 Welcome to Agile Roots 2010, sponsored by Version 1, Rally Software, Vario, AmirSys, Agile Alliance, and Xmission Internet. Systems Thinking and the Learning Organization by Jason Dean. Well good morning, it's actually afternoon everyone. My name is Jason, and if you went to the presentation we had yesterday about on the cycles of your brain and your body during the day, this is the actual worst possible time you could be here. So, I'll do my best to keep you awake, and if I get boring, I have my permission to say, this sucks! So everybody practice, ready? This sucks! Good. So, that's our agreement. I won't take it against you, and we'll go from there. My name again is Jason, and I'm an Agile consultant by trade. I do training and consulting, and it's a relatively new business, so I just enjoy the opportunity to do it, mostly in the adoption space. So, working with companies who've never done Agile before, mostly. A lot of experience in the traditional PMI world as it were, and then a coder and tester and business analyst and project manager and various sides of teams and companies. So, I really enjoy what Agile has today to offer for us. Systems thinking is what I'm going to be talking about today, and unabashedly I've stolen everything for this talk directly out of Peter Sengay's book. How many people have read this book? Peter Sengay that did discipline. This is a must read. This is classic business literature, but I think it goes way beyond just the general organizational management. It has a lot of application for all of us, so that's where I'm going to be taking a lot of this information today, and I highly encourage you to get a copy of that. My supposition is that great software is only possible in a learning organization. There's lots of different ideas about what a learning organization is. We're going to look at a couple of different ideas here. I don't know if this turner is going to work, we'll see. So, a learning organization, and that might be kind of small, but I'll just kind of talk through it with you. What is a learning organization? Well, a learning organization, at least according to Peter Sengay, is a place where people are continually expanding their capacity to create. I think we can see some immediate value in that. Their capacity to create obviously directly impacts your ability to deliver value, and that's what agile should be all about, at least. But we're talking about getting the results you really want out of their organization. Wouldn't you like to live in a place or work in a place where thinking is nurtured and you're rewarded for that? You know, where you get to pursue this collective aspiration, working together. I know that in the agile world, that's definitely something we're trying to pattern, we're trying to build. We're trying to do that with a care program, and we're trying to do that with some of these different roles that we've established for Scrum, for example. It's a place where people are continually learning how to learn together. So a learning organization is not something you achieve, right? A learning organization is something that you constantly are continually doing. So what's wrong with the current system? Why do we need learning organizations? Well, I think Deming said it pretty well here. Our prevailing system of management is destroying our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, and joy to learn. I don't think a lot has changed since he made that statement. Very few organizations that I've worked in really focus on my success. And how many times have you been encouraged to succeed for the sake of others around you? We're encouraged to succeed to get the job done. But is it more than that? I hope that it is. And this highlighted part, destroying our people, this is why I do agile. I don't do agile because I just think it's something fun. I do it because I think you're valuable. I think that people are valuable. And I think that agile explores respect for people, you know, and that interaction between people. Maybe that's idealistic, but hey, I'm an idealistic kind of guy. So I think that agile has a lot to say about that. You know, we've seen a lot of short-term thinking of supplying the same rules across the organization no matter who you are, what kind of project it is, measuring the wrong things, controlling energy by fear. So the first step I really think about when we think about a learning organization is how do we create that? I mean, it doesn't happen by accident. Nothing good happens by accident, right? So we're going to have to build that organization ourselves and it's going to take some hard work. A lot of it has to do with this idea of creating and changing realities. Businesses that essentially are the sum of their decisions. Makes sense. It's not rocket science. The decisions, the culture, the ethos, these interactions that we've been talking about, their visions and goals. This system that the company has built has created its own situation, has created its own reality. It's really easy to complain about the problems that we have, that if we'll stop and think about it for a moment, they're there because of us, right? So if they're going to change, they're going to have to change because of us. Now sure we have external forces acting upon us and those can create problems internally, but what I'm really talking about is our ability to learn, our ability to grow, our ability to be more than we are today, right? So these decisions, this culture that we've built have really caused things to be the way they are. Peter talks about in his book here, he says that system structure leads