 Should get a start and I'm very lucky because it's a very small group so we might be able to actually talk, right? What I would actually like to do is not do this kind of formal introduction that I'd planned we've been together for two days I Probably between us. We've covered most of the sessions Personally, I'm exhausted with this much information But what I want to talk about with you today is That we can't actually make any progress in our work unless we've got a good grasp on the nature of the problem we're dealing with So if we think about The talks we've heard over the past two days. I've noticed a number of things Nobody at least in the talks that I've been to has been talking about what's called problems of simplicity Where you've got one or two variables like you go in a bank and you say okay? I'll sort out the credit and debit. No one's talking about that that kind of thing. I think it's because We know how to do it I've not heard anyone talk really about what's called problems of disorganized complexity which are problems of statistics and probability I Think it's because We know how to do it we can do the math so we can help a and a health company on death statistics or certain illnesses Now I just came from a talk Given by Linda where this was brought up But the issue was not our ability to do the compute the calculations. It was our Inability to be real about ourselves, which is a very different problem So in the last two days, I'm not seeing people talk about this Either one of those simple problems or disorganized complexity problems What I am seeing is incredible talks actually all of the ones that I've been to Where what we're talking about are problems of organized complexity where and this these are if you want these are the biological problems the life sciences problems How does something grow? What how does aging work? How does an organization adapt and evolve? We're talking about those kinds of problems the words you I've been hearing the last few days are Organic complex Emergence there was a talk on self-organizing Distributed intelligence non-linear interaction these kinds of words I've been hearing So what's with this? What I So if you just think about those two the two plenaries so the first plenary was on how to scale scrum So that is classically one of these kinds of problems. That's where we opened the whole conference with How do we grow scrum? How do we go from small teams to bigger teams? The plenary this morning was on what with Mary that was so long ago But it was on how you know a lot of rules about the self-organizing sustainable groups, okay And in these kinds of problems, it's not one or two variables like your credit and debit system in a bank It's not about counting billions like in probability and statistics These are problems where you've got a dozen two dozen variables that interact non-linearly and This is what we're having trouble with so What I really want to discuss with you today is Getting a handle on the nature of this problem Which has been at the root of all the talks I've heard in the last two days But when no one yet has said let's talk about the nature of the problem and how we're going to work with it There is however a Common sort of commentary agile is aware of this They're not comfortable with it, but they know that the waterfall stuff and the usual stuff is the wrong methodology It's not going to get them there There's an understanding that when we do this kind of anthropology this was the Jeff talk and you You interview that strange creature the client and the customer and what is it? they want and do they know what they want and There's a someone brought up in the panel that lovely quote old quote from Henry Ford and Henry Ford said if I asked my customers what they wanted they'd say I want a faster horse So How do so there's an awareness that when you're dealing with a client their needs their ability to discuss their needs our Ability to predict how long it will take we're in this world of organized complexity and dealing with the other and sometimes the other is us It's come up in the last two days With design thinking so one of the famous Design problems that you can find on on YouTube is how EDO went about doing a shopping cart And you look it seems a simple object but you've got a couple dozen variables if you're going to do that well and Actually, this is really pretty normal So in the 17th 18th 19th century we were working on one or two variables Then we moved up to disorganized complexity issues of stats and probabilities and that where we are now both I think in IT if I judge from these two days and in the scientific world We're dealing with this organized complexity non-linear a dozen two dozen variables That's the nature of the problem that we're struggling with now our Method and I could get Linda this to you know stand up and give two more hours so we've got to be as As Scientific as we can so this collect your data identify a variable you're working with What's its relationship with other variables? Then you've got short segments. How do those work? And of the talks all the talks I've heard Scalp you know kind of dance around this The one that that I heard that I think is the clearest in these terms would be the one that Linda gave yesterday on Stereotype and prejudice and I don't know how many of you were in that Some of you okay, so this idea that you can say well isn't that strange? you if you have Male or female players on a computer game and you give them a female avatar they