"Campfire Talks with Herbie" is the podcast hosted by steve-tendon, creator of TameFlow. Episode 26, recorded September 8, 2020, features Clarke Ching discussing Agile and Theory of Constraints. The show's name is a direct eliyahu-goldratt reference: Herbie is the slowest boy in the hiking group in "The Goal," used to illustrate the concept of the system constraint.
Context and conversation
The "Campfire Talks with Herbie" format positions conversations as informal discussions around a notional campfire — accessible, exploratory, and community-oriented. Tendon's TameFlow approach synthesizes TOC, Agile, and psychological flow, making his podcast a natural home for Ching's work. Both practitioners are translating Goldratt for software and knowledge work audiences; their conversation would likely explore the parallels and divergences between Ching's narrative-driven approach and Tendon's more systematic TameFlow methodology.
The episode's existence demonstrates that Ching was recognized within the TameFlow and broader TOC-Agile community as a practitioner worth engaging. Tendon's audience includes serious TOC practitioners as well as Agile practitioners interested in deeper frameworks — a more technically sophisticated audience than typical Agile podcasts.
Relationship to the broader TOC-Agile community
The tameflow-campfire-talk alongside the agile-uprising-toc-aissance-interview shows Ching operating across both the mainstream Agile podcast circuit and the more specialized TOC-Agile practitioner community in the same period (2020). This dual presence reflects his bridge position: credentialed enough in the TOC tradition to speak to TameFlow audiences, accessible enough for mainstream Agile practitioners.
The goldratt-to-software-transmission-chain note examines how multiple practitioners — Ching, Tendon, gene-kim, david-anderson — arrived at similar destinations from the same Goldratt upstream source. This conversation between Ching and Tendon is a direct recorded instance of two nodes in that transmission chain comparing notes.