How Transient Hypofrontality Helps With Your Creative Work

The Agile Field Notes series contains a collection of ideas and experiences related to adventuring in the software industry.

For an overview of the A Matter of Survival publication, see the Introduction.

Transient: Lasting only for a short time; impermanent.

Hypofrontality: A decrease in the neuronal activity of various areas of the frontal lobes. The frontal lobes control: speech and language, voluntary movements (e.g., walking, tapping out a rhythm, typing on a keyboard), categorizing and differentiating things in the world (e.g., …

A Tool for Collaborative Solutioning

The Agile Field Notes series contains a collection of ideas and experiences related to adventuring in the software industry.

For an overview of the A Matter of Survival publication, see the Introduction.

The Proposal

Entrepreneurs as Explorers

The Agile Adventurers series examines the lives and experiences of various wilderness adventurers, teasing out the lessons they have to share.

For an overview of the A Matter of Survival publication, see the Introduction.

Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control.

— Howard H. Stevenson
Professor, Emeritus, Harvard Business School

Richard Burton started looking for his next adventure as soon as he returned to Cairo from his solo expedition to the Arabian Peninsula. He didn’t have much time to find that opportunity, much less convince the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) and the East India Company…

Introduction

The Agile Adventurers series examines the lives and experiences of various wilderness adventurers, teasing out the lessons they have to share.

For an overview of the A Matter of Survival publication, see the Introduction.

Of his many accomplishments — soldier, linguist, ethnologist, philanderer, translator of the Kama Sutra and the Arabian Nights, and vocal critic of Victorian morals — Sir Richard Burton is best remembered as the British explorer who led an expedition into the wilds of Tanzania which found the source of the Nile.

It was his third expedition. The first two (one into the Arabian Peninsula and one…

Part of the A Matter of Survival: Software Development as Wilderness Adventuring Series.

Some number of years ago, I found myself in the midst of a crisis. As any good crisis should, this one slapped me up alongside the head hard enough to shake a few things loose. In particular, it forced me to reconsider the very foundations of what I thought was essential in software development, causing me to view my chosen profession through a radically different lens — the lens of wilderness survival.

I know what you’re thinking. Wilderness survival? What?

No, I had not actually been lost…