The exceptional testing performance requires something from everyone of us: We are performing in teams, but as individuals we need to be experts in our craft, tools and methods.
That is not all, though. We also need to be expert ourselves.
How can I be myself? That is a question, which philosophers have discussed for thousands of years.
We have to talk and think more about our personal values to become ourselves. I find that knowing and acting on our values is key to our professional performance as testers, and even more as leaders. It requires a rich language.
The problem, I think, is that in the processes of perfecting our software and technology development, and manage our projects, our language has become dull, technical, command-and-control-focused and valueless. Am I right?
Language scientists believe that in the earliest languages, there were no nouns. Verbs existed before nouns.
This indicates that that our ancestors talked about our relation to the world and people around us long before they started naming things in it.
Today we spend almost all our working hours defining and naming things. We discuss whether one noun is better than another. Which is the correct noun to use in a situation. What noun names the best practice.
I find there is far too little talk about what to do with the things named by all the nouns. And more importantly: What comes out of doing stuff, in the world around us.
Naming things isn’t leadership. It is optimization of communication. I want to see more leadership in testing.
We should somehow go back to the roots of our language and start talking about testing values using less nouns, more verbs.
I am running a series of protreptic workshops with my friend Karen in Copenhagen. We bring together a very diverse group of people and talk about values. The setting is informal, but Karen and I facilitate it closely.
The experience is awesome.
One participant wrote to me that it requires a great deal of “brain work”, but is rewarding: “I have met people who are different from me, and that makes the experience interesting because you start thinking: why do I have the attitudes and opinions I have?”
We don’t do psychoanalysis or discuss reactions. We don’t talk about models of the brain either. There is, in general, no cause-and-effect-thinking in the workshop. Only lots of inspiration.
And we inspire each other to talk about worth and personal values. Asking “why do I have these attitudes and opinions?” is one way of discovering them.
Leadership is about the team taking responsibility together, but that is not something that is monopolized with the constituted leader anymore. Taking responsibility is on everyone’s shoulders today, even you and me, the individual team members.
“To lead others, first you have to lead yourself”, my friend Maibritt Isberg Andersen says.
And now, that we are all test leaders, I really hope we will all start talking more about our attitudes and opinions, and why we have them.
It is about inspiring test leadership.
