My journey

I was born into a family of builders. Not metaphorical builders. Actual builders. My childhood featured seeing beautiful buildings and being told about how my grandfather or my great grandfather built them. Or I’d hear stories about how they travelled around the world to build for others. My grandfathers were often were called in on the jobs where tools and materials were hard to come by, their abilities to intuitively understand physics and structures, and create solid builds from whatever was available meant their skills were sought after.

I chose arts and culture to study, and found my hearts path through radio, counselling, teaching and parenting. My career, my primary way of making money I’ve kept part-time at nearly all times - has mostly been involved in Software projects. First as a tester, then as a systems admin, then project manager, before finally moving into Agile.

The builder within me struggled as I got into the role of project manager. I missed the tangible feeling of delivering a product. I was instead a conductor and collector of stories from the people doing the building. And the stories I told helped them to build together, or told others other about the progress the builders were making. But at the time, I couldn’t really feel the value of how this contributed to building anything.

And then I discovered Agile, and I found myself taking the role of Scrum Master to a cross functional delivery team.

And finally I felt the role of builder was back.

I built connections within my team. I built understanding with stakeholders. I built trust with the cynical. But most importantly, the impatient builder in me got to see software being built. Early, often, and delivered to customers.

My work with visualisation in teams started at this point. Where I could make something visible and tangible - whether it be the invisible deployment process, the repetitive beat of the software delivery lifecycle, the powerful connections between people, teams and their influences on each other - this became my way of building something new and extra special.

I was building new awareness and understanding in the people around me.

I’ve since developed this skill by learning more about sketchnoting, visual thinking and seen how these can sit alongside different Agile practices.

My mission now is to share this knowledge with others. Not in a formulaic way, but to help people come to the understanding of why these tools work and how to use them in different ways, so that like my grandfathers before me they can intuit how to use what they have available to them, to build something special, lasting and beautiful.