuses to be held accountable for their actions or their non-actions, they're the weak link in the team. Will you say Steve, do you have a different view on that? You're absolutely right. It's about accountability and with accountability goes personal responsibility. So for me, the way that you get to being a couple that live an Agile life is one of you lives an Agile life well, and you intrigue and delight and encourage the other person to want to understand more about how that works. So you don't start off by beating someone over the head going, we're going to live an Agile life. You go, I've learned about this new life philosophy and I'm going to give it a try. And I'm going to try it. And the first thing that someone's going to say is, well, why aren't you asking me to try it? Well, I want to see if it works for me first. So I'd rather try it for me and if it works, then if somebody else sees that you're doing things better, having a better life, enjoying more, they've then got two choices up there. They can either can ask, can I come along on that ride? Or they don't have to. Either way, you get to live your best life. Yeah, you'd probably have to have some parameters if like Adam asked if me and Catherine could do that. Well, I probably couldn't just, you know, actually do that without some kind of control, because I can't just say, right, my two year goal is to sell the house and live in a cottage in the South of France. And in three months time, I'm going to a sports car in six months. I'm going to take three months off and travel in the world. Right. That's what I'm doing, Catherine. You can't, you can't kind of do completely actually, but you mentioned it earlier, Steve, about a personal being doing it when you both talk about doing it personally. So I guess the more personal things in terms of, I guess it's the kind of things you'd have if you had a personal coach to improve your mindset and, you know, to, and it comes back to accountability, holding yourself accountable, setting those actions, setting those goals and working towards them. And you could do it at a personal level, your own achievements, what you want to get out of life, which fits into your existing partnership or relationship to which Dan could blend into both people taking part, I guess. I absolutely agree with that, David. But my overtake on that is if you're going to set the big, I'm going to move to France and you haven't got the sort of relationship where you can talk to your partner about that anyway. It's probably best you move to France on your own. But actually, when I'm talking about even, again, let's go to MVP for your agile life. MVP for your agile life is actually, I've always fancied learning French. So my next sprint next quarter, I'm going to learn some basic conversational French. So that has no house in the future. But it's something that you could get for your personal gratification using an agile approach. And if you're having fun doing that, people who are having fun are naturally attractive to the people around them. And people want to know what the secret source is. If you're personally accountable, you soon find out the people whose values and goals you're not aligned with. And actually, I think that in marriage or relationships, it's okay to question those things. And I think Steve and I have both been very clear that actually we come to our relationship as free agent. And whether we're married or not, or whatever kind of grand life plan we have, that doesn't have to be the be or an end all. And either of us, if we feel that we're not aligned with our goals and our values anymore, we would probably wouldn't be happy in the short term. But we would, I think we're both secure enough in who we are to know that actually, this isn't working. There's no point in flogging a dead horse and hanging on for dear life when those shared things aren't there anymore. And that is kind of agile in itself, isn't it? Yeah, I might just squeeze the wire from this into this episode. So, what she does, she's going to hear that. Yeah, again, again, not the worst thing I've done. So if you were going to put this down in a book, say for example, which I actually think is a really good idea. I know we're not the first people to suggest that to you. But I genuinely genuinely think that like Dave says, marriage counselling for a start is expensive, it's on dog. And there is things that you can do before you get to that level. And I do think that if people are out there and they're looking for some self-help, then this would be a very, very good approach for people who live in an organised way, what need pointing in that direction, because you can be organised and you can plan for work, you can be organised and you can plan when you're going on a trip, how are you going to pay for it, what your itinerary is going to look like when you're there, we can all do those things when we have to, because we know the benefits of them. If we can do that in our personal life, and we've got some money to role model what it looks like and you can demonstrate what it looks like, I do think, A, that would make a fantastic book, it would be beneficial to a lot of people, and B, there's a little bit of money to be made there and I'll pass it in to once you get that out. Listen, don't knock it. But if you were to try a book, Steve, I would imagine you want to put some rules in there, you know, if you go there. Yeah, okay. So, okay, fair, it's nice, nice leader, thank you. So one of the things that actually that you could regard these as tests to whether or not you could live an