What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

We know all the theory right? So now all we have to do is put it into practice? How hard can that be?

I read a blog post a couple of weeks ago about how to keep your brain sharp as you get older. This is the kind of thing that is to Twitter (with the oldest average age of any social media network) what relationship quizzes are to fashion magazines.

I don't remember most of the recommendations (probably because I'm getting old - boom! boom!), but one of the suggestions was that you try to do things with the "wrong" hand. I'm left-handed and all the way through school struggled to write as quickly and as neatly as my right-handed school mates. And trying it out has revealed to me a marvellous instant demonstration of the difference between theory and practice.

Right-handed writing, the first time I tried it

So, for several weeks now, I've been writing my morning journal with my right hand instead of my left. It isn't easy. I'm a lot more relaxed now, but when I first started doing it, it was physically demanding. I found myself having to deliberately stop myself from gritting my teeth and curiously jutting my jaw - sort of like somebody might act if they were trying to amputate their own leg in an action movie.

And the writing itself was diabolical.

I would often find myself just heading off in the wrong direction with the pen, or "losing it" altogether and not being able to write anything at all.

But of course, the more I've done it, the easier it's got. Very early on in the process it dawned on me "Hey! I already know how to write! I already know all the letters of the alphabet and how to put them in the right order. In other words, I already know all the THEORY of writing, but that doesn't mean that it's any easier to put the thing into practice."

Three weeks later - better but still room for improvement

When you try writing with your wrong hand you realise very quickly that putting theory into practice is a separate process from understanding the theory. For handwriting, putting theory into practice involves changing the way muscles and neurons work, storing new information inside them, and that's a non-trivial process that takes time.

There's the learning that, and then there's the learning how and very often they're two seperate processes.

Some points that I've noticed about trying to experimenting with this radical change:

• If I take the trouble to visualise a word before I write it, writing the word feels much easier and looks much better.
• Doing something so strange, results in the whole of your body tensing up which results in terrible handwriting. But if you relax too much, that's no good either, nothing happens. You have to actively look for a balance between focus and relaxation.
• When you first start doing it, you're knackered after half an hour, actually, probably about ten minutes.
• Latin characters are designed to be written right-handed. There's a kind of rolling flow to writing right-handed that you never feel when you write with your left hand. Every now and then I feel this "flow", normally when I forget that I'm writing with the wrong hand and concentrate on what I'm writing.
• Exploring all the possibilities of writing with my right hand, cutting loose, letting go, scribbling and shading, drawing big shapes and small shapes, tiny stick men and perfect circles, seems to improve things just as much, if not more than simply concentrating tighter and tighter control and getting the letters perfect. Periods of "going crazy" scribbling and doodling followed by focussed concentration seem to work best of all.

Left-hand writing, perfected over about 36 years.

Any of this got anything to do with Agile? With training? With Lean and Kanban and experimenting with new methodologies? I dunno, what do you think?

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)