to patterns of behavior, which sounds pretty logical, doesn't it? System structures, the way that we've built the organization, leads to these patterns of behavior which lead to events. So what are we always trying to fix in the organization? We're always trying to fix events, right? We're fixing the fact that the project is late, we don't have enough resources, there's these events that happen. And so we're always focused on the particular problem of the day, but what the point here is that there's something else behind that. And that's really the purpose of this whole talk today is to say that the problems that we experience and things that we go through, the structure of our system in our organization, is the result of behaviors that we've learned, behaviors that we've taken on as we were trained there, expectations of our culture, and they relate to these system structures that we continually either build up or tear down or add to. Peter talks about this idea of a metanoia, which means a change of mind. He related it to like the early Gnostic Christians would call this word repent. It means to turn around and change your way of thinking. He said that there needs to be a revolution in the way we think, that we're not just thinking of the small pieces. Now as good engineers we're trained to break apart everything, aren't we? We take apart the big problem and make it smaller problems. And then we take apart those smaller pieces and break them apart further. So we can try to get down to a root cause, these kinds of activities we do all the time. And yet when we do that, we wind up losing something. We lose the ability to see the whole system. I think that's the real value for Agile. That's something that I think we miss often, at least in companies where there aren't people sort of dedicated to looking at that system. Maybe they're a manager, a project manager maybe, or a business manager. But the problem so often is not just that event that happened, but there's a systemic reason. And we can think about this technically. We know what a systemic problem is. It's not just a data problem. It's not just a little defect. It's a result of the architecture of the system. So he says that we need a metanoia. We need to recreate ourselves. And this is how we're going to be able to really make a difference and learn and be in that place that we really want to be. Structure and patterns that control events. And what I'm saying to you is that those Agile patterns that we're talking about, those can be our structure. And that can enable us to be a true learning organization. And that's what I say here. Agile provides a framework from which a learning organization can be built. So my proposal is that Agile is not only good for building software, but it's good for building organizations. It's good for building interactions between people. We just heard from Alistair talking about those interactions. That exactly is where the meet is at. And Agile we have, maybe we use a card on a wall. It represents a conversation, right? That's what we need Agile for in our organization is to help us find ways to have more conversations. So we can break down those barriers between those organizations. We've all experienced that IT business, uncomfortableness. I was at HP, worked there for a number of years. And I was an R&D team. And I managed requirements for a remote delivery team, off-shore team. And they combined us, they did a reorg and they combined us with a marketing group. And I just thought that was the weirdest thing I've ever seen. It was so strange. We had really geeky guys, technical freaks sitting next to these marketing guys who knew nothing about the technology underneath the software they were getting. What I found was it started a conversation. All of a sudden I knew why we were building those things that we needed. Now in Agile we know that that's a good thing. We talk about customers sitting with us or going to a customer's location. So we know that that's a good thing. But I propose that we use Agile to do more than just deliver value in software. I propose that we use it to deliver value in the organization. So there's three main core learning disciplines grouped into these five learning disciplines that Senge talks about. Fostering, aspiration, this three-legged stool. Fostering, aspiration, understanding, complexity, and developing reflective conversation. So I'm going to try to move through these pretty quick. My goal here is not that you try to get everything that I talk about because there's just a lot in this space. If you're at all interested in this, you know, I'll give you some more information. I just want you to be listening for keys that might help you think at a broader level. Our responsibility, our social responsibility in my opinion on this earth is to expand our circle. You know, we all have a little circle around us and this is where I live. This is my space. I control my thoughts and actions and I think about me and my needs and I eat and I sleep. That circle is very small and when we, you know, can draw that bigger circle around our family we're doing things for our family and with our family and we're able to help more people. So I'm encouraging you and I'm encouraging me to draw that circle bigger in our organization, develop partnerships, use these tools to help you think about the bigger picture. We're going to start with the concept of systems thinking, but we'll go through these other ones as well, systems thinking. So here's an example of a system. When it rains, we don't always think about the fact of the whole system behind it, right? We just