 I want to welcome Linda Reising to give the keynote. How many of you know Linda Reising over here? Thank you. So no need to introduce Linda Reing. She first came to India in 2013 conference, and she was rated as the best speaker of the conference. Linda, again, we're going to have people standing all the way in the streets waiting to watch. So that didn't happen, but Linda is here. It's excellent that we're coming. So good morning, everyone. Usually I start by saying this first slide is one of the most important because it has my contact information. And these days, I give away my PowerPoint. So at the end, do you think this is a worthwhile presentation? It might be useful. And you'd like to take it back and show people in your workplace who weren't able to be here at the conference. Just send me some email, and I'll be happy to do that. That's true for this presentation. It's true for the one on retrospectives, whether you were able to attend that or not. I'll be happy to mail you the PowerPoint. You can do anything you want with it. I think Nuresh forgot to say what this little string of letters and digits is, but apparently they changed the Wi-Fi password. So to log on today, you're going to need that. And we're going to move off this slide. So if you want to quickly jot that down, it's FW4 WFAAA. And I think it matters whether it's uppercase or not. I don't think it's uppercase. So has everybody got that? I heard you say that you've been having a good time at the conference, but I wasn't convinced. So I would like you, if you've been enjoying the conference and you've been finding it useful, I would like you to stand up. You have to get up to say stand up. Put your feet apart. I want you to raise your arms in the air. And I want you to say yes. Yes. OK, hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it. So there's research that shows if you stand like this for two minutes, I'm not going to make you stand like this for two minutes. But if you stand like this for two minutes, it improves your making ability. It's measurable. We can look at hormone levels. And we can see that you're better for having done this. So you might think about a practice once a day of standing like this for two minutes. You might have to go into the restroom so nobody would notice that you're standing like this. But OK, you can put your hands down now. And I'm not going to tell you to sit. You can sit if you want. But I'm going to encourage you, not only for the duration of the talk, but for today and throughout all your days, to spend more time standing. We sit too much. Sitting is the new smoking. Now, don't stand in front of somebody. But I want you to know that it's OK with me if you stand up and walk to the side while I'm talking and take some chances during the day to stand up. Your brain will be better. Your body will be better because of it. And while you're at it, whether you're sitting or standing, make sure you have water in front of you. This is your best thinking tool. So I'm just going to turn around. If you want to sit down, it's OK. Good. Lots of you moved to this side. So I've just given you three tips that will make you better. It's going to help your thinking. It's going to help your physical condition. And there is research behind all of those tips. And it's not just some new age wacko that's come up. It was those ideas, that first power pose. So just Google on power pose. That first power pose comes from the research of a professor at the Harvard Business School. Now, that's in contrast to the way we make our usual decisions in software. And that's what this talk is about. Let's take a short survey. How many of you are doing Agile? Yeah, almost everybody in the room. Would you stand up? I'm going to try to get you standing today. Stand up if you're doing some kind of Agile. Very good. OK, now keep standing. If you made that decision based on all of the randomized, double-blind, controlled studies, the science that showed clearly that Agile is better than your previous process, whether it was waterfall or rough, it doesn't matter. You looked at all of the science. And that's how you decided to go Agile. So remain standing if you looked at those studies. Otherwise, sit down. So if you looked at the scientific randomized double-blind, controlled studies, so what we know now is that in India, people tell the truth because there aren't any randomized, double-blind, controlled studies that show clearly that Agile is better. In fact, in software development, we've had lots of other approaches. Agile is just the latest. And for none of those, that is in zero of those. Were there ever any randomized, double-blind, controlled studies in science that showed clearly that the new way was better than the old? And yet we did it. We moved to the new why, because we heard a good story. We heard IBM is doing it. Or our competitors, our competitors are doing Agile now. So we better do this new thing. Or we're going to lose out. We're afraid that if we don't follow the new trends, that somehow we're going to be missing on advances that will give us a business edge. And we made that decision. Some of those are expensive. How many of you went through major Agile transition and you brought in coaches and consultants and you bought books and you took a lot of time? But we messed expensive, isn't it? Oh my gosh. No wonder we have so many Agile consultants. It's big business. Oh, yeah. And we did that without any proof. Oh, well, I get a lot of pushback when I start talking about this, because most people say, well, Linda, wait a minute. What are you talking about here? Agile is, well, isn't