The story behind Guerrilla Training

I recently announced a new agile and lean training concept that I am calling Guerrilla Training. Here’s why I’ve called it that, and a bit more on the thinking behind it.

Unconventional, yet highly effective

Guerrilla (noun)

a member of a small independent group taking part in irregular fighting, typically against larger regular forces…

referring to actions or activities performed in an impromptu way, often without authorization…

When I started thinking about setting up a series of training days that do things differently, my naming options were either Café Training, or Guerrilla Training. In the end, I went for Guerrilla, because the venues don’t necessarily have to be cafés, the definition of guerrilla, and also because I liked the gorilla/guerrilla pun.

To me being agile and lean is about being adaptable; trying different ways to do things better. My thinking is that agile and lean training should be different and better too.

The idea is to be effective, professional and focused, giving a platform for some of the best agile and lean practitioners in Melbourne to share their knowledge authentically.

Similar to Guerrilla Diplomacy, a guerrilla training aesthetic “places maximum value on innovation and on creating and sustaining an atmosphere of confidence, trust and respect.”

Start as you mean to go on

We’ve gotten off to a pretty good start, with Neil Killick and Craig Brown running the first Guerrilla Training session on Lean and Agile Project Management using Scrum, just yesterday. A Net Promoter Score of 57 is a great start, as is a comment like:

after yesterday, I now have a renewed sense of purpose for my particular Agile mission.

There’s more coming, so if you want to know more, go and read the Guerrilla Style Training page, and…

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Why the gorilla?

One of my favourite ever projects was in a team being intrapreneurial (the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization) within a rather large FT100 listed company. We had a lot of autonomy and purpose; far more than I had experienced before, and it was great.

At the beginning we bootstrapped like crazy, designing a logo ourselves, using MS Paint. Later when it became time to think more about branding our product, we discovered that we had a pretty close connection to Jon Hicks, a pretty prominent visual designer. He had worked at our company before furthering his career as a freelancer. Jon’s wife still worked there, so we casually asked whether he was busy at the moment. To my surprise and delight, he was willing and able to do some work for us.

Jon’s written a book about icon design, re-designed the Skype emoticons, designed the Mailchimp and Shopify logos, and is well known for working on the Firefox logo. Getting “the Firefox guy” to do a logo for one of my products remains a highlight of my career 🙂

He also did the gorilla logo for Clear Left’s “guerrilla user testing” app, Silverback, that you can see above. That’s why I did a little drawing of a gorilla and the cup of coffee.