Veil of Mystery

More companies have agreed to let me mention their name on the Customers page. The veil of mystery surrounding them has almost completely been lifted. If you scan the list, you'll see small and middle-sized companies, but also some really big ones.

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The first written feedback arrived today. It was mostly positive, although apparently Silent Grumpy attended one course. On one hand, I appreciate the fact that he hasn't complained during the session, but judging from the feedback, he got absolutely nothing from the whole session! On the other hand, he should have said something and I could have maybe changed something. For my own sake I have to believe that perhaps his job doesn't involve dealing with software, or he doesn't create errors at all and couldn't possibly use a method to prevent them, either. I might never know for sure. I have to believe that I did the best I could, he was the one to have his mind closed. I believe that even if you consider the method unworthy (which you shouldn't do too early at least), you should still be able to learn a few new things when you meet a new and knowledgable person. Unless you consider everybody else to be on a lower level than yourself. Then you couldn't possibly learn anything from just anybody.

It could also be a taste issue. My style is to draw a lot of graphs on the white board and later just erase them as they have only been temporary tools of communication. Some trainees would probably like these to be more permanent and handed out later. But Silent Grumpy seems to have not learned anything new from the graphs either.

Interesting how you can spend three hours on training course and not learn anything useful. Nothing, at least according to the feedback. Perhaps Silent Grumpy was forced to participate, that's one way to shut one's mind, perhaps there's another reason. If he is acting perfectly efficiently in his work, how can you justify the wasted three hours. I like to think that the trainee has some responsibility in making a training session successful. It isn't all up to the trainer. Maybe there wasn't a possibility for enough dialogue?

It is good to get feedback, even better when it is constructive, but what can I do with a comment like: "Do we really need trainings like this?" It would be nice to get some details.

Overall the feedback was encouraging, and we shouldn't forget the fact that internalizing the real thinking change takes time, practice and experience, and once the thinking changes, it might dawn on more participants how really wonderful and powerful the Tick-the-Code Inspection method truly is.

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Kaj is coming back from a holiday in China. Just in time to receive the next chapter of my book to review ;-)

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We plan to come to Finland next time for Christmas on Dec.13th, probably. One idea was to do a week's business trip in November already, but it was a bit too sudden. The rhythm of companies and training is a little bit slower than I thought. I'm sure we can arrange very full and fulfilling training weeks in Finland again in January. New year and new tricks, like they say.