 I think we're going to get started for real this time. This gentleman told us that I had a nice dinner with him last night. He came all the way from New Zealand to share with us better agile through studio. So let's hear from John. Thanks Andrew. Am I coming through alright? Yep, good. Okay cool. So here as the big picture says, I flew a long way into Dave's video and it's really great to actually be in a group of people here in the States. So we want to come over and come to one of these conferences for a long time and I saw this one, I thought it was the one I want to go to because I think the themes of it, the routes and shoots thing is really important. So how I want to hopefully contribute to this routes and shoots thing today is to talk about ideas that we can steal from various other fields from business, psychology, economics, those sort of things to help us both with the routes, the foundations of agile so perhaps with some of the shoots, some of the new things that we can build on. Now I'm going to structure the talk today around the four points from the agile manifesto which Alister took us through earlier except I'm not going to talk about one of them, the working software one. Oops that was meant to cross out, let's try that again. Working software one, I'm not going to be talking about that one today just because I haven't got anything to say and I haven't got enough time to say it even if I had something. So we're going to rip into the other ones and we're going to try and tie it back a little bit to what we were talking about this morning as I was sitting there especially in the panel discussion I was thinking hey you know it relates a little bit to this thing and that thing and the other thing. So without further ado let's have a look at how one of the areas that I've discovered that I think really helps us with responding to change over following a plan or as what was the term for Alister? Attend to current reality. Attend to current reality which is a great term but I've never got around to it, quickly putting it on my side. So, one of the things that I've stumbled across and this presentation is essentially a bunch of things I've stumbled across over the past four or five years when I go man that's relevant to our job that could be helpful. And one of the things that really helps here is this thing called evidence-based management. Now, evidence-based management it's the name of it is inspired by a thing called evidence-based medicine. If you were a doctor it was called it was mine, you might have mentioned it to you. And the evidence-based medicine one basically starts off like this we're not going to treat this particular illness the same way it's been treated for the past 50 years just because that's the way it's always been done. Instead we're going to say is the traditional treatment actually better than doing nothing? Is the traditional treatment better than new treatments? And so evidence-based management comes and applies some of that to business management and it also takes it much further. We're only going to be able to scratch the surface of it today and we're going to talk about how it's relevant to responding change over following a plan. So they in the evidence-based management community they have a manifesto that is a little bit like ours but it's a bit more wordy. This is copy and pasted right off their website and we're not going to talk about all of it today. I guess I wanted to put it up there in part to draw the parallel with our own manifesto and in part to illustrate that I'm only going to really talk today about these two here in the middle and I would have liked to have talked about some of the others because there's lots of relevance and lots of different parts of it. The first one there, number two that I'd like to talk about is getting the best evidence and using it to guide actions and we can see that on two levels in our child. We see it within a project which we'll talk about some more in a minute but we also see it in the sense that Alice was talking about this morning when he went round, when he was waiting for IBM and looked at all those different project teams and said what is in Disney working here and that's one of the really appealing things about agile is to know that we've got this evidence, we've got that research behind it and what the evidence-based management people are saying is that too much of what goes on in the business community doesn't have that behind it. It's fads, it's doing things because it's trendy and you know there's a lesson in there for the business community and there's a lesson in there for us and the good news is that we really do have the solid stuff behind what we're doing in agile particularly if we look in the right places and we remind ourselves of what this conference is about which is indeed to go and to drill back behind the supervision and things of our use of peers if you don't write any documents and actually get back to some of the heart of what the Roots of Agile is about. I should mention that this evidence-based management stuff that comes out of primarily a couple of guys who are at Stanford University very high-playing academics who also spend a lot of time in the real world which probably explains why the quality of their stuff is so high and the other reason that this interest to me that I should mention is because I think it gives us a way to sell what we're doing to business people. We had some questions earlier on on how do you get businesses to buy into this kind of thing and here is something that comes out of the business community. Here is a bunch of business people who, being evidence-based, actually improve these things, these five things on the slide, really, really matter. The first one is basically our trust or our personal safety, should I say, as the Crystal and so there's all these things that are relevant to us that these people are already pitching to the business community and it's already gaining traction in the end and we've got to be able to use that and leverage that when we're selling essentially the same idea with different words into the business community. So I think this is a real help. Someone mentioned the phrase earlier, talking