think, now I need to do windshield wipers on the car, right? We're just thinking about the rain or it's getting my hair wet or whatever, but we know that there's a bigger system. There's rain that goes into the groundwater and the rivers and creeks and the ocean and evaporates up into the clouds and then it rains again. So we know the water cycle, right? So that's part of a system. It would be a mistake for us to think that rain just comes from the clouds because, you know? If we do things that damage our groundwater, that's going to cause an effect on the whole system. So we realize that there's a lot more than just one event. Systems thinking is about holistic thinking. I just got back from China and I loved it because there are very holistic thinkers. You know, when I had some good sweet and sour fish, the head is on one end and the table is on the other. You know, and they think that that looks nice because it's a good presentation. It's the whole animal. It's holistic thinking. You don't eat those parts unless you want to, but you know, you pick the meat off the fish and that's the meal. So they're used to thinking and broader concepts. But some of the parts and their interactions, that's what a system is. Interrelated actions. And again, more specifically, interrelated interactive conversations between components of the system. People are active participants in changing their future in the system, right? People are participating, making decisions. It's concept of dynamic complexity that we can't just say there's one main reason. Sometimes there is one main reason for something, but many times we know that there's a lot of other parts of the system that has an effect on what's going on. But so often we want to blame somebody, right? We want to blame the developer for writing the core code or we want to blame IT because they clearly can't, you know, don't know our business needs. So it's easy to try to blame someone, but really there's this dynamic complexity. There's detail complexity. Sure, there's little details that we need to understand and know, but there's this dynamic complexity about how all the parts of the system work together. And there's this concept of circles of causality, which is very interesting. If you can see that picture, essentially, you know, if you start with the faucet, turn the faucet on, right? Water fills up the cup. It's flowing into the cup and the water level is going up. My brain is seeing that with my eyes, right? I'm registering a perceived gap between the desired water level, right? I want a full glass of water, but not all the way to the top, a quarter inch below the top. So I'm looking for that. And when that water level approaches, I turn it off, right? So here we have a cycle. We have a system. Now, we typically describe it in that fashion. We would say I turn on the water. It fills up when I see that it's level I want. I turn it off. But you can also describe this in the reverse. The water level affects the faucet position through the perception. It can go the other direction as well. And so we don't often think about it from that way, right? We're just thinking about it from the fact that I'm controlling my hand. But really, it's the water level controlling my hand, right? So this is just a simple example. And those arrows represent influences. So your perceptions influence that faucet position and water flows and influence. So this is a system. Now, in Cengage's book, which I encourage you to dig into when you have time, he goes through several different archetypes. And I think these are really valuable for you to look at. There's this first one I'm just giving as an example, and it's limits to growth. And essentially what you have is two loops. You have this reinforcing loop and you have this balancing loop. So in this example, you have a production, flexibility and cost. And that influences our commitment to just-in-time delivery, right? And of course that just-in-time delivery affects or influences our production, flexibility and cost. Having the right stuff there at the right time influences our ability to produce more. On the other side, the balancing side, that left side is the growth side. The reinforcing is the growth. But on the left side, we have one of the right sides, the balancing loop. Well, that commitment to just-in-time threat causes or influences the manufacturer, doesn't it? The manufacturer has a goal. He wants to maintain multiple sources because he doesn't want to be left high and dry, okay? But the supplier, you know, he wants to be the sole source. That is a risk to the supplier. There's a delay between when we see the actual results happen. And that affects negatively our ability to have just-in-time delivery. So the point here is there's this reinforcing loop. There's things that cause things to go well and to grow. And you can have reinforcing of negatives as well, right? And then there's things that balance. Why is this important? Because when you're looking at a problem in your organization, when you're looking at a problem in your system, you need to realize that there's things that cause it to grow and there's things that cause it to be limited. Now, what do we normally do? If there's something that we want to grow, we push harder, right? Push harder on that thing to make it grow. We're going to train people more. We're going to do all these things to make it go faster and faster and faster. But in actuality, we need to be looking at the other side. We need to be looking at this limiting factor. That manufacturer's goal is a limiting factor. We need to address that. If we can reduce the limiting