add differently So we're talking about variables which are context Sensitive change the context their behavior changes You give people you give students a math test one group. They just do the test Another group it's fill out your name your address or your male or female you get different results You do that before you take the test it changes the results, so we're talking about Variables which are non-linear which are context sensitive which makes us terribly difficult to work with well or work with easily But both in the panel and in both of Linda's talks I heard them as a plea for a more systematic kind of what is the hypothesis what are we working on and the even the idea that Experiment has now changed its meaning to mess around Just try it out. We've lost this kind of disciplined approach to analysis so the first big idea that I want to leave with you is that we've got to get clear and articulate about the nature of the problem and the second one is really as good as our tools and Much of what I was been hearing the last two days is kind of an agony About inadequate tools, so what I chose for this Talk is to introduce to you a person you've probably never heard of Who's an English philosopher J.G. Bennett any takers? Who's heard of J.G. Bennett? And you cheaty So Here's this philosopher But I kind of share with Linda if you're having trouble in a domain here and making progress Look elsewhere See what you can borrow and bring it back in So I'd like to offer up to you a brief introduction to J.G. Bennett. It's even briefer than brief It's cherry-picking tiny bits of it which may be relevant And then if you're interested you can go and read the humongous work by J.G. Bennett so Then it's interesting because he's the only philosopher I know who's looking at this kind of methodology We're struggling with and saying okay, what would be the simplest bit What would be the minimum segment that would contain conditionality and context sensitivity Where we might be able to start to get a handle on this issue of organized complexity So he's not attempting to solve the problem. He's attempting to make one organized step forward So he says all right that we're going to work with triads And we're going to think of it as a plot a little story that has three actors His vocabulary is impulse We'll have one impulse a force a motivation an agent That will act on another which will receive that impulse Might take it on might push it back, but receives it Through the mediation of a third Okay, so we've got actor receiver mediator three little players here three kinds of impulses Which is going to give us six possible modes of relationships or plots, okay So I don't what happened to that But that's all right. I don't want you to worry about that because it would give you a headache It was so nice. You're gonna worry about it later But just to make our one hour easier I've made up short little names that are memorable and then you can go back to the More arid approach if you want, okay So we'll go through the six and if you'll note that they're in different order So this first one is red blue green then red green blue then blue red green then blue Green red, but they change the six modes are different relationships between the three I don't know what's this these slides aren't have moved around All right, it's on on we go of the six Three of them have to do about maintaining stability in a system And we've heard a lot of them actually being discussed in the last couple days obviously not in this vocabulary So let me go through those three and then go through it the second set of three that has to do with change The first one will call automatic pilot. In fact, Mary actually used that expression this morning with her system one when you're talking about self-governing communities So an automatic pilot are things that we do Every day with great regularity and if you remember Mary said if we didn't have automatic habits We couldn't get out of bed okay, so This underlying regularity it makes our activities predictable legible even unnoticed and It's it's a set of Interactions which creates absolutely nothing new but what it does do is Kind of facilitate these lower-level tasks so that you can pay attention to the higher ones All right a few examples anybody Goes through the mediating technology of email sends off a note to friends an agile developer Through the mediating context to burn down charts information radiators and so on which absorbs some of the cognitive load Helps you get to the next task easily Who was it who confessed to going to McDonald's? But a famished McDonald's fan walks to the mediating familiarity of the layout and without thinking about it just reaches for that wallet knows the software knows the tray because it's on automatic pilot and This kind of interaction is going to be key to all cultures based on simple transactions or business units based on simple track transactions And so we want to be doing this or paying attention to this particular mode When we want to increase transparency or invisibility of the mediating tools in this system So if we think for example Some of the people here came from Bangalore others from far away I came from far away. I simply did get here go on the web and Ordered myself up some tickets no sweat Because it's all been done by the software world on automatic pilot If I'm stuck in an airport It's chaos because no one has done the next step Which is the automatic pilot of what do you do when a flight is canceled? But it could be