agile life, or you can actually just regard these as direct hacks, but Lindsay and I sort of had a chat about what sort of things make good agile. If you're living an agile life, but you don't want to live the whole agile philosophy, what are some things you could do to just live a bit more agile in the way that you live. So, and we investigated and we talked and we spoke and we said we sort of came up with five hacks that you can do that would actually help you live a more agile life. And you can do these as couples, you can do them individually, or you can do them with friends. So, and believe it or not, they've made that the five hacks actually spell agile. What a shock that is, eh? So, the five life hacks and exercises are adapt, goal set, iterate, learn and enjoy. So, adapt, goal set, iterate, learn and enjoy. And we've, we had a bit of fun, we had some enjoyment, we had a bit of fun, coming up with some exercises for them. So, what are these, these are almost daily exercises you can do to help you go through the idea of adapt, goal set, iterate, learn and enjoy. So, Lindsey, do you want to kick off with adapt? Yeah, so the hack we've got for that is about being flexible. So, keeping an open mind of being prepared to try new things. So, going back to my worst thing in the world, which is getting out of bed in the morning, I could do a little kind of thought and practical experiment with myself to give it a try. Give it a try getting up early for a week. And I do that quite regularly. And then the side, it actually sucks. But no, I actually, I may not be a member of the private court in the morning club, which Steve quite often is, but I do get up and I take the dogs out and feed them on time every morning. But we all have our version of what works for us. And I am willing to try something else. Occasionally Steve, what would be what would be a habit that you're quite looking at? It's literally about challenging habits. So, for me, it could be do you brush your teeth after your shower? So, for a week, brush your teeth before your shower. Just do something. Try to hold your arms the opposite way around, which I've just discovered is completely impossible. Yeah, so you've got that. So basically, just pick anything that's a habit and over a period of a week, challenge yourself to try something different instead of that habit. So, if you get up and you always have two slices of toast with marmalade, get up and have two slices of toast with something else for a week. And each, at the end of that period, just reflect on what's different, what was that? You know, you might not have enjoyed some of the things that you've tried changing, but you might have learned something. So, you're always going to get feedback. You're always going to learn by trying to adapt. And if you try it and you don't like it, you've learned the lesson that actually, that thing that you tried to change a habit but actually hated it, so now I can decide whether to continue to beat myself up for not getting up at five o'clock in the morning every day, or I can just forget that as a habit that I'm going to force myself to change and live a happier life for that. So, you know, stop trying to be that person, that you're not. I mean, that's not quite the same if you want to give up smoking 60 cigarettes a day, because that's probably a really good habit to give up, even if you think it's rubbish. But yeah, it's just about questioning your thoughts about something and getting rid of the things that you don't have to beat yourself up for any more. Well, the very definition of a habit is it's something that you do which is mindless. Mindless is a complete opposite of mindful. So, what this is really saying is just try some things mindfully. That's interesting. Just, yeah, wow. Wow, what would be the first thing you changed, Dave? What would you find, you know, when we look at the things like getting up like, same as yourself, Stephen, I'm definitely a member of the five o'clock in the morning club. I'm awake. I don't settle arms, never need to settle arm. I'm awake at that time, regardless of whether my children were working up for that time, not with most of the time they do, but even when they don't, I'm awake at five o'clock in the morning. The idea of staying in bed later than seven fills me with dread. You know, I like to be up and I like to be about, I like to be doing something. You know, so maybe that'll be the first thing I will look at changing, just try and have a lie in once in a while, because it's not something I can do. Yeah, I mean, it's, I don't tend to have very repetitive habits. I don't think, maybe when I think about it after it might be that, but it's a bit random anyway from when I get up to when I start work, when I finish work to what I have for breakfast, or if I have breakfast, there's no real consistent patterns. But I do take the principle that, you know, trying to just break some habit of something simple is just putting that lesson into your head and you do it with the small stuff that is just trivia and almost fun, a little personal challenge and then you can build on that. Well, the other thing it will absolutely do is teach you to be more observant in general. So for example, you've just made a great statement. I'm not sure really sure I have habits. I, you know, I do lots of different things different way. So the next 20 times you put your earbuds in, see if you always put them in with the same ear first. Yeah. And then start, and then start to ask yourself why do I do that? And then you've started to observe something about yourself. It