Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and with guest revolutionist Toby Thompson (who was sitting at the table and initially didn’t want to speak on the podcast but then we couldn’t keep him quiet!) catch up with Jessie Shternshus, CEO at The Improv Effect and author of “CTRLShift“:
When you are facilitating you need to know your audience and believe in what you are doing – to get people involved, do things in small groups in partners so nobody has the attention on them initially and then build them up to group activities
Make people safe and get them to laugh – then you have them for the ride
At the March 2017 Agile Brisbane meetup, we were lucky to have Pat Reed, an internationally recognised Agile transformational leader in Adaptive Leadership and Value Innovation, present on “Business Agility: Creating the Future”.
She provided a copy of her slides, and here are my notes from the evening:
Every leader at eBay (440 of them) are Agile Coaches, it’s the third round now for them, imagine the change if you get frozen middle on board
Compasses are what we need to thrive on uncertainity, we cannot leverage maps because it is an unknown future
Don’t do more with less, do less, to execute in uncertainity
Change is changing, we need time for learning and innovating
If you demonstrate belief in the team and give an environment of safety, the team will believe in their potential – stop telling teams what to do, ask them what they think what we should do
Safe to fail is critical – we were all born with an Agile mindset (Carol Dweck) but our work and experiences push us towards a fixed mindset – if people can’t learn and thrive, your transformation will fail – as a coach we need to provide air cover
Keep timelines short all the time – the size of the iteration accelerates the learning cycle and the faster the learning
An adaptive framework – believing is seeing at centre, need to see awareness and understand the problem, need to process options through discovery (really short time frame, as for 3 value experiments), taking action (learn by doing not thinking), transform learnings into collective knowledge
Polarity Management – polarity is when you think you nailed a wicked problem and then it comes back to bite you, need to find the best win-win from any scenario, if you try to solve it traditionally you make it worse
VUCA is here to stay, learning is our competitive advantage
Measure real value, speed to value and cost of value, need relative value not precision because it doesn’t serve us – Case Study and spreadsheet to calculate value
Craig catches up with two luminaries in the Agile and Lean space, Mary and Tom Poppendieck at YOW! Conference to talk about agile, lean, rapid feedback, culture and leadership. The discussion points include:
Making the link between lean and software development and discovering that waterfall makes no sense
Day 2 at Agile 2011 in Salt Lake City kicked off with Todd Little advising that the conference this year had 1604 attendees from 43 countries and from 968 submissions we ended up with 268 sessions. Here are my notes.
Keynote – Why Care About Positive Emotions
Barbara Frederickson led with a keynote, but unfortunately I didn’t get to stick around for much of it as I needed to prepare for my session following. Two brief notes I picked up were:
positive psychology is about resilience, the closest concept in psychology to agile
positive emotions open us – we are more creative and can see more in the periphery, we have more resilience to bounce back, better performance on exams
The Speed To Cool: Agile Testing And Building Quality In
The session that I presented with Adrian Smith from Ennova was close to a full audience and was also one of a handful of sessions that was chosen to be recorded. We received lots of great feedback. The slides are available in a separate post. The following pictures were Adrian and I outside the room prior to the session:
Agile Coaching Self-Assessment – Where Do You Stand on the Competencies?
This session was limited to 32 participants, so it was with good luck and planning that I was able to sit in workshop facilitated by Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd.
Coaches are energy shifters and are tuned into the atmosphere of the room. We were invited to walk around the circle and reflect on the following areas:
agile-lean practitioner – people who know the tools and practices
business mastery – know what the business needs
coaching -professional coaching
mentoring – help people access what they already know
technical mastery – help people create great software
context – need to not look at a whole object but how it fits into the whole system
patterns – in pair programming, the navigator can see patterns because they are not concerned with the symbols and syntax, pattern matching is the key to expertise
neuroplasticity – humans can grow new neurons, but not sitting in a cage or a cubicle, work with enlightened people or in a sensory rich environment you will grow new neurons, but if you don’t use parts of your brain it will get rewired
If you study in an artificial environment you will get artificial results.