done so thinking about a Client or a business unit or a need what are the automatic pilots that we could be working on That would make life easier this outcome thing a Second one and the Beatles are the best example Where you've got the Beatles? I don't know if you know the story the history of the Beatles Before they were the Beatles and they had to take any gig they could get They got a really creepy job in Hamburg in the red light district Where they had to play and play and play out of which came the song eight days a week and So being forced to Be in that mode of performance they exhausted every trick They had had to come up with new ones and through that process actually become the Beatles So we have a mode of interaction between three variables Which we can call the identity fades into view you become Who you are through this repetitive kind of action a few examples In a motorcycle repair shop here would be the auto rickshaws Okay You get a little apprentice who becomes very sensitive repeat Exposure to the context of the smells and the sounds and through that becomes an expert mechanic You've got the programmer apprentice Who threw complete through petered exposure to this context of retrospective stand-ups and stroke so on Has a chance to become a talented developer So this particular mode of the six They're absolutely key to any kind of culture based on expertise and And The job here would be to increase opportunities For this plot or this kind of action to take place I'm looking forward to a talk tomorrow on gamification because this is what they've done extraordinarily well They've understood that you scaffold it so as a player plays and plays and plays It's never too hard. It's never too easy. There's always something new to go for and Through that repetition you get this identity fades into view of the wonderful player So games are extraordinary. There's something like 30 million hours of voluntary Time have been given to this game There's something here to be learned and in particular the people who need to learn at our school teachers Because we kill them We kill our students with boredom when there's so much that could be acquired from understanding that plot of three variables of Identification fades into view The third one here on this kind of stability side of it. Okay, we're looking at Situations of three variables which show us why the world cannot be capricious We can't do just anything Okay So if we for example have a blood test The if you're going to handle the blood safely, you can't leave it on the windows on the heat You can't drop it on the floor so that requirement Acts on the supervisor who writes the SOPs and the protocols who enforces that on employee behavior We have a different kind of interaction from the three We get a MIS report on a negative cash flow So the boss says you cannot go to Bangalore and spend money on a conference you stay home It changes the employee behavior If I tried McDonald again, you've got the guiding hand of McDonald nests Which will influence the layout which will give you a controlled customer behavior So this is a plot in this kind of organized complexity That will be central to all the cultures based on My goodness, what is Wrong with the slides Reglementation, okay, right data right form right time to the right people. I've heard that I haven't heard that in the last two Days though, but I have heard it exactly that okay So in our university, we have a program Called audit degree audit which is supposed to allow students to go on and Figure out exactly where they are in their studies. How many more credits they have to have How much more English they have to have how much more science they have to have before they can get the magic piece of paper and I think the the Ward Cunningham has been mentioned in a few talks and Actually his that was his definition of beauty of aesthetics and programming Was a lock and key quality to the actual creation? So we got the cook Ingredients surprising meal. We've got a programmer. Let's say he uses a pattern I picked to publish and and subscribe so he gets a more elegant and habitable code He creates something and obviously we need this for any cultures of Innovation change improvement So let me give you this example which surprised me actually I got it from Dave So what is this? It's an aircraft air traffic control So in most in airports your biggest and of course, that's a master control center Okay, and in airports that is your number one bottleneck to increasing efficiency and traffic in the airport Are we gonna let go of it? No, okay, but there is one place Which is an Oshkosh, Wisconsin where I've never been Where there is no air traffic control and all the the pilots use the Publish and subscribe But it works because you have this distributed intelligence you've got an elegant situation So so we're moving from this kind of waterfall mechanic to something more of an organized complexity when we allow ourselves to do that But I think the point that when I got this from Example from Dave is that when they have air shows they have incredible traffic and it still works Everyone has a shared desire to not run into each other Well from what I know there has been no crash. Do you want to answer? The other pilots Okay, but that's not really your question is so the answer would be Yes, it would But it's fright. It's frightening. I Mean isn't that your reaction But If we had serve the protocol had safe emergency, okay, so the What happened Okay, I'll check that out