doesn't have to be mega and life changing. It's about getting you into a questioning mindset. That's what it's about. I don't think I do put the same one in first every time. I think it's just, I'm just thinking about it now. It's just how I pick them up and I untangle them. I'm pretty sure. But I will pay attention. But I get into the same side of the bed every night. Well, yeah, because Catherine's on the other side. Yeah, but what happened if you swapped? What would it feel like if you slept fine? Very uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. I don't really mean it's like holding your arms the wrong way. Yeah, you always know. Absolutely. So the thing is, you can't just let me be. Anyway, sorry. I'll do the second one. So the second one is goal settings. So give yourself targets, take big jobs, break them down into smaller jobs and deliver them over a period of time. So effectively, the idea of having a product backlog and sprint backlogs. So just a good way of doing that is we create a vision board. So grab some newspapers, magazines, or the digital equivalent is go off to one splash and grab some royalty-free images. And, you know, we actually create mood boards electronically that we use as wallpaper. And they basically got our goals. And then we're on our monitor. It's not on the wall. Yeah, wallpaper on our monitors. And then what we do is, I mean, you can use anything you want. You can use post-it notes. We use post-it notes when we're working manually, but you can also use planner tools or Trello or anything else if you're a software person. And just then you've got your broken down into your substeps. If you're not sure how to break a big goal you've got into substeps, recently, we found this amazing, amazing AI-based tool that is completely free to use called gobleen.tools. And it was actually, it's actually been built for neurospicy people, people who are on the autism spectrum. And you can put a goal into it and hit a button and say, break that down into subtasks for me. And then you can pick any one of the subtasks and say, break that down into subtasks for me. So we'll actually do the job of breaking your big goal down into subtasks for you. Really useful tool. Really, really useful tool. Completely free, written by a Belgian guy who wants to help neurodivergent people with autism and with exactly function challenges. Absolutely fantastic tool. Can't recommend it highly enough. That's cool. I like it when people do stuff like that with other people in mind. I think that's fabulous. It is. Yeah, and actually really, really useful. I promise you, that is one thing that I will definitely, definitely use out of back it is. I know I didn't want to put in there because I don't plan that far out of my life. But I don't doubt that it'd be very, very useful for me. Maybe we could use it on the podcast, Dave. Well, I was going to say, you could ask your good wife to set your goal and see if you can do it. She does that without me asking. There you go. I was just going to say, just to go back to a bit of witchy wheel about the mood boards, mood boards are really, really powerful tools. Especially if, like me, you're very visual and you like to see what something looks like or you like to see the big picture. When we first got together, we made a mood board for our business. Well, it was a kind of life balance mood board, wasn't it? It was things that we wanted for the business, but also things we wanted out of our domestic life. So it had pictures of us with the children. It had pictures of the kind of house we wanted to live in. And actually, most of the things that we put on that board kind of came to life, didn't they? Some people would call it manifesting. I'd call it breaking it down into sprints and delivering the tasks. Yeah, one of the pictures was of a bottle of wine, though, and we did do that in a non-intuitive fashion. But one of the things that we put on there, we picked a completely random picture from Unsplash to represent travel for the business. And it had, there was one picture with an aeroplane wing to kind of represent travel abroad. And then there was a map with a load of pins in it. And it was just a generic picture of a map with pins in it. But anyway, after a few months of having this mood board, we got the opportunity to use one of our products in Kuala Lumpur. And you actually went, didn't you? We had a few dates lined up before COVID. But Steve went to Kuala Lumpur and successfully delivered one of our courses and came back and we went and we visited the mood board when COVID hit. And on close the examination of that completely random picture of the map with pins in it, the central pin was over Kuala Lumpur and we'd never even noticed. But somehow, that was exactly the thing that we did. Just proving with a sample set of one that correlation does not equate to causation. So there we go. But then also going back to David's thing about having no money and no resources, most witches have never had access to a hitman with it with a sniper rifle. But what they did have was an egg, some clay and some pins. Is that what we've got in our freezer at the moment? Fair enough. I'll do iterate. So the next one is you've got a hat. So I'll do iterate. Iterate is don't expect perfect, get something basic out, minimum of our product and build up on it. And I get loads of loads of people saying, no, no, you've got to get the right that you've got to be right before it goes out the door. But my view is how many people are 23 years old moving to their final house? Probably not many, not many. So we