The Agile Haiku Workshop
Writing haiku, the art form of short poetry from Japan, is a great way to reset the brain, express emotions without using emotional language, and explore the wealth of talent for writing and communication which exists in each of us. Often, our thought processes are procedural in nature. We treat our lives and work as railroads to success. This workshop explores the structure and language of haiku, aiming to break the habit of procedural thought through techniques which capture the moment and nurture the brain’s natural tendency to make connections.
Participants will learn:
- how to write haiku (and why they’re not 5-7-5)
- a little of the history of haiku, its traditions and related forms such as tankas, rengas, senryu, scifaiku, horrorku etc.
- how to communicate emotionally, without emotional words
- how the art of haiku draws on aspects of NLP
- how the brain connects seemingly disparate events, and how haiku can be used to help nurture the ability to make those connections
- mind-mapping, and how to use it both generally and for creating haiku
- how you can use the art of haiku to give useful feedback, or realise the source of your own feelings
- how being a haijin (a haiku poet) can improve your work life, help you write emails and make presentations, and find peace in a turbulent world.
This session is suitable for anyone, including people speaking English as a second language. Previous participants who swore they had no art with words have discovered that they possess the soul of a poet.
Value statement and tests: see Summary. It’s not completely insane, and it’s been run successfully several times before!
Abstract: Participants learn to write haiku through simple exercises. We explore how this can help us communicate, and understand and appreciate aspects of ourselves, our colleagues and our work.
Performance style: I teach with examples, using exercises which gently lead participants from a broad understanding to a deeper skill, surprising them with their own abilities along the way. Diverse images are provided to help stimulate the participants’ imaginations. I have only ever run this session for software professionals, and have had great feedback. Some previous participants now write haiku regularly. I can run this session with 4 to 30 people.
The Story So Far
I’m an Agile coach, a BDD enthusiast and a (paid) published poet. About three years ago I realised that I had some skills that were strange and a little rare. These included the ability to change and diverge from proscribed processes without fear, to express myself briefly and purposefully, with impact, and to write. I created this session to pass on some of those skills. It’s since been run at Thoughtworks, at client sites and at XPDay 2005, where it was received very well, becoming the main topic of conversation in the pub afterwards!
The skills are disparate. There’s no direct link between Agile and haiku… but experience suggests that the practitioners of one really like the other too, using them in emails, code comments, etc. I also found similarities with the art of haiku in NLP, and have adapted the workshop accordingly.
Examples of haiku from experienced haijins accompany each exercise.
Exercise 1: The Random Haiku
We each write a few phrases about a visual or sensory scene that we find emotionally moving. We then swap the phrases, creating verses from random snippets. Invariably each poem creates an image, often different in each participant’s imagination.
This exercise gives people confidence about their ability to create poetry and introduces some of the guidelines of good haiku.
Presentation: A little history
About the four haiku masters, how haiku originated, and the different forms which have evolved.
Exercise 2: The Renga
The renga is an ongoing poem throughout the workshop, to which each participant will contribute.
Exercise 3: Mind-mapping
An introduction and a quick overview of Mind Mapping, some practice pieces, and how to use mind maps to create a haiku, centralised on the main theme, without incorporating any direct images. We examine the results.
Exercise 4: Free-form haiku
We create our own haiku based on the rules we’ve learned so far.
Q&A: How can haiku help us?
What happens to our brain if we practice this regularly? How does it affect our ability to make connections? Our vocabulary? Our communication skills? What changes about the way we look at projects? What will we do differently?
Reading of the Renga
A look at the shared art we’ve produced, and how it’s evolved as the session has progressed.