 So far, the conference has been pretty good. I hope to continue in that vein. Agile mindset to tough business challenges. I'm Shane. I work for SoftEd. I'm part of the editorial team at InfoQ. I'm on the board of the Agile Alliance. I'm from New Zealand. I'm a Kiwi. There's my Twitter handle. Please feel free to tweet lots. And the thing I'm the most proud of at the moment is I have five beautiful children and even more fun than that seven grandchildren. That's number seven over on the corner there. She was born less than three months ago. You get all sorts of fun when you have grandchildren. As they come and visit, you feed them full of sugar. You take them. You do all the things they shouldn't do. And then you give them back to your parents, their parents. And yes, parents, we do it deliberately. It is revenge. What are we gonna look at? We've only got 45 minutes. So I have to be relatively quick. We are, what is the Agile mindset? An overview, a brief understanding. Then what are some of the tough business problems that we face in the world today? And then I'm gonna try and tie those together looking at some specific agile techniques, practices, brands, things that are out there and available to us and how they can help to address these tough challenges that do exist. And then we'll try and wrap it all up. What I'm not gonna be able to do in the time we have available to us is teach you how to use all of these techniques. And I'm gonna mention quite a lot of things. I would encourage you to download the slides. I have made them available and there's about three dozen links for references, for follow-up material. I really would encourage you to go and delve deeper if you find that there's something in here that excites you that, yes, this is something I could use. But we just don't have the time to delve too deep. So what is the agile mindset? Well, first and foremost, I wanna reiterate that. Agile is not a thing. It's not a noun. It's an adjective. It changes other things. So you can have an agile mindset. You can have an agile practice. You can have an agile methodology, but you can't ever buy or have an agile on its own. But what you might have and might want is agility. And in today's very dynamic world, agility, as defined by these two authors, is actually pretty important. The ability to both create and respond to change in order to profit in a turbulent business environment. Well, that's pretty important today. I would say that for most of us, the business environment we work in is turbulent. Studies tell us that the average period of stability of a business process, now this was a study done in my region in Australia and New Zealand. I don't know what it's like here. I suspect it's even quicker. But in our region, the average period of stability of a business process today is 90 days. The really scary thing is the average duration of an IT project to implement that business process change is nine months. Some things out of sync. So if we get everything perfect, we have an absolutely crystal clear understanding of what this business process changes. By the time we bring it to market, two-thirds of what we've done is wrong. The second one from Philippe Christian, the ability of an organization to react and adjust to change, adapt to changes in its environment faster than the rate of those changes. That's what we need today. I also put that one up there. The oath of non-allegiance. This is something that Alistair Coburn came up with. And I think that everybody who aspires to working in an agile way should seriously think about this. It goes, I promise not to exclude from consideration any idea based on its source, but to consider ideas across schools and heritages in order to find the ones that best suit the current situation. I see far too much dogma in the agile community. We have religious wars about safe versus dad versus less. Well, actually all of them have some value in some context. And what we need to be doing is taking a much more inclusive view and looking at ideas from anywhere. Certainly, if we look at Richard's keynote this morning, what they're doing at Menlo, you wouldn't recognize any of the brands except some of the XP practices. But they're succeeding phenomenally. What about this thing? Everyone knows it? It's engraved on your soul in letters of fire? The manifesto for agile software development. Can we apply that to business problems? Or perhaps this version, or maybe that one that was published yesterday. Can we apply this to business thinking? I feel we can, but I think it needs a little bit of a change. Oh, are we going to be heretical and change the words of the manifesto? What if we change just one word? If instead of talking about software, we talk about solutions, how would that help us in tackling the problems our organizations face? So let's read it. We are uncovering better ways of developing solutions by doing it and helping others do it. Sounds quite reasonable to me. And we do want to share our knowledge. Again, if I refer to Richard's keynote this morning, he's generously sharing his knowledge and experience. What he is consciously saying is do not try and copy what we do, but take these ideas and see how they apply for you. He's so generous, he's written it in a book. Through this work, we have come to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Well, yeah, I think that works. No matter what domain I'm talking in, I'm working in, working solutions over comprehensive documentation. That doesn't feel too bad either. Sounds reasonable to me. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Now, we have to be good corporate citizens and we have to be able to answer some of the hard questions like when will we done and what will this cost? I think it's fair that there's, contracts don't go away just because we're doing our job. But we know that our customers' needs are changing and they're changing at an ever-increasing rate. So the focus on collaboration over contracts feels okay to me. Responding to change over following a plan. That also feels okay. And they're loud next door. Do I have to get louder? So, yeah, we know we have to respond to change, but we also know from our experiences, Agilistas, that the way we do planning has changed significantly and actually we become very, very predictable in our planning approach because we're using a learning adaptive planning mechanisms. So, we value the items on the right, but we value the items on the left more. That's all, I don't know. Could you take that to one of the business people in your organization and say we want to work like this? Okay, I don't do rhetorical question. Does that feel the basis for a reasonable conversation in your organization? We take it out of the context of software development and we think about it as solving problems, delivering solutions. So that's the foundation of the Agile Mindset is this thing, the Agile Manifesto. But what are the characteristics of our mindset, of our way of thinking? Carol Dweck's work looks at the difference between the fixed and the growth mindset. And in today's world, we need a growth mindset. We need to approach the challenges that we face from the point of view of these are things we can figure out. We can learn, we can adapt, we can overcome rather than that's it, we're sunk. We've never done it before. It hasn't happened before. I don't know how to do it, we're sunk to take that embrace uncertainty, embrace change, accept uncertainty point of view. So moving away from a mechanistic approach where everything is defined in advance to an adaptive learning environment where we will figure out what the appropriate outcome is based on the context and the reality and the learning that happens where what we're building is not tangible very often. Where it's not concrete. We're not in the world of 20th century management of construction industries. Now yes, there are still construction projects and in those environments you wanna use a construction approach. But most of the challenges that our organizations face today are not in how do we build something. It's in how do we make sure that this thing that we're gonna build is the right thing. How do we learn what the real needs are? And our processes have to be fundamentally empirical and learning. So there's learning all over the place. And I've got a quote coming up in a little while. Why learning is so crucial. And we heard the learning organization this morning. So Agile as an approach to work is all about constantly learning. And it's also about focusing on value. Traditionally we've used our iron triangle. The time and scope and funds. And somehow quality was the middle of that triangle. I've never really understood that one. Any PMPs in here, can you tell me where you get quality in the center of that triangle? But never mind. And we define success as meeting that triangle. Whether or not our customers actually got any value from the thing that we delivered didn't matter. Did it? We met the budget. We were on time. We had all the features that were in the list. The fact that nobody ever bothers to use it. Well, that's someone else's problem. And our funding mechanisms make it somebody else's problem as well. Almost all organizations use a projectised culture. So you have a project that is funded to deliver something. And then some other group takes it over and they've got to get the value from it. And then we incentivize our project managers by getting things done quickly. Outcomes be damned. That's someone else's problem down the line. Jim Highsmith presented this agile triangle where he says we need to focus on maximizing value at an acceptable level of quality. Those are two dimensions. Our traditional iron triangle is one corner, one third. Because yes, we have to work within constraints. We have to be good corporate citizens. There's no question that we're agile. Just give us money and go away. Yeah, I've never met an organization whose budgeting process works like that. So we have to be realistic in terms of our dimensions. The other important aspect of the agile mindset is the way that we look at teams. How many times have you heard somebody say, give me another programming resource? In fact, we have a whole department in the organization, the human resources department. This worries me. A resource is something that is consumed in the production of a product. We're talking about people. Yeah, not good. I do not want to consume the people on my team. The other one that you sometimes hear is people are our greatest asset. Yet slavery was abolished. The only person I'm possibly an asset for is my wife, and actually it's more likely a liability. We need to change our way of thinking. And in agile organizations, we're starting to do that. We're looking at teams of people who work together and we have these four pillars. They are trusted. We believe that they have the organization's best interests at heart. Now in most places, our bureaucratic processes are designed around mistrust. Our business rules, our methodology rules are actually about somebody made a mistake once and if you ever do that again, I'm gonna fire you. Which is a fundamental element of mistrust. So we turn that on its head. We also empower people. So instead of having to go to a change control board to get permission to deploy this last chunk of the product that you have just built, you have some corporate guidelines that say, you know, don't do stuff that's gonna break things and we trust you. You're empowered. They are engaged. They care. And they're committed. They will do what is needed to deliver value to the organization. That's what makes agile teams effective and is one of the key aspects of this agile mindset that we need to take. So we can take these ideas that have grown up inside software engineering and software development. If we go back to that manifesto, they were the 17 people that wrote it in the first place. They were looking at the problems inside software development. We've largely solved those problems. Now, not every organization has applied these