it really just common sense? It feels right. It seems so obvious. We look at the practices. We look at the values and we resonate. We feel good. We like it. Surely it's just common sense. We don't need to prove common sense, do we? What do you think? Is it just common sense? You know what this animal is? Can you see it clearly? It's a leech. I don't know if it's leeches in India. I think you do. Yes, I think you do. So is medicine a science? We think of doctors as being scientific and making decisions based on those double-blind, randomized, controlled experiments. We think of the decisions that doctors make as scientific. Any doctors in the room, physicians? Oh, good. So we can say anything we want. So physicians, doctors, good-hearted, well-intentioned. Doctors want to heal. Doctors want their patients to survive, certainly, to be better. Doctors for nearly 2,000 years use the practice of applying these little animals to people who were sick. Now, the science behind that decision goes something like this. We believe there are four humors in the body, blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile. And if you're sick, it's an indication that one of those humors is how to balance. And so if we just use these little animals, then they will remove the inappropriate humor. And therefore, you will get better and will cure your illness. Now, there was never any scientific proof for this practice. But each physician learned it from his or her mentor was taught that in the version of medical school that that individual attended. It was the best practice. And of course, some people did get better. In fact, if you look at the history of medicine, you'll find that throughout history, we did get better. But it wasn't because of the physicians. It was despite the physicians. And only until recently can we show clearly that medicine is doing anything good for us at all. Most of it turns out to just be placebo. And we'll talk about that. But for those physicians who use this technique for 2,000 years, it was just common sense to apply a leech to somebody who's sick. It wasn't until Harvey did some scientific experiments, William Harvey looked at the practice of applying leeches to patients. And he said, you know, there is no scientific evidence for the practice of applying leeches. He did these experiments in 1628. But physicians continued using leeches on patients until the 1920s, even in the face of people who did die, including the first president of the United States. He basically had a bad cold. The doctors kept applying leeches, thinking that that was the best way for him to get better. And they killed him. So best practice at the time, even in the face of science. So maybe doctors are not very scientific. Maybe scientists, even scientists, are not very scientific. They have their own distorted view of reality. They don't even look at scientific results. I was in Budapest this year. I had the great privilege to visit an interesting little museum. It's a little museum about medical history. And I wanted to visit that museum because I had heard an interesting story about a scientist, a physician named Ignat Semmelweis. Isn't that a wonderful name? I love that, Ignat Semmelweis. Has anyone heard of Ignat Semmelweis? No? Okay. Ignat Semmelweis was a young physician. He was born in Hungary. But he worked in a hospital in Vienna. And he noticed something interesting. He noticed that when women came in to deliver a baby, if they happened to be assigned to a ward where physicians were delivering the babies, there was a high incidence of something called child bed fever and the mothers, and usually the babies died. It was pretty common in those days for women to die in childbirth, so nobody really paid any attention. What caught his interest, though, was that if he just went down the hall and he saw women who came into the hospital who were not attended by a physician but were intended by a midwife, yes, some of them did die of child bed fever, but not very many. In fact, when he started doing some measurements, some metrics, he compared and he saw that 10 times as many women died when they were attended by a physician as those who were attended by a midwife. And he wondered, why the huge difference? He even went out on the street. He saw very poor women who delivered babies at home or sometimes in the middle of the street. And even there, yes, some of them did die, but the numbers compared more closely with those delivered by the midwife than those delivered by the doctors. So women delivering babies under horrible conditions had a better chance of surviving than if they were delivered by a physician. So he began to study. He began to observe. He began to see what the difference could possibly be and he noticed that when the doctors came in first thing in the morning, they didn't go into the hospital ward. They went into the morgue. Do you know what that means, what the morgue is for? Yes, that's where they put people who had died the day before. And their job was to perform autopsies. And they went from performing autopsies to delivering babies. And they were wearing typically their aprons and those aprons were covered with blood and tissue from those patients who had died the day before. And in fact, the doctors joked about it. Oh, look at me. I'm covered in blood. It's a guy thing. So he noticed that that seemed to be the only difference, that the physicians were moving, covered in blood, from performing autopsies to delivering babies. Could there be something going on there? He wasn't sure. But he decided to try a cheap experiment. He enlisted to help some of the doctors. And