factor, then all of a sudden we've opened up our system to growth, right? Well, what is this? We know this as theory of constraints. That's exactly what this is. So Agile is already doing systems work. That's kind of the corollary part of this talk, is that when we use Agile, we're actually implementing systems thinking in our organization. But when we want to try to, in this case, reduce that limiting factor, then we're opened up. It's the same thing about saving money. We can make more money by saving it, right? System thinking then integrates some other learning disciplines, which we're going to look at. The idea of personal mastery, shared vision, mental models, dialogue, and team learning. We'll get to those. Again, this idea of a metanoia. We've been trained to break things down, but we need to think differently. What does Agile offer for us? How is Agile implementing this already? Well, we see here just a few things. Value stream, right? We know what a value stream is. It's a flow of value within the organization, the system, supplier, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Flow. Flow implies a system. Pull from a customer implies a system. Team ownership, right? We have a team that owns code, not just one person, so I can code on anything in the system because a team owns it. No individual ownership, no slicing of information instead of just having a component. Agile's already doing some of these things, which I think is good. That's why I'm proposing that Agile is a good tool to use for helping your organization be a learning organization. I'm going to go through these just real briefly because there's a lot here. We just don't have time. Again, we talked about this concept that today's problems came from yesterday's solutions, right? We know about refactoring. We know about technical debt. Does anybody have any technical debt? We know that tomorrow's problems are coming from the things we're building today. If that's the case, how should we be building the things that we're building today? With Agile, we're not thinking about everything that could possibly happen. We're not planning for 100 years down the line or a long time away. We're planning for a short time horizon. But we need to be thinking beyond just the next generation a little bit. We need to be thinking, how is our customer going to use this and what do they want to use next? What are competitors doing? As a developer, it was very helpful for me to know not only how my customers were using my software, but how the organization was going to be moving in that application space. Why invest a bunch of time in something that isn't going anywhere? So I don't go and do a bunch of cleanup, maybe, in a particular part of the system. It really isn't going to go anywhere. So having a systems thinking perspective can be very helpful. Another thing that I've seen a lot in Agile and Scrum teams is that things go really great. They adopt Agile, they start doing well, and they start getting some great velocity and they start delivering. And everyone gets excited. And then what happens? It starts trailing off. They're not quite as concerned about it anymore. And the developers are kind of not really wanting to pair anymore. And the management is thinking, well, we did that already. What else do we need to do? So that you see this kind of great excitement and then things kind of taper off. That's what happens in general in systems. The behavior gets better before it gets worse. So if we know that's going to happen, what are we doing about that? What are we doing to ensure that we're continuing to motivate people, train people, prepare people? How do we integrate the IT and business better so we don't have these weird situations where they show up and say, I've got to have this tomorrow. I don't care what your process is. I don't care what it breaks in his bucket of stuff. I just care about my bucket of stuff. As a project manager, I can't tell you how many times a program manager came to me and said, I've got to have this done. And I don't blame them. They're under the gun. But what about the other program managers that I was delivering for? They had to say needs as well. And the easy way out often leads back in. It's like the story of the drunk guy. He's under the light out in front of his house and he's looking for his keys or he's looking around on the ground and somebody says, what are you looking for? Looking for your keys. Well, where did you leave them? Well, I dropped them by the door. What are you looking here for? Well, there's no light by the door. So it's this whole concept that it's easy to do what's familiar. But if you're a learning organization, you're constantly putting yourself in a new light. You're looking at yourself. You're introspective. You're retrospecting. That's why we do retrospective. So we can learn so we can grow. But when we stop learning, that's when systems begin to take over because the harder you push, it'll push back unless you're doing things to prevent them. Faster is slower. We know that. Sometimes we do agile thinking that we're just doing it for speed. And yeah, sometimes we can get speed, depending on the system. But, you know, faster is slower in the sense that unless we're thinking ahead, unless we're committing to these things that we're doing, it can cause problems, right? If we're exchanging the long term for the short term. And this is really boring stuff, but I like it anyway. So another big problem that we have is cause and effect are not connected always in time, right? In other words, just because we do something in one sprint doesn't mean we're