accept that we iterate in life. Why all of a sudden when we're talking about this stuff, is it really hard to accept we're just going to put something out there and we're going to keep improving it? Because that's what iteration is. We're just going to keep improving. That's all it is. No one expects their first car to be a Porsche or a Bentley. There are loads of ways we accept iteration in our lives. But still you say, why don't you take that as a strategy and use it in certain aspects of your life? All of a sudden people think you're more weird. But we iterate loads in our lives. No, that makes sense to me. That does make sense to me. Because I spent a lot of time in retail and we went to all these meetings where we talked through what we're going to do and what have you. And it is about hitting the ground running and getting it right the first time of asking. And I can tell you without exception, we didn't. There was lessons to be learned along the way and lessons that can't be learned until actually you have the product out there as we were and actually see what it looks like. How would that, I'm scared to ask, how would that look like in a marriage life then? What sort of thing would you be looking at there? The important thing about iteration is for iteration to work, you have to reflect and choose what you're going to add into the next version of the product. Now, a lot of people, I think, make a decision that actually they're going to scrap the last product and start a new one. And that's actually, that is when you get a divorce and a new marriage. But actually, they expect the same things as the new product. So you just get the same thing over and over again. I think if you're prepared to reflect and invest in the product you've already got, you've got a chance of building that marriage. And it's having the mindset that you have to try things and you have to accept that things are going to fail and things aren't going to work. And if you both approach it with that mindset, or if it's an individual thing, this might not work, this might fail. But if I don't try, I'll never know, I never don't try, I won't learn anything. So David, you talked about the early days in your business, didn't you? What you did was you failed forward. Yeah, definitely. You failed forward. Yeah. And you have to, because if you, if you don't try stuff, don't try quickly. And you spent too much time trying to think about the right answer, you'll never get done. And there's no guarantee you end up with the right answer anyway. So it'd just be really slow when you won't go forward at all. Yeah, David, I've got a question for David. Do you believe that failure is the first attempt at learning? He's done it, he has to do it for impressive. You know, it costs my mind that the guys would now have said about 15 times, fail is the first attempt to learn it. So we've said it, at least it might be a guess. Yeah, it's one for you guys. Yeah, so basically, and you can turn iteration into a, into a, a little exercise that you can give yourself. So pick something that each day you want to get better at. So you could say, literally, I'm going to spend five minutes every day getting better at this. You know, five minutes a day, 10 minutes a day. And just keep building on what it is you're learning. You can do that in so many ways in your life. Lindsay, why don't you do learn? Yeah, so, well, you've already teed it up. The next one is else, learn, which is about embracing a mindset of continuous learning and growing and actually growing on purpose, not, not just kind of being forced or dragged along by, by someone else to do something, to do things differently. So, I mean, I, I love to learn things anyway. I always have the 10, 11, 12 books on the go. But it's about challenging yourself to do something different. What have you learned this week, Steve? What have I learned this week? I've learned that having high levels of testosterone in your body does not genetically equate to you not being female. So I've been perfectly, genetically female and still have significantly high levels of testosterone in your body. I've been following the whole story about this book. It's in the outside world, not about me. Yeah, absolutely. No, no, I'm just following this whole story is unraveled about the the boxer. I've, it's puts you a lot by not making a judgment. I'm going, there's loads of this stuff I don't understand. So I've learned loads about the idea of, you know, what about genetics and about hormones and all sorts of stuff. That's an interesting one. And it has been a very interesting week in, well, I want to say sport, but I think it goes beyond sport, to be honest with you, when you look at biology and physiology, it's, it's been unique. And probably a conversation like you say, very easy to have a biased opinion about, you know, there's a lot of conjecture in the media on social media that will tell you what a gender is and how it's defined and amongst other things. But yeah, like you say, this week has been a very, very interesting week. If you want to learn something about, absolutely, absolutely. That's something I didn't think we're going to be touching on today. When we, when we sat on this agile journey. Yeah, this week has been quite a tumultuous week. I've found it very challenging to try and learn something positive from the events of last Monday in, in Southport that have, that have led to many cities in, in the country being on fire and it's very easy to draw the conclusion that we live in a horrible world with horrible people in it. But for every one of those