solutions, but we know how to do this now. Now it's time to step outside and look at what are some of the tough business problems? What's the nature of the world around us? And there's a lovely acronym, VUCA. The world is volatile. The rate of change is ever increasing. Exponentially, so they tell us, power of 10 every year. At the moment, the total sum of human knowledge is doubling every 12 months. Good luck if you're trying to keep track in your organization. We're also in a state of uncertainty. We can't plan for two weeks ahead. Never mind 12 months. Things are constantly changing and we have to adapt to them. Our world is more complex today. Lots of loosely related factors that impact the outcomes. We don't have a nice, clear path from cause to effect. The path, if there is a path, is probably interwoven with myriads of other influences and factors. And our world is ambiguous. We've got a total lack of clarity about meaning. What is customer satisfaction? What satisfies a customer today annoys them tomorrow by keeping abreast? And we have to have new ways of thinking about work and from that new ways of working to adapt to cope in the VUCA world. And here's the quote I was talking about. The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn constantly. Alvin Toffler said that. Hugely, hugely important is that ability to constantly discard old knowledge because yesterday's truth is not tomorrow's truth. It's not just learning new things. It's consciously unlearning, letting go of these truths that we thought we had. So let's tackle what are some of these tough business problems? The overwhelming flood of data that's out there. We talk about the internet of things. We talk about big data. Everything is providing us. We've got this flood of potential knowledge that's coming into our organizations from many, many different places. But turning that into useful information from that actionable knowledge is incredibly difficult. Our customers are fickle. Customer loyalty is a concept that doesn't apply anymore. Whereas in the 20th century, once you had gained a customer, you had to do something really bad to make them go somewhere else. Today, they know everything about you and about your competition. They know what your cost structure is and if they don't like your profit margin, they'll go and find somebody who's cheaper. And they can find that information in two clicks. The people who work in your organization are disengaged. Studies in the US, and I don't know what the numbers are here. Studies in the US last year, 70% of employees were actively looking for another role. Two thirds of the people on your team would leave tomorrow if they could. What will that do to your organization? They can't at the moment because we're, the economy's tight, yet right. Wave another job at them and they're gone. Skill shortages. The toughest challenge that organizations, certainly again, I'm gonna say for my own region, that senior executives are facing at the moment is the lack of capability within their organization. And this is driving the globalization of work, which is not a bad thing, but it makes work more complex. Distributed teams are harder to work in than co-located teams. So we've gotta do something within our organizations to adapt to this new environment. We can't just continue in the way we used to work. One of the worst is the financial cycles. How many of your organizations require that departments put in their funding needs for the next 12 months, at least 18 months ahead of the time when they're gonna need the money? The budgeting cycle. Yeah. But we know that 75% of what's happening in that organization's gonna change over the next 12 months. But we have to budget for it now. The learning is not happening at that financial cycle. And the constant growth and change in technologies, everything is digital. If you're a bank today, you're not a bank, you're a software provider. If you're a motor vehicle manufacturer, you build computers with wheels. Smart buildings. Even the construction industry. Smart roads. Everything is digital. It's not the internet of things, it's the internet of everything. And our organizations have to adapt to this. And those that don't are gonna be left in the rubble. So those are the challenges. And I'm sure you can explore them, you can apply any one of these challenges to things that you're seeing at your organization today. But I said, Agile helps. In the software engineering realm, we have figured out how to cope with a lot of these challenges. And the Agile mindset, our Agile techniques, our practices, our teams, these are things that have made a difference. And if you look at the metrics and the adoption rate and the outcomes for organizations that have taken an Agile approach to their software engineering, they're seeing substantively improved outcomes. So how can we apply some of these concepts and ideas towards the challenges in the rest of the organization? What about dealing with complexity? The value in a model like this is understanding where you sit and that then gives you a context on which you can choose the techniques or practices that you feel are appropriate. So this is the Stacey model. There's also Dave Snowden's Kenevan model that looks at complexity. Fundamentally, you need to understand the level of knowns and unknowns in terms of the approach that you are taking, the technology that you're using. And by the way, pen and paper is a technology too. And how stable or unstable are your requirements? If you're down here, if you are building houses from a plan, then please don't use an adaptive project. It doesn't make sense. In our world today, those problems still exist. Building a new road, building a bridge, building houses from plans, all of those things, they still exist, but they don't generate the value in our economy. The things that are generating values are stuff that get into the area of complexity where we may have some reasonable understanding of the approach that we wanna take. And some of our requirements