 So this is just going to be a very quick talk here. So my name is Jaflo Pestite. I am from Solutions IQ. And this is a talk called The Exorcist was a lean planning master. And it's how we learned, how I got insight from a famous American horror flick on how to have conversations faster. And the conversation is not scary, so the movie is. So if you had read the program, the program said, this is a Pecha Kucha talk. Pecha Kuchas are generally six and a half minutes, but I was asked to do a longer version of this. That's about 20 minutes long. So if you see me going on, and it's not really a Pecha Kucha, because I'm not, those are like 30 seconds of slides, and they just go on, they go on very quickly. So you are getting the expensive version of this talk today, all right? All right. Okey-doke. Let's get this on, and all right, okay. So a lot of you have probably seen this before. This is the front page of the Agile Manifesto website. And here is a simple statement of the Agile Manifesto. I've been staring at this page many times for my entire Agile career. The first time I saw this was back in 2007. So you're just used to what it says, right? If you haven't seen it, that's where you can find it. But now, you know, you've probably been looking at it so long that you may have been unconscious to the picture behind it. And those are a bunch of the guys that created the Agile Manifesto. I think one of them actually may have been here this week. I'm not sure, I can't name them right off hand, but I see, you know, there's, I think that's Ron Jeffery's there. Somebody else who could probably name those guys off one by one. But this is actually that when we talk about what an adult team looks like when they work, this is the visual image that we often have, which is a bunch of people standing at a whiteboard having a conversation, right? One of them is waving their arms in the air, saying, look at this. And you see the rest of them are around talking to them. And often, actually, if you go on to Google and you search for scrum team or agile team, that's the visual image. You'll get something like that. And it makes a lot of sense that reinforces two of the principles of the Agile Manifesto that business, people and developers must work together daily in a project. So you see, and we'll see a few images of people working, business people and technology people working together daily. And the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is a face-to-face conversation. So if you go out and search, you'll see all these images, right? Here are a bunch of people doing some kind of, they're at their task board, right? That picture actually looks a little bit staged to me. So the people kind of look a little bit too happy. So let's look at, right? So let's look at something a little more hardcore. Here's people at a planning session, not necessarily else sitting, but here's somebody in a big planning session, you have people, and there's a visual representation of what's going on in face-to-face communication in the room. Here's something from the user experience world. Look at all those people, and they're engaging really in a face-to-face conversation with the work in front of them. So we keep seeing this over and over. This is a picture that's very near and dear to my heart. This is actually my second term of service at Solutions Like You. I went off for about three years and worked as an independent, and this was my very first team as an independent advocate. She was at a global nonprofit charity called World Vision. Their US headquarters is based in the Seattle area. And this was a team from an area that had a reputation in this organization from never being able to deliver anything, right? They're a backend database team, and they could never deliver anything. And it was actually really impacting the strategic direction of that whole organization. It's a huge international nonprofit. Just this division in the US raises over a billion dollars in contributions every year, and then they couldn't get information from the database. So this is like my first agile team. By the time I got done working there, they could deliver about every six weeks. And these, there they are, and they're standing up and having a face-to-face conversation and discussing their work. So this is like in the visual image goes over and over on what effective communication looks like on an agile team. But then when I got done working with this organization, I went into kind of the opposite extreme is I started coaching companies in the financial services industry, specifically teams that were writing securities trading software, software that traded stocks and bonds. Millions, sometimes billions of transactions a day. And if you've ever worked in that realm, every time you buy a stock or you buy a bond, you make the purchase order and then later on that night it settles. The money actually changed hands. Every one of those billions of transactions could have to be touched by usually 75 to 100 distinct business logic processes, one right after the other from the time it settled, of billions of transactions. Extremely complex business logic. Having to do with taxation and regulation and reporting and that's why it was just so incredibly complex. And to make it even more challenging, a lot of that stuff is actually run as we heard a couple presentations this week. It's running on big mainframes and people are writing COBOL that makes it even more complex. I was one of these teams, I was working, most of the team had to work with a single program. One single program written in COBOL, probably written about 15 years ago, that at the time they were working in it was over 35,000 lines long. So even simple things, they would have to maybe, a simple thing, the actual change might take five minutes, but it would take hours and hours and hours of research to find the six