Yes, yes, and we can I mean there's been a lot of talking Do it Yes, so this is this this idea of Well a very simple rules and each agent then acts according to very simple Rules, which is what you see in the traffic around here and then the system actually flows quite well without the centralized control But in our businesses and organizations, we can't give up that centralized Control psychologically, we can't give it up Although we should that's the challenge Okay, so if I go to this second to last one It's a this is a plot where you have You the initiator Puts themselves in a receiving position To a stronger force and something New happens so the classic example This is the plot of self-development. So this is the plot of all the mentoring and coaching we're looking at here Where we're going from actual to potential this is the The situation of the shrink or the mentor and the coach Okay So patient concerned about her family goes to see the psychiatrist and you get an improved family life It doesn't have to be nice though. So the high school kid we throw them in jail for drugs They spend time in jail with a professional drug addict and the result is increasing trafficking skills The I mean the so the plots are neutral. You don't necessarily get beautiful results Agile programmer Submits to the wisdom of the on-site customer the end user and you get improved insight in the culture and tasks So this would be The three the the mode or the little plot that you need where you have constant evolution of skill base This expression of always getting better rather than trying to be good all the time a movement from actual to potential Now most of the time this is this is human to human. We can find cases where the computer is involved so I took the example of bush people trying to predict what was going to happen with the Effects of ending the tax cuts that you put in place We have computer power for calculating discreet rather than continuous. I'm sorry for the slides have gone bizarre And this gives us new mental models that we can work with so we have a better We have an increased potential here and the this last one of the six Which we'll call release into new freedoms. I like this quote From Peter block It's a possibility where once once a possibility has surfaced You don't have to work on it. It will start to work on you Okay, so two obvious examples one would be Gandhi with his philosophy of the nonviolent resistance and We can look at Facebook. So if we take Gandhi, you got the nonviolent resistance Invites the police to reflect upon their own behavior and new possibilities of justice Surface and they in turn then start to work on People around them pretty different world, but Facebook So Facebook mediates exchanges It acts on the receptive users and what comes up are all kinds of new possibilities for marketing Which then become a force for acting? Yet more changes So that would be a very simple plot basic to cultures of collaboration and constant change Okay, I think Ken Beck has come up Not once an hour, but a fair amount So we can use that his vision of enough Which would influence the developers and the clients and so we wouldn't have to get into it Craig talked about what did he call it the contract game Who's who's gonna blame are you gonna ask for more then you're gonna negotiate for yes If we could get this vision of enough this was Ken Beck's idea it would work and out of that would emerge Environments which would permit kind of methodologies a wholeness collaboration Which then in turn could start to become and it would become an active agent So they're very briefly you've got what Bennett calls the six modes this kind of minimum set of Variables that you can permutate in different ways and get these subtle context-sensitive Kinds of changes that we see in these organized complexity situations growth adaptation Pollution that we've been struggling with over the last two days, but we haven't got we haven't yet got a way to Do the scientific Analysis of it and then it could be helpful here and What he argues is that if you're going to have a healthy culture That could be the agile team itself or it could be the business as a whole But if you're going to have a healthy culture All six of these plots all six of these permutations have to be in existence and Interacting with each other all the time So this is what gives you the liveliness of the healthy agile team a good business and so on They're all there and you can watch them. I asked Linda if she would come so I talked about Bennett's ideas to Some software people in Minneapolis, they'd never heard of Bennett except one guy And he said oh Bennett. I know Bennett, but it's not from software. It's because I study the guitar and his the methodology for learning the guitar had Inspired their teaching and learning procedures from Bennett So I was very surprised to see this programmer who said oh, yeah, I know Bennett From learning the guitar So I said, okay, we're going to India. It's not the guitar. We'll try this. We'll try something else But can we then use this an example Which has the advantage of being extremely simple because you can talk about the same variables as you go around and do the six So I thought it'd be fun to have Linda because she knows not only software It's because we're both 500 years old Not quite okay But if we just go back through those six with just the same variables all the time you can start to see how this works So You've got a player who by but the automatic pilot constant