are gonna be stable, but there's a whole lot of learning that needs to happen. If that's where you live, then you need to have an adaptive learning-based delivery mechanism, and I don't care what your methodology is, what you brand it, but it has to be adaptive learning-based with quick feedback loops. If you're up here, you need a learning cycle that is measured in hours and days, and tools like Lean Startup can be useful. The design thinking stuff, let's come out of Stanford and others. A clear line of sight to our real customers. Again, Richard this morning spoke about their high-tech anthropology approach. A lot of those ideas are built into here, where you go and you watch people work to get a real understanding of what their problems are. Because just asking them, send me an email with your requirements, and whether you're designing a new business process, creating a new insurance product, designing a new motor car. This design thinking approach brings ideas that we truly can use. Likewise, hypothesis-driven delivery. If we start thinking of the work that we do as being a series of small experiments, in the scientific world, an experiment starts with a hypothesis. How will we know whether this is true? So we need to start expressing our goals in terms of these hypotheses. If we do this, we believe that this will happen. They will experience that benefit and they'll respond in this way. We will know we have succeeded when we can measure this result. And if we don't get that result, what are we gonna do next? And again, you can apply this to the design of a new business process, to the creation of a new insurance product or a banking product. It's not linked to any technology. And how do we express value? Value is hard. Dave Husman, the dude, gave us dude's law, which is such a simple expression. Value is y divided by how. When I first saw this, it was a light bulb moment. Wow! Yes, that is what value means. And we can apply, we can put numbers around that or we can put even subjective factors. We can actually put into that formula. And we can see and then use it to start to compare different initiatives based around the value that we will derive from them. Outcome over cost, benefits over investment. We also need to consider time to value. And the people at Black Swan Farming present these really nifty graphs that talk about the cost of delay. What happens if we don't achieve a market window? Does it just, we lose the potential opportunities for that short time period? Or have actually we lost some of the peak? We'll never get it back. That's typically a fashion-based cycle. It's got a peak and then it drops. If somebody beats us to the market, will we never get to that potential? Or is it about, or is it just about time? So understanding what those things are can help us define things like our MVP, minimum viable product. Or to use Henrik Nieberg's term, the minimum lovable product. It's not just viable, it's, and he says there's three steps. There's the minimum testable, the minimum viable and the minimum lovable product. We wanna get that minimum lovable product as quickly as possible. We also need to understand that the way that we are making people work in our organizations is mitigating against the production of value. We measure the wrong things. We measure activity, not outcomes. We keep people together just long enough to become a productive, high-performing group a really good team, and then we disband them because why have we got a new project? We need to change our whole way of thinking about work. Keep it to a steady, constant flow rather than big batches. Small pieces of value flowing through the system. Little's law talks about the flow in fluid dynamics. Well, it applies in our organizations as well. Rapid feedback, rapid fearless decision making, being able to kill things quickly. So taking that learning cycle and acting on the feedback. One of the toughest things in many organizations is stopping a piece of work that is in midstream. The fallacy of sunk cost, and it is a fallacy. If this is a bad project, if this is a bad initiative, if I don't care how much more you spend on it, it's still gonna be bad. Kill it, preferably at birth. Building mechanisms to learn and get feedback constantly. Luke Holman is doing amazing work with the Innovation Games people in the city of San Jose. I would encourage you to have a look, do a search. He gave a keynote at the Agile 2015 conference where he spoke about how they're engaging the citizenry and making decisions about how the city is spending its money. And the people who live there are making the hard trade-off decisions. What is worth more? Building a library in one area or putting another fireman on the fire truck? Now these are hard, hard decisions and the best way to do it is to get the engagement of the people whose lives are impacted. And they're doing that incredibly well. Act on the feedback, don't ignore it. Adapt, plan, do, check, act. This is a cycle that's been around since the 1950s. There's nothing new here. But what we tend to do is plan, do, ignore, ignore. Or we might do plan, do, check, ignore. Look for the waste in your system. Take a lean thinking approach. So what are the eight wastes? How do we remove those, mitigate them? Overcome these challenges. One of the worst is wasted talent. People who are not, we're not taking advantage of the skill and knowledge of people. For me, one of the, in information technology, one of the worst examples of that is manual testing. To have a human being manually execute a test script that someone else has written. Is cruel and unusual punishment. Automate that and use the human brain to do the interesting stuff like designing that test case and then doing exploratory testing. At the management level, there are a whole set of new ideas that are coming out. There's the, you're gonna Pella's work on management 3.0. There's the Beyond Budgeting Institute. Coming up with great ways of looking at how we structure our organizations. The Stoast Network, which is