he said, I'm going to make a little basin full of a mixture of chlorine. And when you come from the morgue, I'd like you to wash your hands before you go in and deliver the babies. So some of them were willing to try that experiment. It was a small thing, just washing their hands. And as he measured in his experiment, he could see clearly that all of a sudden the numbers of women who died in childbirth improved. So he collected data. Data is convincing, is it not? Scientific data? Isn't that how we are scientific? We are rational. We look at data, and that is always convincing for us, isn't it? Oh, good. You're so honest. I really appreciate that. So he collected the data, and he showed it to the doctors. And he said, I think this should become best practice. I don't know why. I can't explain it. But I wonder if maybe somehow in performing the autopsy, we're bringing in, and he didn't have a name for it, he said, cadaver particles. Something was being transferred from the dead patients to the mothers, and it was killing them. And he was laughed out of the hospital. They said, you are crazy. What are you talking about, cadaver particles? You're saying these things, and that we can't see them. That's ridiculous. We all know there are four humors. That's what determines health in people. These cadaver particles, what a stupid idea. And he wouldn't give up. He was an evangelist. He had passion for this idea. He could see women dying. He said, no, trust me. And he tried to encourage people to adopt this habit of washing their hands, and they refused, even in the face of data. They told him he was crazy. Even his family believed he was crazy. They locked him up in a mental hospital, and he was abused by the guards. They beat him to death. He died at the age of 47. They threw his body into a grave with a lot of other people from the hospital, and they forgot about him. It wasn't until much later that scientists like Lister and Pasteur began to show that there really was something. They didn't call it a cadaver particle. They called it a germ. And they had tools and techniques that Semmelweis did not, and they could begin to see them. And they said, we have to be concerned about these germs. And washing your hands is a very good practice. But even in the face of that evidence, it took decades before physicians around the world said, OK, yeah, this is pretty convincing. I guess we should start doing it, except for the last stronghold. There was one large country in the world that said, no, we're not doing that. What a waste of time washing your hands, worrying about these little tiny things that you can't even see with a naked eye. We're not doing that. What country was that, do you suppose? Oh, no, not India. India is so far ahead. I mean, what? Russia, no, no, not Russia. This is a really backward country. The USA, that's it. Except for physicians in the USA, the whole world had pretty much come over to the side of believing in germ theory. But no, no, not in the US, not convinced by science. They continued this waste of time. You probably don't know this individual, so I won't even ask you to raise your hands. He was elected the 20th president of the United States. He was adored by the American public. He was the last of the, we call him the log cabin presidents. He was born in poverty. He worked his way up. He was, by all indications, a genius. And not only that, he cared. He had passion for trying to make things right in the country. Such a promising individual. And after only a few months in office, he was standing in a railway station with his colleagues getting ready to go on a trip. And as they were standing there, a man came out of the crowd with a gun and pointed it at the president. And bang, shot the president in the arm and in the back. The president fell to the ground. He was not dead. He was only wounded, luckily or not. There were physicians in the group, well-intentioned, caring physicians. And their first thought was, the president, the president has been shot. Let's try to remove the bullet. The president is lying in a pool of blood on the floor of the railway station. And they begin to pick up unsterilized instruments of various sorts, including their own fingers, and to probe into the back of the president over and over and again for several minutes, trying to find the bullet. They believed it was on the right side. They couldn't find the bullet. So they said, let's take the president out of here, and we'll really work on him. They spent hours. The president, without any anesthesia, endured this constant probing by as many as a dozen different physicians, all trying to extract the bullet, and they were not successful. Several months later, the president died in agony. He had a massive infection that spread throughout his entire body, even his jaw. He couldn't in the last few days of his life. He couldn't eat. And when he died, at least to the credit of the physicians, they said, let's do our usual practice. Let's do an autopsy. And when they did, they were horrified, because the bullet, they thought, had been lodged on the right side of the president, was on the left side. And what had killed the president was clearly a massive infection that had spread throughout the right side of his body and had taken over. And the cause of that infection, the work of the physicians themselves. And at least they had the grace to look around at each other and say, gentlemen, we have killed the president. And that event was what turned the tide for the United States. All of a sudden, physicians said, maybe there is something to this germ theory. Maybe we should pay attention. Often wonder about the drug companies. Suppose drug companies operated the way we do. Then we could stand on the street corner and we could say, hey, I have some little blue pills. They really worked for me. Would you like to try them? Have some. We'd be passing drugs on the street corner. Well, actually, we are already passing drugs on the street corner. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands on that one. We do know that the drug companies at least make an attempt. Anybody here work for a drug company? Pharmaceutical company? See, you're not raising your hands now for that one, are you? We know the drug companies do controlled experiments, don't they? I mean, if you're going to find that whether a drug works or not, you have to have a control group that gets nothing for whatever that illness is. And then you have to have another group over here that gets the drug. And then you have to compare. And you have to see, well, does the drug really help? They do, randomized, controlled experiments, and have always done. But then they noticed something funny about the drugs. And they said, you know, our science isn't really good enough because what happens is we have these drugs. We put them on the market. And then they don't seem to be very effective. Why is it they look so good in our experiments, but later on they didn't seem to be as effective as we anticipated. And they realized they were going to need something else. Because in the experiment when people are being observed and they're given a drug, there's some magic that happens in their brains that says, I am taking a drug. This is something new and exciting. It should probably help me get better. And so they did. Believing in that drug is really what made them better. That's called the placebo effect. Have you ever heard of that? Yeah, the placebo effect. So the drug company said, you know, I think we need another group. We've got to have the control group that gets nothing. And we've got to have the group over here that gets the real drug. But now this group is going to get something that looks just like the real drug or the real surgery. You can do this with surgery. Looks like the real surgery, but is not. If it's a pill, for instance, it's just a sugar pill. If it's an injection, it's just normal saline. And so we'll compare now the real drug, not with the control group alone, but also with the placebo group. Because what they began to notice is that in the placebo group, these are people who are getting sugar pills and saline injections that a significant number of people get better. Now, my daughter works for a pharmaceutical company. And she said, mom, it's really interesting about those drug trials now. The people who are on placebo, well, used to be about 50% to 60% would get better. That number is going up. And we don't know why. How does that work? How does that work? It's your brain, isn't it? If we could open a door to that little pharmacy in our brains, we wouldn't need many of the drugs that we take. We could just say, I want to believe that I can get better. And we will. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Because it's the belief. It's the belief in that treatment that cures us. So I have a talk that asks this question, could agile be a placebo? Yes, we think it's effective. We have no scientific proof, but, well, we believe in it. Would that be enough to make us, well, when we were talking on the panel yesterday about productivity, efficiency, I hate to bring it up, velocity, all of those things, we could be getting better. Yes, we could even be getting measurably better. But could that be happening because we believe in it? And it's our belief, just like our belief in a placebo drug, our belief that makes it better. We know that there are agile failures. We know there are times in organizations, maybe even teens within organizations, where it doesn't work. It's not effective. You don't see increases in productivity or velocity. Could it be that they didn't believe? They didn't like it. They resisted it. And so therefore, it didn't work. And really, is this a bad thing? Am I saying something bad about agile? That it works because we believe in it. After all, we have no randomized, controlled, double-blind studies that show it works. Maybe believing in it is a good thing. Maybe that will move us forward. I don't know. Because even if we could do those randomized double-blind controlled experiments, we know scientists make mistakes. There are lots of times when, oh my goodness, scientists change their minds. They used to tell us one thing, and now they tell us another. Have you noticed that? Is that a good thing? Don't you hate that? Well, they used to tell us it was OK to eat butter and sugar in fat. And now it's not so good. But on the other hand, if it's natural butter, that might be OK. But oh no, not if it's, and then sugar is, no, sugar is not. And then why can't they make up their minds? Why do scientists keep changing their minds? Why do they do that? Because they're trying to be annoying? Why do they do that? Why would a scientist change his or her mind about something? Yeah, they have new information. So that's a good thing. We would like that. We would like more information. Well, and what happens when a politician changes his or her mind? Oh no, we should not come. So we know that scientists not only make mistakes, but sometimes they can only say what they can say. They don't know enough. It's the best they can do at the time. The example here is Newtonian physics. At the time, it was the best idea. It's the best we could do. It wasn't until Einstein came