practice Acquires the automatic pilot skills that you need to actually play if you Start the other way around the gravity applies the limits of the instrument or the limits of the form You get a controlled behavior outcome if you Take the player who submits to the superior force of the instrument You're going to an intensification of skill Straight creation you get a player you get an instrument you get novel performances You can do it this way you get the guy with it Repeated exposure leads to the affirming player. This is the Beatles scenario You get the release on new freedom It's the performance that acts on the musician which gives you better sound and Musicians will tell you that a live performance is never the same is in the sound studio Hey, it's and it's because this is actually the plot that is in place Okay, so I know if Linda wants to make a comment So this was the the one Computer guy who'd heard a Bennett and it was through guitar But he was saying this is how they actually attempt to teach guitar and the various aspects of that activity in It in a in a in this kind of complex in a whole way trying to cover all the bases Yes, so if I go back to This thing go back real quick It doesn't like this So, can you bring how do you bring up that's the star here? I just wanted to go back to the one of the star. No way down here fast fast fast my PC PowerPoint doesn't like this Faster. Yeah, so that's a good question. So basically would What they're doing in this in this guitar world is you you're using this as a As an inspiration model, you can't take it too far, but you can say what are we not doing enough of? Where are we running into problems? Is there an imbalance? So So the the guitar world is using it as a kind of a checklist Okay, say, okay, we have to have automatic stuff in the learning of a guitar you got to have if I go through the you know them You got to have this automatic pilot stuff You got to have a situation where they understand what the limits are the gravity applies You got to have them do the Beatles things where they because start to become themselves and those three are grounding But you also have to have in that music world if it's jazz and improv you got to have the creation You got to have this Intensification where you really submit to someone who does it really well and you learn from them And then you have to have what is the actual performance do to you? So they're using it for guitars To get a certain kind of wholeness to it And so the idea is could you use that in software? Would it help you? Yes A retrospective goddess now there's a title I Don't that's I think it's a fine question Let me give you my guess, but I'm not a retrospective goddess No Okay, to me the retrospective Obviously plays into the Beatles kind of thing Where by exposure to retrospectives? You can actually become better because you go through it again and again and like the Beatles you exhaust your existing skills And you go for more I would Yes, that's That's the so the that's the story the Beatles who at the beginning are just another Rad tag bunch of teenagers who create a band They aren't the Beatles when they start Or a mcdonald mcdonald is fine. Yes, that'll work. I would think intensive occasion would be rather obvious and the retrospectives But let me turn it over to to those who because I'm not a T person so Linda what would be your guess to that question? Okay Okay Yeah, the gravity applies and you get the hammer on the toe, okay, and it can be an increase in automatic pilot You just start to learn it You could use it between going from shoe to heart Okay Exactly okay, and in my own just kind of playing around with this I find it I Find it useful in thinking through sick situations You say all right. What's what something's wrong here, and it helps me think through so more precisely what is wrong? And therefore what can I do about it? Okay So so my question you is can you could you use this as a transformation model or as a check? I don't like checklist. That's very mechanical but as a way of thinking about Context sensitive variables and how you at a very fine grain level can start to tweak them Because in the talks we've heard the last few days what people are talking about for the most part is a lot of fine grain stuff How do you get out of the contract game? How do you get out of what did he call it that secret box of Stuff of well, we'll put it in the fix it later rather than talk about it now So and that's really fairly fine grained, but when you talk about life Life systems living systems. You're talking about this fine grain non-mechanical kinds of interaction so so in addressing this this kind of problem of that Dozen variables two dozen variables We're missing tools, and this is the best thing. I've come across that might serve us in thinking through it more systematically Not just messing around as we've been doing. I can give you another couple of examples But are there other questions or comments on the kind of basic here? Just brilliant. Okay, but yeah, Bennett's brilliant I'm brilliant to bring you brilliant Bennett. Okay. Yeah Okay I Yes, okay, let me try let me try this Okay So let's but let's try this for long so What Bennett's talking about is is so you've got these six little plots With three characters. Okay, but that's not enough because you also have to do the relationships between the six plots Okay, so you get this dance that the the guitar people are developing So let me give you a couple of examples I Don't know if you've