Work Hard, Play Harder!

The moment has come.
I’ve noticed that my slightly cough geeky hobby and my daily job have been flirting with each other. And by flirting I mean dating. Like the kind of dating where they prefer to get to know each other first. Then before they knew it, they ended up… well, maybe I should stop the metaphor here before things get out of hand.
So what are my hobby and daily job I hear you think. Let’s start out with my job:

Hard Work

I help Fortune 500 companies and big national players to survive. Tadaaa!

As an agile coachsultant at Xebia [web], I help organizations to become future fit. I’ve been involved [web] in multiple agile ‘Spotify-inspired’ transformations. Some people call me a culture hacker, with my main weapons of mass change being agile serious games and visualization.

Then on to my hobby:

Harder Play

I’m a board game geek. There. I said it. Geek is the new black, so I’m proud of it!

I just love awesome board games with fascinating mechanics and miniatures and theme and strategies and storytelling and and and… This doesn’t mean I’m not into card games. With almost any audience I like to play social deduction games like Werewolves, Secret Hitl*r or Coup. A game of Star Realms or Dominion I can also appreciate, although I’m not that good at them. I’m just not that much into TCG/CCG/LCG’s like Magic the Gathering & Co. When you’re interested in the type of games I like and play, check out the footer [blog] down here.
As with almost any hobby, there is a wiki with a large online community behind it. BoardGameGeek [BGG] is the most complete and complex wiki I’ve ever seen. At first sight it looks like a portal to the lower levels of usability hell. Though hidden beneath that is one of the bether communities you’ll encounter online.

How it all Began

So how did this start out? We all had that one geeky classmate in high school. That guy or girl who was into anime and video gaming and knew internet memes while you were still trying to find the internet. Well, actually I am blessed with multiple of those high school friends. So blessed, that 20 years after we met, we still meet the first Saturday of every month with the five of us. We call ourselves JIRMS; Jordann, Ivo, Robin, Maurice and Sven. Quite a lot of those monthly meetups we’ve had since high school (over 150!) we spent playing one or more games.

For years and years on end, my high school friend Sven de Jong has been my personal board game dealer. Thanks for getting me addicted, Sven! 😀
Moving to Utrecht last year has brought me closer to a lot of other board game geeks, both personally as well as location-wise. This also triggered me to expand my own game collection [BGG].

Why this Blog?

Agileety is wordplay on my work infused with my hobby.

Agility refers to what I infect others with.
Leet¹ is internet-speak used by (video) gamers to express how ‘awe some ‘ they are.
An important part of my job is putting the fun in functional. At my previous job I helped facilitate and enhance the LEGO4Scrum simulation. I could go on for hours about my volunteer job as a summer camp coach; how designing and scaling games to play with up to 60 kids is a fantastic and rewarding challenge. Or how my open space on using an existing game in a work context, turned out to be a big hit at Agile Coach Camp 2015.

All these topics warrant their own stories, so I’ll start off my next post [blog] with the last one. When I was a Scrum master it was my moral duty to spark the team’s creativity during the Refinement and Sprint planning. Subscribe or stay tuned to soon read how I started using a lateral thinking game (Black Stories) to accomplish this. It not only improved out-of-the-box thinking, but also had some unforeseen other effects.

As I started out this introduction post: The moment has come. The moment to realise that my job and hobby making a love child is an awesome thing! <3

Leet > short for ‘Elite,’ also spelled l33t, 1337 or any other combination of letters and their number substitutions.