of women, you know, if you're trying to sell agile, how much influence can you really do and here is this whole field of study and research and writing and practical experience that is already selling this to business people. So let's tap into that and use that as we sell the same ideas. The other one I wanted to talk about, the second one here, sorry, the third one, is treat your organisation as an unfinished prototype, learn by doing. And again, there's this complete independent discovery of our notion of feedback, our notion of learning as we go and in fact I really like the way they phrase it. They phrase it with this bit in the middle here which I really, really like. It says, best organisations have the courage to act on what they know right now and the humility to change course will find better evidence and that really connected with me. When I read that I thought, hey, that's responding to change over following a plan and really, really eloquent language and so to me that's really, really important thing. I've also seen it phrased as act on your knowledge while doubting what you know and it captures in a way the real tension that we have when we try and pitch agile to business people because we're effectively asking them to do this and we're asking them to get started on a project when they do not have a 3,000 page speed, when we're telling them that we're going to change our minds later and effectively what this is saying is this is what those very same businesses should be doing, not just in software but in everything they do. So certainly really encourage us to tap into that both in terms of informing our own understanding of this and in terms of selling what we're doing in agile. The other main point, this is one that I think connected a lot with some of what we were talking about earlier was individuals and their interactions and some of the stuff that feeds into this from all sorts of other fields. Now my own journey on this has been an interesting one. I started off as the sort of stereotypical kind of shy nerd when I entered the industry about 39 years ago and I had this realisation that if I carried on like that it wasn't going to be very good for my career and so I said to myself, look, you've got to do something about this and the starting point, to give you an idea of what a low level I was starting from, one of the things I remember doing is forcing myself every morning to say hello to the receptionist and that felt like a challenge for me. So I hope most people in the room are starting from a somewhat less challenged starting point but the big thing that I've learned from my personal journey and that now as I've started looking into some of these fields we're going to talk about today is the level of change that you can undergo personally in your skills and your enjoyment of this side of work. There's a very similar story to mine of a university professor who had the same realisation that I did of this is going to hold back my career and he said basically he was essentially a real introvert he said this is going to get in my way and so he basically got into the habit of acting in an extroverted way and I don't mean telling jokes and all but I mean engaging with people, we've talked about engagement before and it can seem like an effort, it certainly has been my experience it can seem like an effort to engage but in my experience you get used to it and you actually realise to your surprise that you kind of like it and this story of this guy he went on to become indistinguishable from an extrovert now on the inside maybe he still felt like if he did still feel like he hadn't completely changed but for practical purposes he had and we have this notion in terms of individuals and interactions that so much of what happens in this area is simply ingrained in people that either you have soft skills or you don't have people skills or you don't we have so much talking like this we have personality profile which kind of again encourages this thought that either you have these skills or you don't and my experience and my is that you can change this stuff so much through practice now it's not going to happen overnight we'll get to that in a minute and so what I wanted to discover as I started to move into some of these fields that Alan mentioned earlier being psychology and as best I can as someone with a full-time job as a nerd I have tried to study some of these things in my spare time and I've been really encouraged to find this notion of these key skills and aspects of our personality I'm really pleased to discover that they are far more changeable than I had ever thought they were and probably even most people in the IT probably don't realise how changeable these things are there's one of the fields that touches on this is this thing called positive psychology which is this really seriously cool thing which I don't have a lot of time to talk about today but one of the foundation books and that is the thing called learned optimism how you can permanently change your level of optimism and you're like wow who thought you could do that before that book was written who thought that was a valid and useful thing for a person to do and so the level of change in this is potentially very large and you can't change everything the corresponding thing on happiness out of positive psychology is you can change about 40% of the happiness that you have in life the other 60% you probably can't believe about so the other analogy I've heard on this is that it's a bit like dieting if you're naturally skinny as I am you can be skinny without a lot of effort if you're naturally a larger person that takes more effort and can achieve it and I think that's what it's like with some of these interpersonal skills that maybe don't come naturally to those of us who are geeks we may require more effort than you know our buddy who's you know I don't know I can't even notice the background you know in sales you know we may require more effort to become good and become sensible of these things so it's just like someone who maybe requires a bit more effort in dieting they can still achieve the result so that's essentially the central theme of what I've got here the central theme