along and he said, what if? And then here's an example of something where we can't do a scientific experiment. But it's a scientific result, nonetheless. What we know about Einstein is that he loved stories. In fact, he spent more time on stories than he did on physical scientific experiments. He would begin to say, let's suppose we were in a spaceship and it was traveling at the speed of light. And we had an observer outside the spaceship and an observer inside the spaceship. And they each dropped a ball and they noticed the other. And he would develop elaborate, wonderful stories. And then he'd go to a colleague and he'd say, hey, what do you think about this? Suppose there's a spaceship going at the speed and he'd get feedback and he'd improve the stories. And he was really more about stories than he was about experiments. And it was those stories he called them thought experiments. They were more convincing for the scientists at the time. They were overwhelmed by his ability to come up with a good story, much more convincing than the real physical experiments that didn't come until much later. We also know that scientists are biased. That most of the time, scientists do some kind of research. And they have an investment in a particular point of view. And then along comes a new idea or a new theory. And they will resist that as long as possible. Because after all, their publication, their position, their tenure, if they're at a university, depends upon all the work they've done up to this point. And so a very famous scientist named Max Planck said, science makes progress not because scientists pay attention to new data, but because the old scientists die. We have to wait for the old guys to die before we can make any progress. You can see that now in economics. Classical economics, which is what I studied, believed that you and I are rational decision makers. The model for them is the rational decision maker. Is that a bad sign? It looks like a bad sign. Should I be worried? I'm not worried. You might be worried that, oh, isn't he on the Seinfeld? OK, so they're paying attention. And we won't have to worry about that. So what we know about scientists who are behavioral economists is that they said, hey, let's do some experiments. We're not just going to have these nice models that are built on fuzzy ideas. Let's do some real experiments. And what they showed is that people are not rational decision makers. So they have created a new field called behavioral economics. And I'll give you some recommendations for reading about that later. But the old economists are hanging on, especially at the University of Chicago. They are hanging on to their old models. And we will have to wait until they die. And then behavioral economists can take over. And they will do good things until they are displaced and then we'll wait until they die. So I can see what's going on here. So you'll have the slides later, I guess. I have a great quote. I was on a committee that was reviewing papers submitted for a scientific conference. And I got a comment from one reviewer who said, I wouldn't believe this even if it were true. What we know is that it takes both. We know that good science can inform us. But what convinces us, what leads us to adopt the idea, is a good story. This is the way it happened for Garfield. It wasn't the nice organized research by Semmelweis. The physicians in the US didn't care about that. They didn't look at it. It didn't convince them. What influenced them to change their practice was the death of Garfield. The good story about what happened to the president when inappropriate practices were used. You can see that throughout the history of science. Has anyone heard of a guy named Galileo? What happened to him? When he came along and he said, no, no, we've got it wrong. Everything doesn't revolve around the Earth. No, the sun. That's where it's happening. The Earth is revolving around the sun. And did the people at the time say, oh, yippee. Thank you, Galileo, for sharing your insight. Is that what happened? Is that what happened? No, no, that's not what happened. Even his fellow astronomers said, are you kidding? What are you talking about? We have this nice model. It explains everything, and it fits with the Bible. The Earth is the most important thing in the universe. Forget about that other sun thing. And he was hauled up before the Roman Inquisition, and they were very convincing. It was sort of something like this. Galileo, change your mind, or we will kill you. And he said, hmm, well, OK, I'll change my mind. Sure, sure. And like Semmelweis, they locked him up, and he died. This is how we start out experimenting. We would never have learned to walk if we weren't natural scientists. If we weren't always saying, well, I wonder what this does. And by standing saying, well, I think I can figure this out. But oh my goodness, I fall down. But that's OK. I get up again, and I try again, and I fail again. We wouldn't be here. We wouldn't walk. We wouldn't speak. We wouldn't have any of the wonderful skills we do if we hadn't had that approach of being a natural scientist, of performing a series of experiments, trial and error, learn from failure. If we hadn't had that approach to the way we live, we wouldn't make any progress at all. And what happened to us? What happened from that wonderful stage of our life to where we are now? Oh my goodness, do we do this now? I don't think so. The search became not so much about trying and being OK with failing. No, no. It was more about I need to get the right answer. I need to find the right answer. That's what our parents told