going to see the results in the next. And maybe much further down the line before we realize that code we should have refactored is now causing some major problems, okay? So, there's this delay. But if we don't think about the fact that there's a delay, we just go happily on our way. And we never, we're not looking at the rest of the system looking for those delays. Now, we know from the leading perspective that we're always trying to get rid of those delays, right? Because those delays cause things to be covered up and cause them to be hidden. And when they're hidden, what happens? Then you have defects that show up at the end that came out of nowhere that are nasty that you can't ship because of this defect. What we should have known about it already. So, I'm just going to say, that's basically, you know, this systems thinking is this concept of looking at the whole picture. But really, we need to take it and apply it to the whole organization and not just, and even for the person living on the Agile team or a tester living on a team or an architect or a developer. The things you do should be connected to the things a company is doing. When I go to implement Agile in some place, I start with value stream mapping, right? I start at the top. What are you trying to do as a business? What's your strategic goals? And by the time we're done, their backlog is connected directly to their strategic goals. So that as a developer I'm sitting on a team, I know that this task that I'm doing right now actually is delivering value to the strategic goals of my company, right? But we don't often do that. So we're wind up doing all this work, lots and lots of work all the time that in the end just gets thrown away because we're not looking at it from a broader perspective. So we're going to talk about personal mastery. Personal mastery is this concept of expanding our own ability to produce the results we want in life. You know, it has to do with self-learning, but it has a lot of work. There's a lot more to it than that. I encourage you to read the book. There's a ton of information around this, but I want results in my life. What's important to you? What do you want out of life? You know, not very long ago, I essentially left corporate America to start my own business because I was tired of someone else determining my priorities for me. I was tired of somebody else telling me to work 12 hours a day building printers. You know, it's just not that important to me. It's not that it's not necessary. I'm glad there are people building printers because I use them, but that's not what makes me satisfied at the end of the day. So I wanted to be on my own so that I could pursue my own goals, my own dreams. What's important to you? How are you growing? How are you learning? The basic idea here is that you as an individual must learn before the organization can learn. Doesn't that make sense? As an organization, we try to say well, we need to move into this space. You've got to move into this market space. Well, we're not going to actually invest in any training. We're not going to invest in hiring people that know that space, or we're not going to invest in giving people time like on Fridays to build code in that area to explore it. We're just going to do things that we've always done. But as an individual, if we don't learn how in the world is an organization going to learn? So you have to learn first. Well, gosh, if you have to learn something, as a manager, what's my job? My job is to make you the best that you can be. Why don't our companies do that? You know? So I think Agile has the opportunity to, again, lift people up and help them be important because why? They're part of the decision process. They're part of making choices, right? So they're empowering people to have something in their life that satisfies. Because if you're just working to get paid, that doesn't really satisfy. Not might, for a time. But it doesn't last. So where does this start? It starts with personal vision. This is really good for me. I like this. An ability to focus on intrinsic desires. What do you really want? What are you pursuing in your life? As a developer, in your code base what are you pursuing? Are you pursuing just getting a job done? Are you pursuing knowing more about it? Being better at what you do? Are you pursuing being better for other people? Are you pursuing those relationships with others that make you a better coder because in the end you know why I'm building the software? Okay? So an ability to focus on the intrinsic desires. Ah, thank you. Is really critical and this is where it starts. People seeking mastery, personal mastery are continually doing these two things. Clarifying what's important and learning and looking learning about what is real. When I went on my own and started my own business it became immediately apparent that there was a lot of things I didn't know. Right? Is that going to stop me? No. Because I know some things and there's a few people in the world that know a little bit less than what I do so I try to find those and help them. Now there's a whole bunch of other people who know way more than me and so I go to places like this to learn from them and to try to be a part of them and be a part of their story. We all have a story. We all have something that brought us where we are. Are we a part of that for someone else? Are we seeking to really see where we are? Are we introspecting to say what is important to me? What's important to our organization? Is it all these other fringe things? Is there a core business that we should be focusing in? Are we building our