number one is the level of change and learning that we can undergo as individuals and we'll come back to some of the other key themes shortly I just wanted on this slide just to take you through some of the new areas that I've found that relate to this when I first started looking into this another part of my personal journey is that not only have I had to learn this stuff I've just been talking about but I've had some real ups and downs in terms of the successes of my interactions with people who work some of them have been very successful and some of them have been just complete train wrecks because it's about individuals and their interactions surely this age-old movement can tell me how to do this stuff so I jumped on Google and I found this wonderful collaboration page and nothing else you know there are thousands of things on tools and processes you know thousands of things that tell me how to do TDD, various factions of TDD the moccasters versus the classists and the factions of the moccasters and but when the manifesto was put together on the hills up there years ago it was saying that this stuff here this stuff right here is more important than processes and tools and I definitely agree with the person who said earlier who was Mike that is agile broken and in this sense I think it is broken we're not putting emphasis in the right place here we're talking and talking and talking about processes and tools when this is the thing that makes the difference and we've always said it was the thing that made the difference so I started to look elsewhere and I discovered this thing called organizational behaviour which defines itself like this and I read that definition and I thought man this thing is people and their interactions at work that's the thing, that's the thing I'm looking for that's the thing that agile is not telling me about and this is this whole area of study with you know academic stuff from practical stuff again that same academic practical mix that I mentioned earlier which is so successful and I was like man this is the thing I've been looking for and so I looked around a bit more and I discovered organizational psychology and the difference between the two is basically that one is taught in business schools and one is taught in psychology departments and so I and there's positive psychology and this is very new thing where the two meet, two come together in this thing called positive organizational psychology and there's not a lot of stuff out here but it's touching on some of what I've talked about today these notions that you can learn all sorts of stuff that is relevant to your ability to have a successful interpersonal relationship with work and we were talking earlier about trust and is trust the right word for this thing that we're trying to do and to me I was thinking whatever it is, it's this thing that particularly this bit is about and some of these other things here, political skill it's about interacting successfully with people around it so sometimes it is building trust sometimes it's influencing them before we've had a chance to build trust and it's all these combinations of things and so this political skill at work is a fascinating thing normally political has some kind of negative connotation to it but basically what these guys are talking about is kind of the good side of the force so to speak and the idea that you can learn how to influence people for good at work and the interesting thing that they teach and I was relieved to find it because I wanted to tell you guys this is true so I had to find out whether it was the business of being able to influence colleagues or managers more successfully than you do now to sell an idea or to interact is by and large a learnable skill and yet so much of the industry including the part of the industry that we're in is not necessarily investing enough effort in this you know it's perfectly normal for gigs to talk about doing the Microsoft certifications or the Java certifications but whoever talks about learning this stuff who even knows that you can learn this stuff you know if you don't think you can learn that of course you're not going to talk about it of course you're not going to try and so one of the things that I'd hope comes out of this talk here today is that when we go back to our various places of work you know there will be people sitting on adjacent desks to you who are like I was 10 or 15 years ago gigs who think they can't do this and who don't know it's learnable and if we can take some of this message back to them I think that could be a really really powerful thing they don't go up to someone and say if I talked about individuals and their interactions you should learn that you know I have got far enough to learn that the full frontal assault dissuasion has seldom been successful but you know what does work is gentle nudges over a long period of time and I think we as a group I'd love to see us giving some of those nudges to try and introduce this idea that this stuff is learnable and try as a group to understand some of the ways that it can be learnt this was my sort of summary slide for this area and I've talked about it would be important and it's obvious there is a lot of research from outside our field that again backs up how important this is it was a case study done in a pharmaceutical company of which teams were the most successful ones and the one that stood out they said well what's the difference about this team and it was the richness of their connections both to each other and to people outside their team and outside their organisation so this stuff has a provable effect on outcomes it's learnable as we said so I want to talk briefly about the ways of learning it so I'm just going to figure out when I'm supposed to be stopping talking because I've lost track of it cool there's this guy who's done a lot of research on the expertise what does it become what does it take to become an expert in tennis some other sport and you know computer programming or in interpersonal interaction and what he's found is this several key notions the one I'm going to single out today is a thing called deliberate practice that means not just accumulating a lot of years