lines in this 35,000 line program you had to do. So extremely, it's just extremely complex business logic. And so what I found right away is it was really pushing the bounds of face-to-face communication, that teams and actually, so here's, this is actually, this is, I'll tell a little bit more about this. I'm gonna go back here. So the teams I was got that was building this, actually, when I was working of them, one of them, if you saw the talk this morning on BDD, the keynote, they were really proficient in BDD, right? They were great. They went out and worked with their customers. They had the discovery sessions, like they was talking about. They were extraordinary communicators, but it was so complex and frankly so scary for them that these conversations would go on for hours. They were masters at extraordinary communication, but it was so complex what they were dealing with. And if I quit, kept working with them, the more and more it felt like what they were really working on was just as complex as the human body. So if you look this, this, this is actually some kind of a medical monitor, right? And I was working in this team, like this team, the same thing. And the more I looked at it, I would watch these teams work together. And I would watch them work together and it really felt to me like, I watch them work together and I was so reminded of a primetime television show about doctors. I don't know if they have these in so much in India. They're very popular in the United States, right? There's always some drama about a doctor's working together in a hospital and they're always saving lives and causing miracles. And usually there's usually multiple scenes in there where they're dealing with some difficult case and look what's happening. They're sitting together working, having face-to-face conversation, right? This is obviously, this looks like, this is a staged photograph. This is not in all visibility. These are not doctors. These are veterinarians, right? But here's from a reality TV show in the United States and look, look what they're doing. They have a tough case and they're engaging in face-to-face communication. So it just fascinated me how they really hit the barrier. So what we say, well, most effective way is the face-to-face communication, business people working together daily. This team was doing BDD. They weren't doing huge amounts of, they were doing, they were doing what they felt were small stories. Stories were well-written. What's going on? And it was taking so long. And so I was looking for some model I could find to what could I find to break through so they could actually, these conversations would go differently and they could go faster and get to work. And I found it in the famous American horror movie, The Exorcist. How many people here have seen The Exorcist? Quite a few, not a whole lot. All right, all right. A lot of people in India have not seen this film. In the United States, this is actually very well-known and it's usually regarded as the scariest movie ever made. It was also very controversial because, and I won't show you the very controversial scenes. I actually won't tell you about the very controversial scenes, but this is anybody who was alive this is made in like I think 74, 75, like that time is etched in their memory is when The Exorcist came out. And to this day, it has a reputation. It's the scariest, actually in very realistic movie. Also had some great, great, great American and international actors in it that we'll see. But what does this have to do with having conversations on an actual development team? So let me tell you the story of this movie. You don't have to have seen the movie to understand what I'm talking about. I'll tell you about it. So meet Reagan McNeil, all right. Reagan is this bright, intelligent, friendly, well-adjusted young girl, right? And she lives with her mother. Her mother is a famous actress and they have just moved to the Washington, D.C. area where her mother is acting in a film that's being shot there. Now she does have stress in her life is that her parents had really recently separated. So then every, the movie starts out, life seems great, but then Reagan starts acting very strangely, right? She starts throwing tantrums. She gets very physical. She actually, worse things happen. She, people with strangers would come in and she would vomit all over them, right? Just really horrible, crazy stuff. And so their mother did what a parent would do. They took her to the doctor. Doctor, what do we do, right? And the doctor says, takes a look and he examines, he examines Reagan and he can't find anything physically wrong. So he says, what I think we're doing, well, I think this is just stress, you know, from moving and from the separation. And so he prescribes, he gets her a prescription for something to make her calm and he sends her on her way. But these prescriptions aren't working and Reagan isn't, he's getting worse. She's actually getting extremely violent. She's injuring people that she's becoming and she's just, her behavior is just giving worse, even more bizarre. Strange things are happening in the house. Like things fly around the house and nobody could explain. So back to the doctor she went, right? And they run more tests and they actually bring in a specialist, different kind of specialists. They put her under hypnosis. They bring any kind of specialist they get. But Reagan is not getting better. In fact, Reagan is getting worse. And if you've seen that film, you know she gets much, much worse than I am willing to share at a family-oriented Agile Conference. And so then there's a very pivotal scene in this film. And look at this scene. What is going on here? You have a staff of doctors, very highly trained specialists and there's the mother and they're all around and what are they doing? They're having a face-to-face conversation and