people? So continually clarifying what's important, continually learning to see reality. Well, isn't this what we do in Agile? This is what we do all the time when we write. We're always looking back and we're always looking ahead. We're saying, how can we do this better? What opportunities for improvement do we have? How can I work better with this guy who's totally different than me? Now if I have a mature attitude I'm going to sit down with that guy that I don't really like and I'm going to find a way to have some common boundary or some common space, some common ground that I can get better at. This guy, really, really sharp guy but really blunt. He was just kind of rude. Everyone thought he was rude. He came across as rude, grumpy, was in constant pain all the time. I couldn't really tell. There was something that seemed wrong with the person. I'm just normally an outgoing person and it just didn't sit well with me. I had to work with him. I had to sit next to him and I wasn't willing to let that lay. I found out just real quickly that it wasn't that he's rude it's just that he's interested in the bottom line. He's interested in the details. He's not really interested in all the fluff. Once I found that out I was able to say, here you go, here's what you need. Here's the bottom line. One sentence I delivered what I needed to deliver to. Then all of a sudden he loved to talk about fishing, racing cars and building rockets. All of a sudden the whole door opened up to this guy because I learned a little bit about who he was and what he needed. Well, if we can in our organizations play the same role and say what is the core thing we need to do then we can deliver those things first and the rest opens up to us. I mentioned yesterday a couple of people that I read a proverb a day or so ago that said once we have understanding basic understanding of how the system is working then we get knowledge. In other words, we start to see the real issues. But unless you know how the system is flowing unless you know how you can grow and what's holding you back from growing, what are those limiting factors? How can you see? So these things help us have knowledge about our system help us to learn more about what's happening. It's this idea of moving from where we are to where we want to be this vision so there's a gap, we feel the gap we think we need to be better at these things it says really small in there it didn't zoom in like I wanted but there's this concept of creative tension we talked a little bit about a couple of other sessions yesterday about conflict in the team we talked a little bit more about that but creative tension is this idea of I'm stretching forward trying to grab hold of something and there's other things holding me back so what's the best way to move forward is to release those things holding me back because I'm already motivated man I'm already going places, I know what I want I know how I need to move forward but there's these things holding me back sometimes there are other people so I need to work with those people sometimes there's a business owner because I never can understand anything he tells me how am I supposed to build that? I don't even know what you're asking have I taken the time to ask realizing that there's conflict this is kind of interesting many times we think we can't learn, we can't do something new because we are powerless we think that we don't have any power to do that we think that we're worthless that we don't actually deserve that he says in his book you guys can just kind of listen along and say if you were to say this out loud and say I can create my life exactly the way I want it in all dimensions work, family, relationships community and the whole world do you believe you have the power to do that? do you feel like you're worried to do that? so what's holding you back? there's lots of opportunities in your own organization to overcome obstacles if you'll do it if you'll reach out and be vulnerable it's hard because you might we're afraid we're afraid someone's going to find out we don't know as much as we pretend that we know so we overcome conflict by committing to the truth and this relentless desire to root out our limits and then this next step is driving it to the subconscious I want it to be part of my autonomic system I don't have to think about all the things that have to happen for me to scratch my head my brain does, it does thousands of steps for me to scratch my head but I didn't have to think about that so we can drive these things into our autonomics the things that happen automatically things like sitting down with someone and asking what they think that seems so obvious but sometimes when you're focused and you're trying to get it done, you don't do that and in the end your quality is worse so how does agile help? it gives importance to interaction iteration and incremental discovery we're learning, we're growing this is what is good for an organization this is why I want to see organizations do agile sometimes they deliver software value frequently but because it gives them discovery opportunities that's why I like short sprints because you get to practice more right? conversation and collaboration, relying on personal and team craftsmanship personal accountability transparency and multiple perspectives have you ever heard of the three blind men in the elephant? you probably have this blind man was told to reach out and feel he didn't tell them what it was and then one guy was feeling the tail and he said well it feels like a rope another guy was feeling his leg and said well it feels like a tree another guy