of experience but learning so if I go down to a tennis court and I do the same bad serve 20 times in a row I haven't learned but if I do my bad serve the first time and I reflect on how I can do it better and I do it slightly better and I keep doing that cycle that's deliberate practice and the thing he finds with this is that it does take time the same research says it takes 10 years to become an expert and I've talked a bit about my journey with this as an expert on this, you'd assume it's taken me a number of years so none of this this is not a thing you take away it's wonderful this is a process you take away and you start to put into place and it will be approved over the course of months and years I sort of want to say about deliberate practice there's something else in there if I could hold on and ask me a question at the end the other thing that really appealed to me and this was the notion of what's called authentic leadership a lot of what I've been looking at actually comes out of the leadership field people don't seem to be talking as if ordinary people, people by myself who are not managers ordinary people would want to learn this stuff and so you have to read leadership books and then think how you apply it yourself even though you're not officially a leader and that's what I think is failing of not just the algorithm but industry at large but also for agile we say empower the team let them make decisions and then we reserve the leadership training for the managers to help people having empowered them to make decisions how do they work together more successfully to actually come to those decisions you put three architects in a room you get five possible decisions and no one can agree and you know ego is getting away and this sort of thing and so much of this learnable skill is how to take those intentional conflicts lading things those things with egos in the way and turn them into successful interactions so I was mentioning authenticity which comes from the leadership stuff when I first started trying to learn this some time ago I read a book on you know how to be a leader in a technical field and I felt like it was saying John you're like this and good technical leaders will play like that and I'm like well you know it was sort of most offensive to suggest I should have to have some kind of personality transplant and it seemed unlikely to succeed and it really put me off and I actually said well I don't want to be a technical leader then and the interesting thing that comes out management research completely independent from agile is that the best managers managers in general are not trying to conform to some stereotype of who a manager is they are being themselves more skillfully and this again is this learnable skill I think the leadership and it takes the pressure off this whole notion that we can learn to do this stuff better if you save yourself and it's true to simply be a more skillful version of myself the pressure is off you're not trying to give yourself a personality transplant you're not trying to conform to something that's completely different you're actually trying to do the thing that will work for you and happens to be the best way to lead and motivate anyway the other interesting thing about this authenticity is because you're being yourself it's very consistent with building trust there's this really interesting relationship between political skill which is you know influencing the circulation for good causes in nice ways and how that relates to authenticity so the political skill can help you get a quick win in terms of influencing people but if they work with you for six months and they realize that you were not being honest with them when you're influencing them you've undermined your authenticity if you have both you have this incredibly good combination for building the trust early and sustaining it going forward and so that's a really interesting discussion which we probably don't have to do for a matter of time to get into today one thing I should stress on this stuff and I've sort of touched on a little bit this is not about the colour in that this is not about the people who are on your all chart this is about the stuff that happens to the people who are not even on the all chart the people who sit cutting code the people who sit at their desks and don't talk to their developers the people who sit at their desks and talk too much and push their opinions around both those camps and I'm trying to learn to step out of them into a more positive territory so this is not all chart management stuff this is about empowering the teams this is not also necessarily about training courses the great thing about this is the live practice stuff is that you can learn it by yourself it's great to have a buddy in your organization you can go to and say man that being really bad can you give me some hints on how I might do better but it can be intimidating and I know I was too scared to do that but the great thing is that you can apply the live practice by yourself one of the interesting stories I came across was a CEO 35 years old in charge of this big company and he got there on the back of his in the personal skills and they said how did you do that and he said and how did you build those skills and he said every meeting when I came out of the meeting I go back to my desk I get a notebook and I write down essentially reasons learned from that meeting in terms of personal interaction and basically I never read this notebook but it was a mini personal kind of retrospective thing like we do in Agile you know the Intel operations this was his little thing after each meeting and that took him to a point where he was in this very important successful position on the back of his in the personal skills which he had built that way and certainly for me I've not gone down the notebook but I've certainly found that deliberate practice even without a mentor or a buddy is a powerful thing so you can learn this people in the team can learn this individuals can learn this you don't need you know high flying consultants you don't need you know team building courses with ropes and swings over bridges and stuff so and the other thing is that it does