violent outbursts, there's been people who've been willing to come out and protect the mosques and, and to, to speak out in favor of the, the spirit of their local communities. So there's all, there's something to be found everywhere. But sometimes it's harder than other times to, to find it, isn't it? Yeah, definitely one of the things, you know, I've had my, I've had this conversation many, many times actually over this last week in terms of the events that we're going on in the UK. And we, you know, we've got some friends mainly through the podcasting community in America. And obviously we know the divisive nature sometimes of their media and their politics and the way that everything's set up there. And they've been curious to try and understand it. And to try and explain it and try and explain, they're actually the deeper rooted issues. And actually, you know, like you say, there's some, there's some really good folks out there that are trying to do the right thing by people, by not tarring everybody with the same brush. It's difficult. It's too easy. You know, we, we started out this episode talking about compartmentalizing things. And that's something that we do do as humans to try and understand that we need to give it a label. We need to give a topic and we don't like to deviate from it. So it's quite interesting, really, the way, the journey that we've come on in this episode, yeah, we're a little bit over an hour. And guess what? I'm not finishing yet because we still go a little bit more to go. But it really, it really is, you know what I mean? That is how the human mind works to a degree. But guess what? It works in a few other ways as well. And you can exercise it by just following some of these, you know, anything that's got an acronym, you know, you're on, you know, you've been sold the product here. And you know, it's yet to be written. If Stephen doesn't really, I've been, I've been making notes throughout this episode. So what have you learned, David? What have you learned this week? What's meant you've learned this week? Oh, God. I've learned that it's bloody tiring to drive all the way to Guilford on one day and drive back the next day. That's not really covered. I already knew that. I don't know. Experience is more than anything. This weekend, Alice, is on a residential cooking restaurant, residential in Guilford. And we drove downstate in a nice hotel Sunday night. And I dropped dropped Monday morning, drove back. And that was a, it was a nice time to spend with Alice. We deliberately picked or idly picked a nice hotel. It's not just a premier in the central Guilford, mainly because I wanted it to be a nice weekend for me and Alice. And also to help us settle any anxiety she had for the week ahead. So, you know, if I learned anything, probably learned and developed in emotional attachments with my daughter and we've had some good conversations. So yeah. And I think that's, you know, iteration, isn't it? It fits into that. Yeah, you've learned that works. You've learned that works. That approach works. We're building on previous experiences and previous ways of doing things. And that's why I did deliberately think this way of doing it, because it was a deliberate effort to do that. Yeah. Talking about Americans, Adam, and Americans and politics. Lindsay, what have you learned this week? Talking. I feel like there's a right answer to that question. You were absolutely shocked when I was talking to you about Donald Trump the other day. Oh my God. Yeah. I did not know and have since learned that Donald Trump prints Bibles. Did you know that? And they cost 60 dollars and you can buy them and they have the American Constitution printed in them complete with the second amendment and everything. I didn't know that. And didn't you say that most of Trump's campaign funding comes from, they say, a significant portion of Trump's campaign funding comes from selling 60 dollar Bibles from the Trump Bible publishing company. Wow. Never heard that. I owe you a day, the TBR Bible. That's, that's where the money's at. There you go. Adam, have you learned anything this week? Have I learned, well, I'd like to say I learned not to tick the wife. I've thought, no, I clearly haven't. Have I learned anything this week? Have I learned anything this week? Do I learn anything in any weeks? That's my biggest fear. I've learned something in this episode. I've learned it. I've learned it. Yeah. And again, Stephen, every time we have your arm, I do, I find, I sit and I will analyze myself. And I've, like, I joked earlier a little bit about myself being a bit of it. I'm one of these people who will gladly drift through lives and I always take to people that I've been very, very, very fortunate. Anybody who knows my wife knows I'm punching weight above me weight. And yeah, I've been very lucky and I consider myself very, very lucky and very, very blessed. All of the problems in my life have been of my own creation. And I'm quite happy for that. And then a long way to continue. But in terms of learning something in this episode, it's that planning and it's something I am absolutely terrible at. And I don't know whether it's as I get older in life, you know, I turned 51 a couple of weeks ago. And that gives you a little bit of self reflection and things that you want to do differently. You know, we, Dave and I want to do an episode on midlife crisis. So we research midlife crisis, we've talked about midlife crisis a little bit. I don't believe for a second I might have been one before. Don't hit the panic button just yet. But I have started