heard of open University Okay, so they had an old website So there's the student who goes to the website and gets their chosen courses But the old the old website was the classic. Here's the department of math. Here's chemistry Here's computer science. Here's that here are the fall semester classes. And so you just go by School department class offering Okay So that's red green blue we bring in a designer of user experience who Watches the students operate on the website to choose their classes Gets an understanding of the student behavior. So you've got blue red green He comes at the designer then becomes the actor designer. So you get a red Blue green so the designer then comes up with a new website Which is starts with the student and says who are you what do you want? And what have you had already and only then the student takes the course But this website is not in the least bit organized like the old one So you've got a very different Organization, but when you look at that change process you get Different initiators in each one. So here it's the student doing it here. It's the designer The designer than the student so you get a you can track at a fine-grained level the the kinds of changes Well, let me try this story see if it works So this is a true story I'm appalled by the slides Who worked beautifully at home? So this is a story about Paul. This is a true story So we've got Paul the programmer an automatic pilot who goes to his bank to get a loan for a new car Okay The loan officer is very nice and he says yes, you can have a loan Okay Paul sees that his company could automate all the forms on the loan Which is a brilliant idea? So you so you can see each one is a different plot Okay Works out with his agile team Beetle style how to do it pitches the idea to the bank You'll make money you'll have customer satisfaction blah blah blah, okay But Paul is still thinking like the mechanical Turk and just calculating rather than being organic and he hasn't done his this particular triad so He has not actually listened to the loan officer Which is the only way he can get a culturally appropriate software What happens is? The loan office is all over my dead body. Are you doing this? It will eliminate my job So the loan officer gets very creative. We get creative fighting They manage to control the hierarchy. They refuse to innovate They do not Use Paul's idea Okay, so it's the cultural gravity applies Because we avoided the requirements of the existing culture We bury it and there's Paul and that's in in the things that I've heard in the last two days that Intensification triad has been the most problematic and the most talked about That under this either understanding self or understanding and client Which would be that that one loop if I had to look at anything I've heard in the last couple days That would be the weak spot or the agony spot Doing the right thing and then in that panel discussion Linda says God. I want to go talk about this again Yeah, because that's that's the weak spot that intensification one and what I've heard Okay. Now, let me go back to Well, let's go back to law so We can does that help or you still need more kind of going through them But it took me months to kind of No, actually it took me a long time. I was constantly going back. No, wait a minute. Who's on first who's on second who's on third? It's red. It's blue. It's green. Oh, let's see until I got I kind of got the hang of it So you're not gonna get the hang of it in an hour, right Right. Okay, but if you leave with the tip of the tongue actually, I'm already pretty happy Because it's I mean it's to be able to manipulate it with ease takes a fair amount of work But my question to you is so I don't know what you guys so I'm telling you what I've heard over the last couple days Is this kind of agony not about simple problems not about calculations, but about this multiple variable interaction mess and and any difficulty in Addressing it cleanly So that's what I'd like feedback from you guys on Right Yes, and actually I was intrigued with the guitar players because there is a culture of learning mentoring coaching based on on these on these six plots and The guy who knows the guitar system says, yeah, you know, there there is a transferability from learning that music to learning Programming and learning to interact in an agile world Okay, and one of the fun things about a conference is that you can play around with new ideas From engineers Why But this guy Organized spaces Well, I've seen some pretty bad buildings by architects who didn't understand the engineering That's Okay, well that I mean that's takes us pretty pretty far field Yeah, yeah, and actually I think we could we could learn some interesting design from a really good engineer Okay Okay, yeah so Actually now I was kind of intrigued by the panel session because the only session where the audience was running the show and I'd rather I rather liked it. Okay, so we've got just one or two more minutes But from the quiet people out there. Are there any questions or Comments that you want to ask Bennett the EN and ETT JB JG Bennett is an English English philosopher who died I guess about 15 years ago His main works I Okay, if you but if you're interested is the main work is systemics There's this there's Wikipedia stuff. It's not terribly good, but I mean you can get something of an idea out there All right. Well, thank you for your attention and if it moves from the tip of the tongue to a real idea, let me know Thank you