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Artful Making with Lee Devin
Next Workshop: July 23, Redwood City, CA
“Mindbending… I will be giving a copy to every manager of teams I coach.” – Kent Beck
In their book, Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work, Lee Devin and Rob Austin’s big “aha!” was that knowledge workers are more like artists than they are like scientists. They work on complex problems amidst perpetual uncertainty, and must improvise responses to change on a daily basis–Ken Schwaber said much the same thing when he declared Scrum to be an “empirical process” rather than a “defined process.” Devin’s approach is modeled on theater production rather than industrial processes.
Based on the ideas discussed in Devin’s book, with a focus on generating and building high-performing, collaborative Agile teams, this session offers an introduction to some of the skills and exercises that will help your team reach its productive potential. The exercises are derived from those used by the artists whose work is most like software development: actors.
What This Workshop Covers
This one-day workshop will include work on warm-up, concentration, pushing your edge and innovation, and will introduce the principles of Artful Making. You will learn how to:
collaborate more effectively with creative knowledge workers
prepare for change and uncertainty by building your “improvisational capability”
embrace complexity while getting things done
augement the industrial mindset with a creative one
Devin will present a brief overview of the logic behind learning acting skills to improve work in an agile environment. He will then take the class (as individuals, as a whole, and as small teams) through a sequence of exercises in which you will learn and practice Artful Making skills. A retrospective at the end will encourage you to relate the session to your own work, and perhaps other aspects of your life.
NB: None of these exercises requires you to perform in public or do anything seriously weird. If you can take your shoes off, you’ll be fine.
Lee Devin graduated from San Jose State College and took his PhD at Indiana University in Theatre and Dramatic Literature, with minors in Rhetoric and French. Over the years he taught public speaking, acting, directing, playwriting, dramatic literature, and dramaturgy at the University of Virginia (1962-66), Vassar College (1966-70), and Swarthmore College (1970-2002). In 1970, he founded The Theatre at Swarthmore. An experimental acting class, the first practical arts course offered for academic credit at the college, led to a concentration in theatre within the English Department, a major, and finally to an independent Department of Theatre Studies. He retired from teaching in 2002.
Along the way, he wrote articles, plays, librettos, and translations; worked as a technical director, master electrician, production stage manager, and dramaturg; acted and directed in the academy, the regional theatre, and for movies and TV. He’s been an artist in residence at Ball State University, University of California at San Diego, Minnesota Opera Company, Columbia University, Folger Library, Banff School of the Arts, and Bucknell University.
Artful Making with Lee Devin
Next Workshop:
July 23, Redwood City, CA
In their book, Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work, Lee Devin and Rob Austin’s big “aha!” was that knowledge workers are more like artists than they are like scientists. They work on complex problems amidst perpetual uncertainty, and must improvise responses to change on a daily basis–Ken Schwaber said much the same thing when he declared Scrum to be an “empirical process” rather than a “defined process.” Devin’s approach is modeled on theater production rather than industrial processes.
Based on the ideas discussed in Devin’s book, with a focus on generating and building high-performing, collaborative Agile teams, this session offers an introduction to some of the skills and exercises that will help your team reach its productive potential. The exercises are derived from those used by the artists whose work is most like software development: actors.
What This Workshop Covers
This one-day workshop will include work on warm-up, concentration, pushing your edge and innovation, and will introduce the principles of Artful Making. You will learn how to:
Devin will present a brief overview of the logic behind learning acting skills to improve work in an agile environment. He will then take the class (as individuals, as a whole, and as small teams) through a sequence of exercises in which you will learn and practice Artful Making skills. A retrospective at the end will encourage you to relate the session to your own work, and perhaps other aspects of your life.
NB: None of these exercises requires you to perform in public or do anything seriously weird. If you can take your shoes off, you’ll be fine.
Have a question? Drop us a line!
About the Instructor
Along the way, he wrote articles, plays, librettos, and translations; worked as a technical director, master electrician, production stage manager, and dramaturg; acted and directed in the academy, the regional theatre, and for movies and TV. He’s been an artist in residence at Ball State University, University of California at San Diego, Minnesota Opera Company, Columbia University, Folger Library, Banff School of the Arts, and Bucknell University.
Devin is co-author, with Robert Austin, of Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work.
Register for the next course:
Artful Making with Lee Devin, July 23, 2011