they cannot figure out what's going around. They're going through everything they could do and the mother is just, all you brilliant people from all over the world or if she just throws this tantrum and the thing in this meeting and they can't figure out what's going on and they can't figure out how to solve it. And her mother is saying, well, you're not gonna throw my daughter in a mental hospital. I'm not gonna let her be institutionalized. And it made sense that they didn't know what was going on because what they didn't know is that they were dealing with the devil, right? Reagan had been possessed by an evil spirit. And we know, right, that people have been having face-to-face conversations about evil for thousands of years and it still hasn't gotten us any closer to understanding it. So they were dealing with the devil and they didn't understand that but it made sense that they couldn't solve that through face-to-face conversation. We've done that a long time. And so the doctor, the lead doctor, at one point he says, all right, we have no idea how to solve this and we're out of options. So let's invite in these legacy specialists. And he's almost embarrassed to tell, like let's invite these obscure legacy specialists that have knowledge of extreme old legacy languages like Latin and Aramaic and maybe Tamil old, old ancient languages that they have. So they invite this team in and there are two members on this team. There's a very old experienced member of the team with lots of experience and there's a young member of the team, two members on this legacy team. And the first time we meet, we learn that there's a different approach that the old legacy team member has, that he has a different perspective on what to do here. So here they are. They've met for the first time actually and they're the first thing the young team member does is natural, right? If you've just joined a development team, you want, what do you want to do? You have a conversations. Tell me what this is working on. Show me, let's pair together and show me some, let's try to understand what we're working on. And so he says, first thing he says of course is do you want to hear the background of what we're working on? Because he had been working, he had known about this for a long time but the old legacy, the old legacy team member had just flown in from a foreign country that day. And he says, do you want to hear the background of the case? And then we hear something different because when the young team member says, do you want to hear the background of the case? The old team member says, why? So then they do something, they kind of do a sprint zero thing to get prepared. They go get some tools they need, right? A few tools they need, right? And so then they're about, they're ready to get to work. But then the young team member still isn't comfortable, right? He's still, he's like, I need to know more. I think we need to mow. And he says, I think, wait, I think it might be helpful if I gave you some background on the different personalities Reagan has manifested. Like I've been watching this and I think there's three. And the old team member stops him, cuts him off right there. And he says, this is the line that has stayed with me. Young team member says, I think there are three personalities. And the old team member says, there is only one. There is nothing more we need to do to understand or analyze. There's only the work ahead of us. There's no more understanding, no more conversation we have. We just need to get to work and create the value that we're seeking after. And so they do get to work. And after an iteration and a half of work about and after both of the team members have paid the ultimate price for their iteration commitment, which is namely their lives, they deliver the value they were seeking and Reagan is happy and healthy again. Now what kind of went on here? So when we talk about what the great advantages of Agil, we say it freezes up from having to do big upfront design to spend a lot of time weeks and somehow like I was one of the teams I'd worked here within India, actually they were in that when I joined them they were in the midst of a two and a half year development process, right? All this analysis, this big upfront design and they thought they knew everything and guess what? They didn't, but yet they were engaging this big upfront design. But as I said before, when I was working even in the financial services industries even with teams that were brilliant at face-to-face communication and the kind of exceptional communication we heard this morning, they didn't do big upfront design but what they did was big upfront conversation. Kind of like the United States Congress, right? Institution that's well known for never being able to get anything done but yet they have conversation all the time. So the principles of face-to-face conversation are sometimes insufficient to get to work and produce the value that you want. So this is a quote, this man's name Werner Earhart. Does anybody in this room know who Werner Earhart is? Nobody knows, all right. So Werner Earhart is a personal transformation and personal development guru in the United States. And he created in the 70s something called Est. Some of you in India may have taken as something called the Landmark Forum or from Landmark Education. This is all about, if you've done that, Werner was the originator of that approach, right? Back in the 1970s he originated this. And one of his most famous sayings in the USA is in life, understanding is the booby prize. Now the booby prize is an American slang term and it's when you're in a race and you come in last in the race, you're the last person in the race, it's the gag gift, it's the funny gift that you get, the funny prize you get. And what he's saying there that is if you wanna live a life and deliver, go and meet life and go do things in the world, understanding is the booby prize. Understanding is the gag gift that you get. Maybe if you come in last, in life, if you wanna engage it's getting in action. And understanding how you got there is often secondary. It's getting there and delivering the value and living the exciting life. And that follows through on the very first principle of the Agile Manifesto. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer with early and continuous delivery of valuable software. There's nothing in there that says anything about understanding how you got it. Satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery. If we understand perfectly how we got there, that's the booby prize, right? It's our relationship in delivering value with the customer that gives it. But the thing is is that we create in Agile teams, we bring you together and we say have face-to-face conversation, go at it, and this is what you end up with. You look at all these technology tools. They've got a thing here, you've got laptops and people engage, those people look like they engage and like they're really learning how to deliver, right? Those people look like they're falling asleep to me, right? But we just assume that just because you got an Agile team and we give you this Manifesto and we give you a couple days of training that you actually just go in there and have face-to-face conversation and everything will be awesome. So what we need to work on is to acknowledge that conversation and how we do this is a set of skills that we have to be good at and what we need to move towards is something like a fast conversation. How can I get just enough understanding between us that we can get to work and produce software? And to do that takes practice. It's something we assume away. We just throw people together, collaborate. These people, so that's a man named Ross Daly and he's playing a Greek instrument called a lira, right? And I can guarantee these people are engaged in a complex, difficult conversation along the power of anything a software development team would do because they're largely, they're sitting there and they're improvising together and the stuff they're improvising together is based on music that's emerged actually through an oral tradition for thousands of years but they're there and they're having that conversation the only way they got there is through practice and just like when you're with an agile team being able to communicate and do these things is practice. It doesn't just happen. There's a scene, there's a picture of the set of another famous American movie. Everybody know what that is? Somebody knows what it is. What's that? That is the field of dreams, a famous American movie for a guy that's in Iowa, he owns a farm in Iowa and he hears voices coming from the corn one day and the voices tell him to build a baseball diamond, right? And he builds the baseball diamond and the voice they say that he hears from the corn says if you build it, they will come, right? And he does build the baseball diamond in the middle of the Iowa corn field and out from it emerges the spirits and the angels of famous baseball players who begin playing baseball in his field of dreams, right? He's got the greatest baseball players of all time emerge from the corn, right? At the end of it, at the end, his father who was a baseball player, the young version of his father emerges from the corn, you know, he's hearing it, you know, if you build it, they will come, come through that. So it's like we do this with this, right? Look at this awesome, look at this awesome space, all this office is chairs, people working to go to look at all that whiteboard, all those open things, look at that, it's a great collaborative space and it's like we say that and we say if we build it, they will collaborate, right? I like that. It's like you can hear the voices coming through. But that's how we treat people. So just to bring it home here, this is a picture and I was actually in this room a couple years ago and this is the drafting room at a place called Taliesin which was created by a great American architect named Frank Lloyd Wright. And this is the room, this is, he built this, he and his students built this by hand. I was in this room and it was the greatest collaborative workspace I had ever been in because everything, this is all natural light come in and all this space that people work on on the walls, this is actually a huge fireplace, it's a huge hearth of the fireplace which Frank Lloyd Wright figured out that if you put a fireplace in the room architecturally it creates community in the room. People start gathering around it and talking and working together. But we know what just we talk about, you just can't build the space and throw people in it and when you went and studied with Frank Lloyd Wright you became an apprentice, you lived with him and he just didn't teach you architecture and throw stuff at you. He taught you how to live a life as an architecture. And so here he is with all of his apprentices and they're working together having face-to-face communication but they live there. They didn't just learn architecture, they learned to live a life of an architect. And so somebody asked him when he was working that space which one of these buildings you designed and he is some of those famous beloved buildings in American architecture he's built, which one of them is the most beautiful? In response what he says, the one that's on the board right now, the thing of the value I'm producing right now that's what's the most beautiful, not the thing I had in my head. All right, all right. I hope you got something out of this little fast little talk. Thank you for showing up here today. I know I went really quick and we probably, and I'm about three minutes over so I gotta stop. I'll be around for questions. All right, thank you for coming, bye bye.