looking at that and changing why, you know, when I was reading about how midlife crisis comes along. And the sort of stuff where you rather than looking at what you've achieved in life and everything that you have, which like I've just said there, I'm blessed. I'm very, very fortunate in that respect. But I, you know, I do start then looking at the things that I would like to do and achieve in my dwindling twilight years. And what I'm listening to tonight is a very good way of going about and actually setting myself that task of actually first of all recognizing what it is that I want to achieve. And then maybe using that website that you recommended there, how I'm going to go about doing it. So have I learned much? Not really other than like say bits on midlife crisis. However, you know, I'm recognizing an opportunity to learn in the future and iterate and maybe build a beans, not 2.0, maybe 1.1, you know, take baby steps. And there's always an opportunity to bring a new release out. There is always an opportunity to bring a new release out always. So the last one is enjoy, have some enjoyment in it. Now, I'm going to actually, so part of it is have fun, but part of it is also catch yourself having fun. So the way that I do that and the technique I've developed over a number of years is I've got something here called a gratitude jar. But it in front of your chest, it's disappearing into the there you go. I've got something called a gratitude jar here. Now I have kept a gratitude journal in the past. And the problem with that was one of the key tricks for gratitude is it has maximum impact if you can record it while you're feeling grateful. So but the problem is if you feel a gratitude journal up, it becomes more and more valuable to you as you feel it. And then you don't want to take it with you when you go to places. Yeah. So I've actually got a few strips of paper in my wallet and a little pencil. And when I'm out there having fun or notice something can feel and grateful, I make a note, it comes back and it goes in my jar. And then I have that in sight every day. So when I have a crap moment, crap hour, I look and that started in January. So this is filling up over the year. And I try and recollect a couple of things a day that I put into my gratitude jar. And interestingly, at the end of the year, I tip it all out, I get a nice bottle of wine and I work through it. And it's like having an Oscar ceremony where you win all the Oscars. Yeah. And the reason I did this was I set up a project, a little intellectual scratch of the head. I set up a project where I wanted to record a million gratitude from people around the world. Now we never got to a million because I set myself a fixed timescale. We got to just over quarter a million gratitude. But we analyzed the data. And one of the things that we found out is people on the whole are grateful for the people in their lives, not the things. 98% of people reflected gratitude over relationships, not over ownership of things. Yeah. Yeah. And but this is a great way of catching yourself enjoying life. And then celebrating it at the end of the year with a nice tip or whatever you fancy. And if it's grass like this and it's visual, when you're having a crap hour, you can see just how much you've enjoyed your life so far this year. I like that. I like that very much. It's something we've said on this podcast before, isn't it in the past, David? That when we when we look at life, and I probably said it a number of times, I'm at the risk of doing a gazier. But when we are on a deathbeds, when we go facing Peter, those pearly gates, you were not going to remember the house that you lived in, you're not going to remember the car that you drove. You're not going to remember how nice the pen is that you write your notes with when you pop it into that jar. What you are going to remember, the shared experiences that you've had with people, you know, and just the experience in life are far, far more enriching than a material product. And you know, and it's, you know, David, I differ on the old religion thing. When it's far too late into the podcast, I get into that kind of talk. But that for me is the absolute key to life for shared experiences with people. And to be fair, that's one of the many reasons why we'd started doing this podcast. And also, it's, you know, one of the reasons when people like you could self reach out to us and, you know, we will you, I think you pitched the idea to us, partly it comes from one of my bizarre and thought for broke provoking pro questions that, you know, that we get the opportunity to have you back on and spend another hour or so in your company. And it's been wonderful. And like you say, this, this one, I'm actually going away with a plan of stuff to do. I'm going away, having understood my life may be a little bit better because that was, that was one of the reasons when you when you when you discussed it, you know, you sort of said that yourself and Lindsay have this agile life and how you learn that actually it's something that I could apply, you know, in terms of, you know, my life, and, you know, maybe David can apply to his life. And hopefully anybody who listens to this episode can do the same as well. So I mean, we're going up to round about an hour and a half by the time we're not this on the head. So is there anything else that this point remains instead that we need to squeak in? Well, from Lindsay's perspective, probably, but not from mine. The thing that I think remains unsaid is Steve has an honest Spiderman costume contrary to your story. But in