James King

Yesterday was an unusual day where I live.

In the morning there was an official heatwave warning. This turned out to be valid with temperatures reaching 40 Celsius.

I am not sure what that is in Fahrenheit because I didn’t google it, but the human body’s temperature is 37 degrees Celsius (98 degrees in the obscure scale). So that means the air and whatever you sit on in the sun is hotter than your body temperature.

Fortunately I work in an airconditioned office and not an oven so I was not cooking during the day. But I headed home for some online meetings and other work in the afternoon and noticed the sky changing as I approached home.

When I got home the temperature dropped a good 10 degrees. Note though that I did my own research here using the “I reckon it is getting cooler scale”, so the actual numbers might differ if you use a reliable information source.

Then there was thunder, lightning and, to start with, large drops of rain falling outside. Soon the rain increased to a scale of “really heavy” on my rainfall scale. Then I received an extreme thunderstorm warning on my phone.

So in the same day, there was both a short-lived heatwave and then a dangerous storm. Not the usual weather for “temperate Sydney”.

I was glad to have made it home before the storm, just as I was glad to be protected from the heat by air-conditioning, making these weather extremes interesting, rather than impactful for me.

I guess if I lived in Manilla or some other parts of the world, this weather might not even be extreme or exciting. In fact people might think me a bit wimpy to go on about how extreme it all is.

So climate change is a massive, but gradual and erratic change, but the unusual daily weather was interesting, while not impactful on me.

Of course if I was not working in airconditioned comfort, then spending the day in air that is hotter than my core temperature would require remedial action, and if I was out in a thunderstorm (rather than safely home just in time) then there might be train delays, soaked clothes and, in the extreme, increased danger.

So I guess change is experienced differently, depending on your perspective, experience and circumstances.

Along these lines, there seems to be some consolidation or change happening in the communities I am part of.

• The Agile Alliance has become part of the Project Management Institute, the the chagrin of some, the bemusement of others and the ignorance of many in the world; and
• Today I learned that Pendo (a product company) now owns two product communities that I get information and news from. These are not my only news sources but I wonder if the change is just interesting, or an indicator of other changes.

For reference, these are the announcements:

• Agile update https://www.agilealliance.org/agile-alliance-joins-project-management-institute-pmi/
• Product community updates https://productcollective.com/big-news-for-product-collective-community/

For some, these changes are probably significant, though for me they are currently just of passing interest. But they could also be “weak signals” of bigger changes that I should be aware of, since my career as an “agile coach” in a “product team” kind of depends on both agile and product thinking being things that are cool and important.

I am not going to dig any deeper into the nature of these changes, any more than I am going to ponder the unusual weather yesterday. But it makes me wonder:

• How do I actually determine whether a change is significant, irrelevant or even interesting?
• Do I spend enough time considering that the same change might be more important to others (say because they are more impacted by the weather) or less important (say because they didn’t even know there was an Agile Alliance or Product Collective to be interested in)?

Knowing the answer to these questions seems important because the knowledge would alter how I act and how I communicate change. But the nature of change that is “interesting” rather than “requiring me to actually act now” means that there is probably a lot that I am not really noticing.