We had the opportunity to ask Andy Hunt a couple of questions about his recent book “Pragmatic Thinking and Learning“ and its relation to his Øresund Agile workshop with the same title. Thanks for your time, Andy!

1) The Pragmatic Thinking & Learning book and workshop are not about programming and not about management, but both programmers and managers are an important part of the target audience. Could you elaborate on this?

Well I guess my first question would be, what is programming really all about? We tend to think that programming is all about tools that we use: the programming languages, libraries, frameworks, the IDE.

But programming really isn’t about any of those things, is it? In fact, as I say often when speaking on this material, software development all happens in your head. Software development is a creative, inventive, endeavor. The real tools we need to focus on revolve around creativity and invention. And that’s what my book is about: creativity, invention, and intuition, as it applies to programmers, managers and other folks who work with intellectual capital.

2) Why should people who have already read your book come to the workshop?

That’s a very good question. If you had asked me that last year, I would have said there is no need to come. You’ve already read it all. However, I regularly get people who come up to me after each workshop, who have already read the book, and say how much more they got out of the workshop just by having me explain it. There isn’t that much new or different content, but it is a different experience. After all, context matters.

In the book, I briefly mentioned the differences in learning styles between visual learners, auditory learners, and kinesthetic learners. So this reaction is really not surprising at all. Many people will learn better from hearing the material than they would will from have reading it, and almost everyone can benefit just from the different perspective of experiencing a live presentation versus reading a book.

3) Obvious next question: Why should people who have not read your book come to the workshop?

You have to start somewhere . Not everyone has the time and bandwidth to sit down and read a book piecemeal over the course of several days or weeks. But they might be able to take a few hours and listen to a presentation. Ideally, you’d want to do both. If it were me, I think I’d like to hear the presentation first, and then go back and read the book.

But as I point out again and again, everyone is wired a little differently. What works for me may not work for you, and vice versa.

4) If you make a sequel to to the book, or an “extended edition”, is there something that you want to add (or change)?

That’s a really hard question. The basic problem with this material is that the topic area is so vast. There were a lot of interesting things that I had to leave out just due to space constraints. I would have liked to have added a lot more detail, but that would’ve made it a much more academic piece and not nearly as readable. A I think if I had to do it again, I would emphasize the creative aspects more, and possibly talk more about cognitive biases and bugs in the system. At least, these are the more interesting topics to me now. Next month I may have a different answer