 There are a lot of times when, oh my goodness, scientists change their minds, they used to tell us one thing and now they tell us another. Have you noticed that? Is that a good thing? Don't you hate that? Well they used to tell us it was okay to eat butter and sugar and fat, and now it's not so good, but on the other hand if it's natural butter that might be okay, but oh no, not if it's, and then sugar is, no sugar is not, and then I, why do they make up their minds? Why do scientists keep changing their minds? Why do they do that? Because they're trying to be annoying? Why do they do that? Why would a scientist change his or her mind about something? And they lose new information, so that's a good thing. We would like that, we would like more information. Well what happens when a politician changes his or her mind? A lot of information. So we know that scientists are not going to make mistakes, but sometimes they can only say what they can say. They don't know enough. This is the best they can do at the time. The example here is Newtonian physics. At the time, what was the best idea semester you could do? It wasn't until Einstein came along and he said what if, and then here's an example of something where we can't do a scientific experiment, but it's a scientific result nonetheless. What we know about Einstein is that he loved stories. In fact, he spent more time on stories than he did on physical scientific experiments. He would begin to say let's suppose we were in a spaceship and it was traveling at the speed of light and we had an observer outside of the spaceship and an observer inside the spaceship and they each dropped a ball and they noticed the other and he would develop elaborate, wonderful stories. And then he'd go to a colleague and he'd say hey what do you think about this? Suppose there's a spaceship going at the speed and he could feed back and he improved the stories and he was drawing more about stories than he was about experiments and it was those stories that he called them thought experiments. They were more convincing for the scientists at the time. They were well known by usability to come up with a good story, much more convincing than the real physical experiments that didn't come until much later. We also know that scientists are biased. That most of the time scientists do some kind of research and they have investments in a particular point of view. And now along comes a new idea or a new theory and they will resist that as long as possible because after all their publication, their position, their tenure, if they're at a university depends upon all the work they've done up to this point. And so a very famous scientist named Max Planck said, science makes progress not because scientists pay attention to new data but because the old scientists die. We have to wait for the old guys to die before we can make any progress. You can see that now in economics. Classical economics, which is what I say, believed that you and I are rational decision makers. The models for them are just the rational decision maker. Is that a bad sign? It looks like it is. Should I be worried? I'm not worried. You might be worried. Oh, isn't he on the science level? Okay, so they're paying attention and we will have to worry about that. So what we know about scientists and who are behavioral economists is that they said, hey, let's do some experiments. We're not just going to have these nice models that are built on fuzzy ideas. Let's do some real experiments and what they showed is that people are not rational decision makers. So they have created a new field called behavioral economics. And I'll give you some recommendations for reading about that later. But the old economists are hanging on, especially at the University of Chicago. They are hanging on to their old models and we have to wait until they die. And then behavioral economists can take over. And they will do good things until they are displaced and then they'll wait until they die. So I can see what's going on here. You'll have the slides later, I guess. I have a great quote. I was on a committee that was reviewing papers submitted for a scientific conference and I got a comment from one reviewer who said, I wouldn't believe this, even if it were true. What we know is that it takes most. We know that good science can inform us, but what convinces us, what leads us to adopt the idea is a good story. This is the way it happened for Garfield. It wasn't the nice organized research by Semmelweis. The physicians in the U.S. didn't care about that. They didn't look at it. It didn't convince them. What influenced them to change their practice was the death of Garfield. A good story about what happened to the president when inappropriate practices were used. You can see that throughout the history of science. Has anyone heard of a guy named Galileo? It happened to him. When he came home and he said, no, no, we got it wrong. Everything doesn't revolve around the earth. No, the sun. That's what's happening is the earth is revolving around the sun and did the people at the time say, oh, Yimmy, thank you, Galileo, for sharing your insight. Is that what happened? Is that what happened? No, no, that's not what happened. Even his fellow astronomers said, are you kidding? What are you talking about? We have this nice model. It explains everything and it fits with the Bible. The earth is the most important thing in the universe. Forget about that other sun thing. And he was holed up before the Roman imposition and they were very convincing. It was sort of something like this, Galileo, change your rider. We won't kill