What learning how to ride motorbikes taught me about being agile

I just gave a talk at the awesome Agile 25×20 about riding motorbikes and being implicitly agile, here is what it was about and the slides.

This year I finally got my motorbike licence (yay!), it was an interesting experience in learning new skills and it got me thinking about how we learn and form habits and how does this apply to agile.

Those of you who follow any of my blogs will know that I ride classic 125cc scooters. Riding a bike that is over 50cc means either having a motorbike licence or repeatedly taking a compulsory basic training every couple of years and forever using L-plates, unless you get your licence and I didn’t want to do that anymore.

It was a daunting experience and although I’ve been riding scooters for around 13 years, a 600cc motorbike is pretty different.

Aside from the extra power, a couple of differences are that my scooters don’t have indicators (you use arms combined with positioning), and the gears are in a different place (feet on a motorbike, hands on a classic scooter).

I didn’t pass my road test the first time, mainly because I forgot to turn my indicators off … 3 times, I just wasn’t used to using them. I had to find a way to get that to stick in my head. This led me to think about memory, how we commit things to our implicit memory and how this applies to agile practices. Have a look at the presentation to see my conclusion.

… the trick to passing the second time? I strapped a bike light to my scooter handle bars and pressed it every time I wanted to turn a corner and every time I came out of a corner.