Skills – the Dreyfus model – rules –> intuition, consider everything –> relevant focus –> detached observer –> part of system
novice – no experience, accomplish a goal, want to get it done, don’t know how respond to mistakes, only way to be effective is to have contact-free rules (ie working in a call centre, following a script), need recipes to follow, can’t get much productivity from this level
advanced beginner – start trying tasks on your own, don’t want the big picture
competent – build conceptual models, troubleshoot on your own
proficient – want to understand the big picture, want to understand why, frustrated by oversimplified information, self correct previous poor task performance (retrospectives are a good example of why they need an experienced coach), learn from previous experience, can understand and apply maxims
expert – primary source in their field, continually look for better methods, work from intuition, world does not really work on rules it works on experience
second order of incompetence – know what you don’t know and admit to it
nursing practice shares a lot of similarity to software development – you need to solve problems then and there – need to become outcomes-based, importance of the individual, keep experts in practice, pay based on value added to the company
South American monkey trap is like the tool trap – confuse model with reality, de-value traits that cannot be formalised, legislating behaviour that kills autonomy, alienated experienced practitioners, demand for conformity of tools, insensitivity to contextual nuances
brain is not a computer – made up of L mode and R mode and we switch between them – spinning girl exercise – creativity and intuition works better in R mode
image streaming – pose a problem to yourself, close your eyes for 10 minutes and then for each image that crosses your mind describe it out loud, image it with all five senses and describe it in the present tense
free form journalling – first thing in the morning, write three pages long hand, uncensored, don’t skip a day – way to get it out
ten mental locks – the right answer, that’s not logical, follow the rules, be practical, avoid ambiguity, ……
you need to keep track of your ideas, otherwise you will stop having them – everyone has great ideas, fewer keep track of them, even fewer act on them and very few can pull them off
carry something with you all the time to record notes – tools like The Pocket Mod or Evernote
mind maps
we miss things that change slowly – this happens on projects on all the time
90 cognitive biases that people suffer – memory stinks – every read is a write that can create false memories, anchoring, fundamental attribution error, need for closure (agile estimation) – we will take any information even crap information for closure – in agile we want to keep things open ended, exposure effect, Hawthorne effect, relativity
ask yourself how you know what you know
your age group changes the way we view and understand things
some people need auditory, visual, kinetic
how to read – SQ3R – survey, question, read, recall, review
how to take notes – make a mind map, the sensory of pen and paper is better
get your ideas out there and blog it, tweet it, present it
Warnings:
multitasking – when you get interrupted your memory is blown, constantly checking email is an IQ drop of 10 points, three times as much as smoking a joint!
send less email and you will receive less email – pick up phone, walk down the hall
choose your tempo for an email conversation
don’t context switch – scan queue once, put things into piles, no mental lists (GTD)
set cues for task resumption when you get interrupted, leave a quick mote in code or on a notebook – gets back to resuming task much faster
set team interruption protocols – most teams say this is the happiest times they have coding
second monitor is a 20-30% productivity gains – ALT-TAB in windows is context switchin
Change is hard:
start with a plan
avoid inaction not errors
new habits take time (3-4 weeks)
belief is physical
take small next steps
This was a great session with so many techniques to look (and re-look at). As a result I think I will also add this book to my reading list (especially given that The Pragmatic Programmer in one of may favourite books). Finally, Andy reminded everybody that the Pragmatic Programmers also have a free magazine that is worth checking out.
After Dark
Tuesday night is typically the night that most of the vendor parties happen. I managed two invites – one to the Atlassian Drink-Up (which unfortunately due to talk preparation I ended up missing) and one to the Celebrate with Rally party which I was able to make for a couple of hours at the end.
Chaos, Chaordism and Agile: When have you slipped away from Agile and moved into chaos? What is Chaordism? When is chaos acceptable? How do you move out of chaos?
Quotes:
“I don’t program software anymore, I program people”
Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and with guest revolutionist Toby Thompson (who was sitting at the table and initially didn’t want to speak on the podcast but then we couldn’t keep him quiet!) catch up with Jessie Shternshus, CEO at The Improv Effect and author of “CTRLShift“:
Craig Smith 
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