you. He said, okay, I'll change my mind. Sure. And like Semmelweis, they locked out. This is how we start out. Experimenting. We would never want to walk if we weren't natural scientists. If we weren't always saying, oh, what are this does? And by standing saying, well, I think I can figure this out then. Oh my goodness, I fall down, but that's okay. I get up again and I try again and I fail again. We wouldn't be here. We wouldn't walk. We wouldn't speak. We wouldn't have any other wonderful skills we do if we hadn't had that approach of being a natural scientist, of performing a series of experiments, trial and error, learn from failure. If we hadn't had that approach to the way we live, we wouldn't make any progress at all. And what happened to us? What happened from that wonderful stage of our life to where we are now? Oh my goodness, do we do this now? I don't think so. The search became not so much about trying and being okay with failing. No, no. It was more about I need to get the right answer. I need to find the right answer. That's what our parents told us. That's what our educational system has trained us to do is here's a problem, find the right answer. And if you do find it, then I will give you an A. That's what our organizations do. Here's a task. If you do it, I will reward you and we've done that over and over and over. So even in science, it's not about doing science. In science classes, it's about here's a list of things that you have to memorize. Now you go out and memorize that and then I'll give you a test and you will either answer it or not. And I will grade it and I will say you get an A or a B or an F. So now that's what we're doing. Those are the kinds of questions I get when I go around the world. How can I do this over zombies? How can I do the right thing? I want to can you give me the answer? I am in the habit of saying I have no idea. Here are some things you could try. I cannot pull up a little nice package of things and say here it is. This is the answer. This will solve all your problems. In fact, if you're paying good money for consultants who come in and do that, I would say beware, beware, run away, run away, be very afraid. Because not only is there not always a right answer, sometimes there's no answer at all and we never prepare students or our children for that. So there might not. You might just have to do the best you can to proceed forward. I'm always looking for better ways so I can live longer. Unfortunately, I know there's no magic silver bullet in the head and that someday I'm going to die. Probably sooner than I realize. That's hard. So when I tell you, I've told you no. I don't have the answer for your problem. Here are some things you could try. Realize it. Not just trying to be contentious. I'm telling you the truth. The truth as I see it. So even when I talk about experiment, we know that many executives are afraid. They don't even like that word. If you go to your CEO and say, hey, we're going to try some small, cheap experiment, I'll bet he or she is not going to be happy. Because the implication of experiment is risk, possibility of failure, and what that executives thinks he or she is paying you to do is have the right answer and get it right. They're not paying you to say, well, I'm not sure. Linda said we can try this or we can try that. They don't think that's an enthusiastic way to proceed. So if you're going to try experiments in your organizations, which I recommend, you better find another word. In the retrospective sessions, we said, well, we can try just saying action items. We know language matters. So you need to find a way of doing those small, cheap experiments in your organizations without scaring your music is. So what can you do? I feel like I've been pretty discouraged at this point. Really, there are some points of light on the horizon. And one of them is some small efforts at research within the Agile community. They're not looking at big, enormous, though I minimize control experiments, but they're looking at the practices, the individual practices, or some small piece of Agile. So here are two recommendations. On the left is a book that was written by Lauren Williams. She is a professor at the University of North Carolina, and she has done a lot of double line control experiments with different kinds of people who are doing their programming. So I recommend her book. On the right is a paper. If you can't find it, send me some email and I will send it to you. Our little bell, she did experiments with her programming. We looked at who should pair with whom? How long should the pair duration be? He really did have hypothesis analysis. These were real science as he could do it in his environment. Now, when you read that, you should take it with the realization that this was his context. But it should give you some ideas, build on that, small research, and try your own experience. So this kind of thing now is happening a lot. People are doing real science with little pieces of Agile development. So do that. There are people outside our industry who are doing real science that applies, that directly applies to what we are doing. So on the left, this is a large study that was done by Theresa Ammibiles. She's a professor at Hardware Business. She wrote a book called Progress Principle. And in it, she describes a study of software development. She followed them for an extensive period of time and collected a lot of data on how they work and motivates them. And the title might give you a little clue, the short story is what motivates software developers is to make daily progress on something they care