 All right, it's a real pleasure to have Dave Snowden over here. It's a dream come true for me I've been trying to get Dave Snowden maybe for six years now and finally we have him here I first saw his keynote in 2007 in Limerick, Ireland and Probably till date I think that was one of the best keynotes I've ever seen I was literally at the edge of my seat throughout the keynote I'm sure you're gonna get the same experience today. He speaks really fast So you have to be attentive don't do multitasking while he's speaking you will get his jokes ten minutes later other ways All right with that. I'm gonna call Dave Snowden. Thanks a lot for coming Dave Limerick was interested in it was the only the second agile conference I'm done in fact It was the first because I did an XP event in London and having spent most of my early life in IT I was one of the founders of DSDM Etc and then moved into general management it was rather odd to come back in and Discover that the Canadian frame where she designed for leadership development and corporate strategy had been picked up in my old Area of Development IIT So for the last four or five years I've been having a thoroughly enjoyable time of plunging back into project management in large IT projects and doing things I thought I'd abandoned early on in my career and coming back So you should hopefully get a bit more reflective wisdom now than you did in Limerick The general title for what the stuff I do and other people do is called sense-making There are various definitions of that. I define it as how do we make sense of the world so that we can act in it Now with that comes the concept of sufficiency yet. You can never know everything you need to know So how do you know when you know enough and what sort of actions can you do based on what you actually know? And really everything falls back to that as we move through and one of the key lessons of this And this is really important for those of you who are focusing on simplistic recipes And this is from a gaping void if you don't know gaping void brilliant cartoonist You can go into his website and one of these cartoons comes down into your email every day If it wasn't for that and Dilbert, I think I'd go quietly insane. All right. They keep me going But this makes a really important point all paths up are different all paths down to the same So the idea that somebody can give you a recipe which will mean that you will succeed is just fundamentally flawed All the people I hear speaking at keynotes whether they're companies talking about changing markets or people talking about radical new methods for agile have actually not copied what somebody else has done They've done something radically different and they've changed the space Yeah, and that's really important to understand. Yeah, I can give you a recipe for failure And the recipe for pay for failure is repeating past mistakes Come back to something. I said briefly on day one Yeah, people are arguing that some of the scalable frameworks and necessary because it's the only way to get adoption of agile within the company Well, if you get people to adopt agile without understanding agile, you're just dooming yourself to another IT failure Yeah, it may give you a temporary satisfaction of suddenly getting budget But downstream the expectations won't match the delivery and you're back into a more traditional mode of IT So there are times when you have to get it right up front and maturity and wisdom is about knowing when that's the case I'm not taking a simplistic root and I'm going to make a big difference between being simplistic and being simple And that that's an important distinction So what I want to do is to introduce some of the basic concepts around complexity I'll do round that around the Kenevin framework. Can I just do a quick check? How many people have heard the children's party story? Oh good and naive audience, right? Okay, you'll get those who have you'll get a live performance All right, so now I know I can use that one After that I'm going to go through two areas of development where we're working now actively within cognitive edge one is Looking at the whole area of how we change the area of requirements capture and how we move into a continuous feedback loop between requirements capture software testing and Really moving to a much earlier stage of understanding users If we go back to some of you know, just great stuff yesterday about the number of failures that you see I want to be slightly different on that. I think okay, so 80% or 90% of what we do fails I've heard that from people who've got lots of experience. I don't want to just accept that I Actually think we need to move learning much earlier into the cycle I think the reason we have that amount of failure is we wait too long before we start actually interacting with users and development So I don't want to take those failure figures. I want to talk about learning early to fail less Yeah, and I'm going to talk about different