facilitating that change because they figured out current management structures just aren't working. The Kaizen approach to making small, steady changes continuously. Toyota Carter. So again, I would encourage you go and look at those things and see how we can bring these ideas in. So Kaizen, change for good. Every day, everyone, everywhere. So this is not business process re-engineering. This is the small, steady changes owned by the people who do the work. In the typical Toyota factory where these ideas came from. They will make in excess of 19,000 changes to the way the production line is working in any 12 month period. That's empowering people in the workplace. There is no need to fill in a form and get permission. It's, I need to change this, it's gonna improve it. Let me try it, let me make the change. If it doesn't work, I will change it back or I'll do something new. And people are empowered to change the way that they work based around the fact that the person doing the work knows that knows it the best. And that's the underlying Kaizen philosophy. Constant change for good. So how do we bring these changes in, in our organizations? And this picture talks about what happens if we don't take the complete view of what happens if we don't do the work. We have to have a decent vision, we have to give people the skills. It's no good, and we've seen this with agile implementations and software. How many times did a manager come along and say, you guys are agile now. Just go and make it happen. And what happens, it fails. You have to give people the skills. You have to fix the incentive model. In organizations today, most companies have a bonus structure that is linked to individual performance. But then we tell people, work together as a team. But you're competing with that person for your bonus. Yeah, it doesn't work. Give them the resources they need. The time, the money, not the people. People are not resources. And help them come up with a good action plan. An action plan that the people own. People doing the work are the best ones to design that work, to design the process of change. And if you get that, you get sustainable change. If you leave out any one of those things, you get these other, not particularly great outcomes, confusion, anxiety, gradual change, frustration and lots and lots of false starts. And we've seen all of those in our organizations, haven't we? This one is the Gandhi quote, be the change that you want to see in the world. Take ownership of being that change. You can't think it, you have to act it. And we have to make it safe to act in these new ways. So that, ladies and gentlemen, is applying the agile mindset to tough business problems, and that was 45 minutes. Time for questions. Re-learning is waste. Let me get back. If you have to learn the same thing over and over again, if you've got to teach somebody how to do a task three or four or five or 10 times, and often that is because they've taken too long between the learning and the application, learning something new is different. But how many times do we go back because we've taught somebody, we've given them a skill set and then not given them the opportunity to apply it for three, six, nine months? Does that make sense? So the question is in a volatile environment where lots of people are looking to change, how do we keep that, how do we maintain the culture across the team? Well, one of the first things I wanna do is create a culture that means that people don't want to leave. Again, going back to Richard's talk this morning, somebody asked him, what is your staff turnover rate? I actually did, got some numbers while I was there. It's less than 10% per annum. In fact, it's closer to about five. And as he says, most of them leave and then come back. So just having an environment where people want to stay is hugely important and that comes from the top. It's building that culture of professionalism and respect and what he calls joy. It happens in the course of time and what you, to get towards that, you have to actively look after and nurture that culture. So from a leadership perspective, you're living the values, showing people that you truly do, trust them, for instance. And one of the most important aspects of trust is when something goes wrong, there's no blame, but there is an exploration and a learning. And if you start living those values and showing people that this is what our culture really means, it becomes infectious. But it does put a lot of pressure on management. Does that help? Yeah, projects are gonna be at risk constantly. So now we've got to manage our customer, our stakeholder engagement with that customer because what we're gonna show is better outcomes with these small, thin slices of delivery rather than a weight and then big bang. So you're changing your delivery models, you're changing the organization culture and you're changing your engagement with your customer. But it does require courage and effort and a conscious attention to it. In my experience, the very top layer, they get it. The areas where you're really gonna struggle are the people is the layer in the middle because they're the ones who, their current set of behaviors have made them successful for the last 10, 15, 20 years and we're asking them to change. So you have to find ways of conveying the value in the outcomes based around and linked to what they will get from it. So now you've got to change your language. Don't expect him or her to be able to make the mental leap, couch things in the problems and the challenges that they face. What keeps them awake at night? And then look at the agile aspects that will help overcome those challenges. But we can't bring our agile ideas and say you've got to do all of this because it's so cool when I'm not making the link between the challenges I face and these factors. Absolutely, so find those pain points, the things that do scare them and keep them up at night. Any other questions out of time? So folks, thank you very much. I hope that was a worthwhile session.