the screen behind me, you are wearing your chicken costume. So do you want to explain why you've got a chicken, why you are a chicken in Minecraft? Okay, so this is an agile business story, I guess. Before COVID hit, we used it and going back to the Kuala Lumpur thing, we used to deliver a course on agile project management techniques using Lego. So the idea would be that we would take a massive sack of Lego and get a team from a given business somewhere in the world. We would give them two days to build us a town out of Lego whilst learning agile project management. So they would learn that agile cycle that Steve described at the beginning with starting with a delivery team and a person with a vision of the bright future, how to get that information from the person with the vision and then starting building a backlog and planning sprints to build the town. And then COVID came and he weren't really allowed to fly around the world with the exact Lego anymore unless he sprayed it with bleach and demonstrated it on teams or something. And so it all got a bit depressing, isn't it? Because all of our business got completely wiped off the calendar. And then I think it was our son who just happened to say, well, if you can't do it with Lego, why don't you drive here? It was Minecraft. And so we actually started thinking that that was quite a good suggestion. But Microsoft had just bought Minecraft and they didn't have time to talk to us because they were too busy helping the world to adjust to remote working. So as David will probably know, there's a big community out there who make open source software that anyone could borrow, use, develop and grow. And we found some people who had a Minecraft type game in the open source community and we decided to use that. So we have our own servers with a version of Minecraft where we teach people our job project management world's appearing as chicken, turtle, panda, tiger, fox avatars running around in a Minecraft world building houses. So now instead of building Lego towns, we get Minecraft yoga retreats and five star hotels and beach resorts. But we went from nothing to first play testing in three weeks because we developed the Minecraft clone with an agile approach. Wow. And then people weren't at work because their businesses have been wiped off the board as well. So we did agile. We did Christmas parties using it. So we did remote Christmas parties and then in a Minecraft world with elves and Santa. Why are you chicken though, just out of which? I don't think we covered that off. Why are you? What you probably can't see behind Steve's head is that Steve is actually a monkey. Oh, no, you're not even in nature. There's just a bunch of turtles. You weren't putting himself on there. He's not like that. So, all of the creatures that we use in Minecraft are not gender identifiable. So you won't find lions in our world because you can tell the difference between a male lion and a female lion. But you will get foxes, wolves, chickens. Well, actually, no, you're unusual as a chicken, aren't you? Because you can get roosters. But effectively, one of the things we decided was we were going to go gender neutral. We weren't going to have Lotus thieves, which is the default Minecraft character. And the other thing that we noticed was people become so you use zoom or teams to talk to each other and then you build in the world. This game actually works in a browser. So you don't have to install extra software. And what we expected was when we called people to huddle and discuss their progress, we expected them to close the game down and come back into zoom. And we knew we got a real winner when they started huddling their characters together and carried on, they had forgotten that they were on zoom because they were so immersed in the game. And you'd see all these very serious pandas nodding and being very kind of going up to people to talk to them when they didn't need to, because they were actually in zoom. We often get asked if people have fun learning agile project management and our answer is absolutely. Yes, they can. So that does sound fun, actually, because it's yeah. And there's a lot of concepts that I can imagine from the let me mention Lego, but from Lego to Minecraft, there's a lot of concepts. You're faced with the real challenges, rather than being conceptual, where you have to talk about it, you actually faced if you've got a set number building blocks and you've got to put them together in a certain way. And if you take somebody else's building box where you take too many at the start, you cause all the problems that you would have in a real agile environment. So I can absolutely see how that works. Yeah. Interestingly, now the world has sort of gone beyond COVID. We're getting more and more people ask us to do Lego agile. But because a lot of businesses have adopted remote teams now, the agile world that we had in the Minecraft world is being used for remote team building now. Cool. But again, I know that we look at iterations there, though, and that's probably one of the biggest lessons in adaptation of businesses, really, and just in life, in terms of all of a sudden we were faced with something that we had to do, we had to shut down and we had to find a whole new different approach, like say, not just business, but some life. And isn't it interesting that some of those things have carried on. Some of them haven't, you know, we're pleased to say, but some of those things have carried on because we've recognised, we've been forced to face up to something and actually recognise that there