take time in this notion of building expertise there's an element of time and patience involved but there's a great great payoff at the end so in the interest of time what I'm going to do on the remaining point which I want to talk about so we're going to move on from that now to the question to the end because I think it was very relevant to the panel discussion earlier I'm going to talk briefly very very briefly about some stuff that relate to contracts and collaboration and I'm going to go very quickly through these three things because they're each written up on my website so I can cheat and not tell you today and you can google them and get everything that I would say if I had more time first one is this thing called principal negotiation has anyone read the book getting the yes cool not a lot of hands went up you haven't read that book you should really really really read it it's transformed my thinking in terms of interacting with customers and colleagues not just about contracts welcome one more time getting the yes yeah I don't have references for all this stuff in the presentation because I've been busy so what I'm going to suggest later on is that if you want this stuff you email me and I will eventually post on my blog references for all of this because what's important to me in this is not to just speak from my own experience not to just have some wild idea here but to be able to have this backed up with research and stuff so I assume you do want to make available to you the stuff that I found backs this up so I will show you details principal negotiation is this wonderful tool for turning negotiation about anything from an adversarial thing into a productive thing the kind of thing we want on an agile project and it can apply to contracts, it can apply to scope and it can apply to choosing your process Alice mentioned earlier situationally specific process is part of the declaration of independence for me my mental framework on how to do a situationally specific process comes out of the work on principal negotiation and all that stuff I've just mentioned is on my site the book is better it's got a whole lot more too QBS quality based selection otherwise known as qualification based selection I work in a company that builds software for other companies and we have this ongoing challenge of pricing being decided upon early and being involved and making choices as the company gets to do the work and I did a bit of googling and I came across something from here in the United States it was fascinating to me if I work in a federal government agency and I want to get an engineer or an architect to do some design work for me I can make that a competitive tent I can put it out to lots of different firms I can ask them whatever I like except the price I have to choose them on their quality they have to complete on their quality and only once I've found my preferred one and my DNA allowed to start negotiating price if we can't agree on price I can go to my second choice what an incredible idea and it seems so relevant to software I have no idea how to affect the kind of industry change but out of the panel this morning we were saying contracts are a big issue here's the thing that's working right here in the United States and it's insanely popular both for the purchases and the sellers because it works so if anyone's got any ideas on how we can try and get some leverage on that do contact me please finally the last one as I said I don't work in an environment enlightened enough to use Qubes unfortunately not yet anyway and so you get the situation there's a little vibe about competitors and software estimation being what it is some people bit high, some people bit low not because you're intentionally doing that but because software estimation is inherently uncertain and so what happens is if we bit too high we don't get to do the project some other sucker who bit low gets to do it we only get to do the work when we are the sucker and so I was having a discussion with this who is quite justifiably a world expert in software and we were talking about this idea but we couldn't nail it down we couldn't assure ourselves whether it was a real phenomenon or not and after a few months of thinking there's got to be an answer to this I had another try in Google and eventually I found this thing called the Winner's Curse and it's been known in economics for I think it's 205 years and here's this thing that is so relevant to so much pain in software development it's been known for 205 years and we haven't by and large reached out and grabbed it there's one excellent paper from the similar research lab in Norway on this wonderful experiment demonstrating it applying exactly through software but apart from that, nothing so one of the reasons I'm using that is it illustrates my broader point of reaching out to the various things around all these different things that exist in all these different fields reaching out and doing them and this idea that was this relevant thing that for 205 years we've missed it really reinforces the point of value of reaching out and looking at incidents and particularly for me around this point here I think there's some real realnesses we can do in that space a couple of bonus points from today we've mentioned how evidence-based management applies to the history of crystal and it's also essentially telling businesses that they should be situationally specific which is exactly what we're telling them through the declaration of interdependence. Something I've actually cut from my presentation was some stuff about the longer-term view I've got involved with in various ways collaborating with people who come out of the Defence Department here in the United States on a thing called earned value and come up with this kind of hybrid thing which is as much of a rigor as I could stand in an Angeles and as much of our likenesses I could shove in there and it turned out to be a very light thing that's still backed by some some rigor and stuff. So again that's completely written up on my website I've got the version for Agilists and the version for people from the traditional DOD background are essentially presenting the same topic and that's a great way