When a business problem doesn’t have an obvious answer, let’s think it through.
Sometimes you don’t need another answer.
You need someone on the other side of the table who asks different questions.
Someone who will challenge your assumptions.
Someone who will ask:
“Hang on. What problem are we actually trying to solve?”
That’s what I call a Ping-Pong Session.
[IMAGE HERE]
Use a horizontal or slightly vertical portrait of Johnny in the same setup used for Debugging Reality videos:
- khaki Henley
- office chair
- white wall
- normal talking-head lighting
- relaxed, looking toward or slightly beside the camera
- not a corporate headshot
- not crossed arms
- no staged props
The image should visually connect this website to the YouTube videos.
What is a Ping-Pong Session?
You bring a problem.
We talk.
You explain how you see it.
I ask questions, challenge assumptions, throw ideas back, and occasionally look at the problem from an angle you may not have considered.
Then you throw it back.
Ping.
Pong.
The goal isn’t for me to give you the answer.
It’s to leave the conversation seeing the problem, the possible solutions, and their trade-offs more clearly.
Every decision is a trade-off. I help people see it more clearly.
The decision is still yours.
What can we talk about?
A difficult business decision.
A software project that has somehow become much more complicated than anyone intended.
A product that has accumulated seventeen perfectly reasonable features and become almost unusable.
A team solving the same problem for the third time.
A decision where every option seems to have an uncomfortable downside.
An idea that doesn’t quite fit together yet.
Or something completely different.
Good.
I don’t need to be the expert in your problem.
You probably are.
My job is to help you inspect it from another angle.
Why me?
I’ve been programming since 1979.
Since then I’ve worked with software, products, businesses, people and systems.
More recently, I’ve added sheep, goats and a small farm to the list.
The domains change.
The patterns are surprisingly repetitive.
We mistake symptoms for problems.
We optimize proxies instead of goals.
We add complexity one perfectly sensible decision at a time.
We become attached to our models long after Reality has started disagreeing with them.
I spend a lot of my time thinking and writing about those patterns.
I call that work Debugging Reality.
You don’t need to read the books before we talk.
But if you have, we’ll probably get to the interesting part faster.
Want to see how I think first?
Good idea.
You can read my books or watch some of my videos before deciding whether a Ping-Pong Session is useful to you.
They are probably a better way to judge me than testimonials.
Read Debugging Reality →
Watch Debugging Reality on YouTube →
If, after that, you find yourself thinking:
“I know how this person thinks, and I want that applied to my problem.”
then we should probably talk.
How does it work?
A Ping-Pong Session is two hours — €750.
Start with an email.
Tell me, briefly, what you’d like to talk about.
I’ll reply myself.
If I think I can be useful, we’ll find a time.
If I don’t think I’m the right person, I’ll tell you that too.
No form.
No cart.
No booking funnel.
No discovery-call choreography.
Just an email between two humans.
Email Johnny →
One important thing
A Ping-Pong Session isn’t about proving who’s right.
I may challenge your assumptions.
You should challenge mine.
We can both be wrong.
That’s rather the point.
Reality gets the final vote.
Elsewhere
I do a few other things.
Debugging Reality
Books and videos about what happens when our models don’t quite match the world.
Visit Debugging Reality →
Den lille holistiske bondegård
The farm Anja and I live on, where Reality provides unusually fast feedback.
Visit DLHB →
Letters From Reality
Small observations from a world that stubbornly refuses to follow the plan.
Visit Letters From Reality →
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