are better ways of doing things. And that's perhaps the lesson that they've added value and created delight. Yeah. Yeah. I should have written that down rather than just trying to please do that. But that's what they've done. But that in an agile term, the things that have continued to happen post-COVID add value and create delight. I would urge you to go and explore that option with your wife as soon as you end this podcast to get back into her birthday. Well, you're in this club. I've had 19 years of adding zero value and no delight. So, you know, I start now. It's never too late to start. I'm joking. There's always a chance for the next release. No, I'm telling you, people don't believe it, but I'm a trophy husband. So with that in mind, folks, with that in mind, we're bringing this episode to a close. Stephen Lindsay, absolute delight to have you on again. You know, we will be looking for the next it's keys to have you back. What we can talk about the next time, and I'm sure we'll be bamboozled more so because actually this one, this one, of all the ones that you've done, Stephen, have made the most sense, the witchcraft. That could be part of it, but no, in terms of the witchcraft, I love, I love stuff on that. I'm fascinated by stuff on that. The other stuff, RG, was like, you know, I said today, you've, you know, when we were looking at it. I'm going to get me a little tell what's out. You know what I mean? It's, it's, this, this, they're so far removed from my, my very limited view on life that I find, I'm utterly confusion and bamboozled. And not to say I didn't enjoy it because I did, because anything that makes you look at anything in a different way has got to be, has got to be adding a little bit of extra value, and maybe bringing a little bit of delight. So with that in mind, did you want to wrap it up first? Lindsay, Stephen, I'll let you decide, I jolly amongst yourselves. Well, here's how it works. I'll let the boss have the last word. That is not how it works at all. But I was thinking that maybe if we came on again, we could talk about who was more Catholic, you all mean, but that would be an interesting discussion in a very bizarre kind of way. Yeah, I spent several years studying to be a priest and I'm less Catholic than Lindsay. Oh, and I'm not even Catholic. Yeah, I mean, you've teed it up there, like, I'm Catholic as well, so I can play that game. There we go. Catholic. It's baptized. Does that count? I don't know. Once you baptize, once you baptize, you're stuck with it. I'm afraid you can't, you can't get rid of it. How guilty do you feel on a daily basis? So my closing words are let's save that for the next release. Well, I like it. Lindsay, Steve, it's been a lot of fun. It's very interesting. You should definitely write the book because I think there's a lot of value to be had in the lessons and to the wider way that people can live as individuals or in relationship or as families. I think it crosses all of those things. It's a great job. Absolutely love that. And that, again, there's so many applications that people could do that. Writing the journals really hard. You're either a journal or you're not, but scraps of paper in a jar, totally get it. And you'll be out and have been on podcasts with the charities, mental health charities, men's suicide charities. Gratitude jar, it puts evidence perspective and it just allows people to reflect. And remember, actually, just because I feel crap today or this week or this month, it's not always, and it's not always crap. Every day there's good stuff that happens. If you make a note of it, you can always look at it and reflect on it. So I think that's my biggest takeaway is to, I might even try and do that. I'm pretty rubbish at saying I do things and then doing things to have it. I need to break. But I'm going to give that some serious thought. I'm going to find myself a jar, I think. So no, brilliant. I mean, you both, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. Indeed. I tell you what, Dave, you're right on the money there. Absolutely right on the money. That gratitude jar is a fantastic idea. And definitely, definitely, definitely, I'd like to see a few other people. If you do shoot out there, share it with us. We'd love to know because just being able to see that jar fill up through the year. Like you say, it can help put things into perspective when you, it's so easy to focus on the challenge that's in front of you and forget about all the good stuff that is around you. Dave is 100% right as well and I hate agreeing with him, but that's twice now. I've just done it in the space of a few moments. That book does need writing. That book does need writing. I'm telling you now, you need to build that into your next sprint or whatever when you start to do it. It needs to be looked at. It needs to be looked at. I do think that this could add a lot of value into people's lives. Certainly, it's value into my life tonight and hopefully for our listeners as well. But one thing I will say, we'll conclude up there. Like Dave says, look at the gratitude. Look at the people around you. Look at the people who are sharing your life with you and be grateful for them and just take some time to meditate on that and just think about what you do have going on in your life. Really, really important. And how have you do choose to live your life? Just remember, it's horribly, horribly short and make the most of it and go out there and live, laugh, and laugh as it's written on the pensioners' world run yet. Take care. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.