to do some of the longer-term view stuff that Alice was talking about earlier. Finally, this point popped into my head during the during the panel discussion we're talking about how do we build this thing called trust or whatever it is that it's not trust this thing that we want, we know what it is and to me those are the ingredients build political skill be authentic and it takes time and I've essentially covered that earlier but for me that's this wonderful formula that helps to answer some of this this thing and if you can get the early version of it the bit where they actually don't trust you yet but you're influencing them to act in a trusting way you can get the later version of it when you've been authentic for six months so they know you're brilliant and they love you and that kind of combination in there I think is really powerful. So to wrap up I guess I want to issue a bit of a call to action here. I'm very, very interested in seeing us both as a group and agile community at large start to make some connections with the outside when I was doing the union value stuff you know, I'm interacting with people from outside out here who work really, really well so if you are interested in that please, please, in touch with me I'm really interested in people who have either new fields or interests in these fields other thing we need to be doing is influencing inside the agile community you know, there was only 17 people eight years ago when we made the Agile Manifesto and that spread out in terms of other people we've got I don't know what it is, 100 in a room or something today the potential for us to influence and to sell some of these ideas is huge so I'd really like to see us do that I have basically no idea how but great faith in the value of community and in the agile community so if you would like to get into that the simplest thing that could possibly work is email me and I'll try to keep us in touch I'm not sure that my email address is the right long term communication mechanism for talking about these topics but it's the easiest thing that we can do right now and I really want to hear from you both because I think this is really important and because I live 8,000 miles away and it gets a bit lonely over there so I don't think we've really got too much time for questions although of course you know, this in my mind at least raises a lot of questions to talk to people afterwards I'm just going to check time when you're coming on Lee, now, right? 5 minutes let's take a little bit of brainstorm questions I'm going to jot them down here and answer them all in one go it's a question backlog I'll introduce this by way of a very brief story many decades ago when I was in high school they had a literary magazine and two, I had to come up with an alternative to it called The Chrome Magnet Journal and one of the papers they published in The Chrome Magnet Journal was The Chrome Magnet Scientific Method and it went something like this draw your conclusion and then look around for enough evidence to support it and I'm curious as to how evidence-based management and its role in agile differs from The Chrome Magnet Scientific Method the question is phrasing the notion of looking around for have I looked around for evidence to support my father's school I will answer that straight away I know he says you're right I'll answer that straight away otherwise I'll forget on one sense it's a really helpful thing no matter how we found it on the other sense as it happens I was looking at the guy one of the key guys behind it in the other field they had on my other slide and I actually found through that so it's like I just stumbled across this thing I thought what is this thing I thought gee I recognise those ideas so I guess I didn't set out to put together a presentation on this and essentially I had most of the personal stuff I was a bit like before I thought man this might make me an agile read stuff presentation but the other stuff particularly the ones I cut a bit short waiting over quite a few years so I don't think we need to be afraid that we are being shallow here in scrambling around for things to prove a point I think we, instead we need to see this as being open minded enough to learn from it and opportunistic enough to leverage the stuff particularly in the people in the interactions we would have had a gap I'll answer the question can you tie up space management with just a little bit more of an agile it doesn't say be agile right it says get started and learn as you go it says change and evolve it says promote what else it calls personal safety which is essentially the ability to bring bad news to your manager so in other words create a culture where it's not just the brave people in this room as someone was saying earlier who are able to say hey manager this project create a culture where everyone can say that so even space management sees these things and they overlap with what we're saying that's essentially the linkage thank you I was thinking about what you said about individuals and their actions thinking about some of the practices that are really common part of what we're having like scannops and retrospectives and things that work high issue level because but then now what you're kind of getting to say I don't think you realize a whole lot of other things in the interest of the latter the question was is standard agile things like stand ups essentially giving us a factor way to do some of these things that I've been hearing about in the interaction stuff maybe sometimes I think the thing that struck me is a whole lot more that we want to know in that agile couldn't tell me how to have a successful whiteboard discussion with an architect to completely disagree with me and successful is not like it my way it's part of the thing success is we get a good outcome and so to me almost in a way the latter is more interesting I don't see huge linkages between our standard practices and what this is teaching I suspect there's some but it doesn't jump out and grab me yep that's it okay so I'm sorry we didn't get much of a question but please do catch up later and please do email me I think I'd love to get involved in more of your discussion on this thank you