was feeling the side it feels like a wall and they were all right and they were all wrong it was all the same thing it was one animal but they had different perspectives right? they had a different way of seeing things well you're in a cross functional team we go around you that see things from a different perspective you need their perspectives but we sit there we just do our little job we don't think about the value that we could get if we would open up which is a scary thing to do sometimes shared vision is about what we want to create it's having this one picture the interesting thing about shared vision that it's built from your personal vision if everyone in this room has their own personal vision about what's the best the example we did with Alistair the best word, the best name but we had to come together with a shared vision we voted, mindset was the top so our personal visions apply into the shared vision and now we're all a little better off because of the shared vision we can all buy into it right? talk a little bit more about this in a second but the interesting thing is that Maslow have you heard of Maslow's hierarchy of need the base level is survival the top is self-fulfilling the things that we do can be so completely ingrained that they cannot be separated from us in other words they become they get forced down through to the lower level so in other words my ability to communicate and to bring in other people's perspectives if I can drive that down to my core need I don't have to think about it anymore if my organization automatically pursues diverse ideas and in our scrum team I'm automatically asking okay I've heard that idea who has a different idea who has another way to do it and as a scrum master I wouldn't leave until we have at least three ways to do something and then we would talk about what the best way was interrelationships require common understanding there's different kinds of commitments we make to one another sometimes it's more just signing up, I'm enrolling sometimes I'm doing it because I have to I'm compliant sometimes I just don't want to there's different kinds of compliance of course if you want people to invest in you guess what? you have to invest in them if you're going to have people that are committed to helping you deliver let's say the business person is helping you deliver good stories guess what? you're going to have to be committed to them and not just give them a bunch of fluff and excuses when something doesn't happen you take responsibility as a team, you take accountability as a team you succeed as a team, you fail as a team but you live in openness and transparency with those who depend on you right be honest and genuine you can't make people join to connect with you you have to reach out to connect to them it's your responsibility, not theirs reflective conversation has this idea of mental models to sum this up as mental model is your world view how do you see things? what's your perspective? which part of the elephant are you holding on to? and then have you shared that with somebody because you're right, at least the code do you think that elephant is just a little rope? and it's not I think the thing that's really important about this whole area is that in our organization we need to create ways for people to learn Google does this they'll give people Fridays or every other Friday something like that to do what they want to do they can do anything they want it has to be a productive project it doesn't have to be within the organization but something that they're learning and growing and building the company up why? because it brings that diversity in it brings that culture of inquiry to the table the worst thing I hate to see as a group of developers sitting around a table and no one says anything I know why that happens because there's lots of times that are just introspective people or they're not as loud and obnoxious as I am so they don't just automatically talk they like to think first but everyone has something to say everyone has something to share you've got a background you've learned some things you're willing to explore and enjoy the diversity of thought around you different world views forward here team learning we're trying to go somewhere we're trying to get somewhere well what usually happens is this that's what happens why? it happens because we don't talk to each other and when we do, we're not really connecting and we don't really care what should it look like that takes work are you willing to do the work? I hope so having real dialogue with one another conflict I love conflict conflict is an opportunity I hate conflict in the sense of arguing with somebody the conflict is an opportunity for you to do something better right? I have a conflict with someone from another country because of my ideological positions I don't need to learn from them if you have a conflict of what the coach should look like you have an opportunity to learn from someone to share but it requires these different ideas doesn't it make sense that if we're going to come together that we have our own passions our own ideas that can create conflict but that's good that we have different ideas right? it helps us to be better we need to learn to practice together as a team we need to learn from ourselves about learning organizations personal masters, vision mental models, team learning systems thinking I think agile is a great pattern for that I encourage you to dig into it find out how agile is making you better but also how thinking about the whole system can make your agile better as well so good luck thank you very much