about. It seems startling. It seems common sense. But now there's the beginning of truth. But what in the middle is something that everybody seems to be reading when they must do a survey. How many are reading it? Or how many have fought about reading it? You've thought about reading a book about the key. The problem with this book is it is really, really big. And it's a slog of reading, but it is amazing. So I recommend it highly. And in it, you'll learn a lot about yourself. You make decisions. And it's all based on science. So it doesn't have to do a software development, but after all we do thinking for a living, wouldn't you like to know better ways? And then on the right is just one of Dan Erling's book. I recommend anything by Dan Erling. If you just Google on Dan Erling, you'll pull up TED talks and articles and lots of free stuff. He's also written three books. So the books are about his research and it all applies directly to software because he's a behavioral economist. He's one of the new young guys who's coming in who's going to change forever in the field of economics. So there are just three examples. There are many more of people who are outside our industry, but their research, their scientific research has direct application. We can use that. We can pay back what they're doing even if we can't do the science. I know you're going to think this is crazy. I think one of the most powerful things we can do in order to be better is to get together and talk about it while you're eating a believer in the power of food and to back me up. I have this wonderful quote from a Nobel laureate at Cambridge and he said, it used to be at Cambridge that we all had lunch together. And when we were together, we would talk about ideas for experiments, ideas for making things better. And he said, what happens now? Well, everybody eats alone, after their deaths, doing their email. He closes, you can't learn anything by doing email. So we're hiding behind a lot of tools that we think help us. And some of those tools are getting in the way of the most insightful app we have in our environment, which is the other people that we work with and just having human interaction and talking about ideas for small cheap experiments in better ways. Don't lose that. Hide behind tools and apps and other electronic things when you've got wonderful brains. Sit around the table with some food. Make sure that your teams are as diverse as possible. Here's another paper from Harvard. I want to send it to you. It shows that having one woman on the team or somebody from another culture or somebody who believes differently, somebody who maybe doesn't like agile. That's a good thing. We talk about firing people who say, I don't care programming. No, no, keep them around. I can have a role for them in my pattern language heroes change. You need somebody who doesn't like all along with the herd. You need the point of view of somebody who says, I'm not sure this agile stuff is really all that great. That's a valuable person and you should listen. You should pay attention. You should just say, well, it's my job and I have to convince them. I have to influence that person so they'll be just like the rest of us and we'll all march together. We love to march together. We love to march together. We want to sing together. That's what the military does. We think that's a good goal. We are all, we are all going agile. The agile has done that has changed everything. So here's what it's all about. It's about taking little tiny steps. How big are those steps? Well, they used to be 30 days, but now they're, they're shrinking. They're two weeks a week. Talk to a team last couple weeks ago. How big are those steps? Well, they're smaller and smaller and what happens in those steps is we do a little experiment. We try something and then we deliver it and then the customer says, that looks okay, but maybe this part up here, I'm going to show you that. And we're back in the scientific experimental mode of trying something just as we did when we were babies. Let's try that little step and maybe we'll fall down, but we will start over again and we'll get better. And we will learn even, well, there is no such thing as a failed experiment. Every experiment tells you something that's going to be useful. So we're back in the role of being a natural scientist regarding development as a series of experiments and maybe for some of us, even doing that in our own lives. Who should be agile? It's not your project, your team, or your organization. All of those components are made up of individuals. You should be agile. That's the goal. Adam had brought values, human values to the table and said, hey, remember software is developed by people. We need to be better. And the way to do that is little tiny steps, learning every step. So the conclusion of the talk is you need both. You need real science to validate whatever it is that you're doing, but people are not convinced by data. They're influenced and they begin to believe because they hear a good story. So you need the power of both. But I would be happy to see more science in what we do every day. So I encourage you to try to find ways of doing a little tiny experiments. Now I wrote a paper about this. It was published in my trip to software back in March, April. And again, if you can't find it or through some of my website, send me some email and I'll be happy to send it to you. I don't know if you have time for questions. Do we? We'll do a couple of questions, but I so appreciate your time and attention. You've been absolutely wonderful. So let me take this opportunity to say