I learned about the band GrooveLily from an episode of Next Big Hit. I wasn’t paying too much attention when the song, “No Room In Your Bag”, started: a patter song over a drum backing. But then some chords on the piano came in, the instrumentation started getting richer (electric violin, yay), and I started realizing that I rather liked the lyrics. (Not to mention the singer’s sliding into falsetto.)
Quite a song; it’s stuck in my head since. I hesitate to link to a myspace page, but it seems to be the best place to listen to the song. (There’s also a live version available on the band’s web site, but the instrumentation is worse, so I won’t link to it here.) About marriage, gender structures, jobs, academia (in part), art, kids: all things that are dear to my heart.
And about making choices, choices with serious consequences, yet not being paralyzed by the consequences of those choices. The title of the song comes from the chorus:
You make a choice, you make a call.
You may rise, you may fall.
You will pay for what you get.
You’ve got no room in your bag for regret.
So: you make choices. They have consequences, potentially serious ones, and won’t always turn out the way you expect. But, if they don’t, wishing you’d chosen differently isn’t going to do squat for you.
I’m not sure why this is rattling around in my head so much right now. I don’t want to give my readers the impression that my life was full of bad choices, choices with unpleasant consequences, because that simply isn’t true: I’m quite happy with the way that basically all of my major life choices have turned out. (And I don’t spend time worrying about the minor ones, either!) But the meme does seem to be showing up in my environment a fair amount; one bit I may post about later, but I’m also thinking of a discussion on the XP mailing list about the prime directive for retrospectives.
Some people like the directive, some people don’t, and I’m not sure myself which side I come down on, but we can all agree that certain aspects are positive. It’s not that you don’t look at the effects of your past choices – if you’re not going to do that, then you’re not holding a retrospective! But that doesn’t mean that you should spend your time beating yourself up over bad consequences. (Or beating other people up, which seems to be more the thrust of the prime directive: don’t waste your energy on blame.) Make a good effort to learn what you can from the past, see if you can come up with a strategy to do better in some way next time, and leave it at that.
Anyways, enough on regret. I got GrooveLily’s album Are We There Yet? on the strength of that song. The album doesn’t live up to its promise, but there are several nice moments. One of my favorites, on the first track: the lyric “I’m feeling paranoid” coming up in a context where you think we’re going to get a Freud rhyme, but no: “Hanging like Harold Lloyd”. They seem to be turning to the stage more these days (or maybe they have a long stage history – I should look into their back catalog); I just finished listening to Striking 12, a charming musical based on “The Little Match Girl”. (I was amused by this Anime Music Video based on the song “Screwed-up People Make Great Art” from the album.)
Good stuff; I plan to listen to more of their music.
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Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could […]
Well, oookay. And just when do we actually fire people for slacking?
5/8/2007 @ 5:47 am
That’s pretty much the debate going on on the xp list right now. As I understand it, the prime directive response is: their context, including both external factors (e.g. team working norms) and internal factors (e.g. their ingrained work habits, but potentially also including, say, problems at home), isn’t allowing the slackers to work well. So then you ask: is there something about the context that you can change to improve the situation? If so, give that a try, and see if it works. If not, accept that this is the way that things are, look at your options, and seriously consider removing that person from the team.
Which may actually mean that the prime directive gets the person fired sooner rather than later. I think the point of the PD in this situation is to say that blaming the slacker may make you feel good, but blaming alone isn’t particularly likely to solve the problem, and blaming doesn’t add any value to an eventual solution.
5/8/2007 @ 9:39 am
Absolutely, David. There’s no need to fire someone because “they’re a slacker.” But it’s perfectly OK to fire them because they aren’t accomplishing what you need done.
But firing someone also doesn’t get the job done. It just means you need to look for someone else to do it. It’s more cost effective (as well as more humane) to try to solve the problem, first. If it’s a persistent problem in the environment, it may well cause the next person to fail, too. If it’s a problem with the other person, effective feedback might help them realize the problem and overcome it. If you don’t do some Root Cause Analysis, you’ll never know what it is. And if you get side-tracked in blaming, you’ll short circuit that analysis.
5/9/2007 @ 7:25 pm
Thanks for the elaboration!
5/9/2007 @ 8:33 pm
Retrospectives and Regret
David Carlton mentioned the Retrospective Prime Directive . I think the prime directive is a great idea. A retrospective is not a place to deal with firing of slackers or whatever. If somebody is truly neglecting their job, this problem should be dealt
5/14/2007 @ 10:52 am
“No Room In Your Bag” was the song which, like a lightning flash, introduced me to GrooveLily. In November 2003 I was driving home and listening to our local public radio station. I had been divorced the previous summer and when Brendan sang (about his mom) “She had subjegated all of her desires for the good of the family unit and the betterment of the husband” I thought, “He’s singing about my life! I liked all the rest of the songs–Shannon, I think and others I don’t remember now. I was so impressed with this group that I immediately went to my computer when I arrived home, looked up http://www.groovelily.com and signed up on the spot to be on their street team. I have traveled to New York City three times, Kerrville, TX, Palo Alto, CA, Lincoln, NE and Aurora, NE to see GrooveLily perform. They really are that good. If they come anywhere close to your neck of the woods–GO!!! You will thank me later.
8/25/2007 @ 11:41 pm