us. That's what our educational system has trained us to do, is here's a problem, find the right answer. And if you do find it, then I will give you an A. And that's what our organizations do. Here is a task. If you do it, I will reward you. And we've done that over and over and over. So even in science, it's not about doing science. In science classes, it's about here's a list of things that you have to memorize. Now, you go out and memorize that. And then I'll give you a test. And you will either answer it or not. And I will grade it. And I will say you get an A or a B or an F. So now that's what we're doing. Those are the kinds of questions I get when I go around the world. How can I do it is what we're zombies. How can I do the right thing? I want to, can you give me the answer? And I am in the habit of saying, I have no idea. Here are some things you could try. But I cannot pull up a little nice package of things and say here it is. This is the answer. This will solve all your problems. In fact, if you're paying good money for consultants who come in and do that, I would say beware, beware, run away, run away, be very afraid. Because not only is there not always a right answer, sometimes there's no answer at all. And we never prepare students or our children for that. Say, there might not be an answer. You might just have to do the best you can, proceed forward. I'm always looking for better ways so I can live longer. And unfortunately I know there's no magic silver bullet for that. And that someday I'm gonna die. Probably sooner than I realize. That's hard. So when I tell you, I don't know. I don't have the answer for your problem. Here are some things you could try. Realize I'm not just trying to be contentious. I'm telling you the truth. The truth as I see it. So even when I talk about experiment, we know that many executives are afraid. They don't even like that word. If you go to your CEO and say, hey, we're gonna try some small, cheap experiments, I'll bet he or she is not gonna be happy. Because the implication of experiment is risk, possibility of failure. And what that executives thinks he or she is paying you to do is have the right answer and to get it right. They're not paying you to say, well, I'm not sure Linda said we could try this or we could try that. They don't think that's an enthusiastic way to proceed. So if you're gonna try experiments in your organizations, which I recommend, you better find another word. In the retrospective sessions, we said, well, we could try just saying action items. We know language matters. So you need to find a way of doing those small, cheap experiments in your organizations without scaring your executives. So what can you do? I feel like I've been pretty discouraging up to this point. And really there are some points of light on the horizon. And one of them is some small efforts at research within the Agile community. They're not looking at big, enormous, double blind randomized controlled experiments, but they're looking at the practices, the individual practices or some small piece of Agile. So here are two recommendations. On the left is a book that was written by Lori Williams. She's a professor at the University of North Carolina and she has done a lot of double blind controlled experiments with different kinds of people who are doing pair programming. So I recommend her book. On the right is a paper. If you can't find it, send me some email and I will send it to you. Arlo Bell, she did experiments with pair programming where he looked at who should pair with whom, how long should the pair duration be? He really did have hypothesis, test, analysis. These were real science as he could do it. In his environment. Now when you read that, you should take it with the realization that this was his context, but it should give you some ideas, build on that small research and try your own experiments. So this kind of thing now is happening a lot. People are doing real science with little pieces of Agile development. So do that. There are people outside our industry who are doing real science that applies, that directly applies to what we are doing. So on the left, this is a large study that was done by Teresa Ammabiles. She's a professor at Harvard Business. She wrote a book called The Progress Principle and in it she describes a study of software development. She followed them for an extensive period of time and collected a lot of data on how they work. What motivates them? And the title might give you a little clue. The short story is what motivates software developers is to make daily progress on something they care about. It seems startling. It seems common sense. But now there's the beginning of proof. So I recommend that book highly. The one in the middle is something that everybody seems to be reading. Let's do a survey. How many are reading it? Or how many have thought about reading it? You've thought about reading a book about thinking. The problem with this book is that it's really, really big. And it's a slog of a read, but it is amazing. So I recommend it highly. And in it you'll learn a lot about yourself and how you make decisions. And it's all based on science. So it doesn't have anything to do with software development but after all we do thinking for a living, do we not? Wouldn't you like to know better ways? And then on the right is just one of Dan Airely's book. I recommend anything by Dan Airely. If you just Google on Dan Airely you'll pull up Ted Talks and articles and lots of free stuff. He's also written three books. So the books are about his research and it all applies directly to software because he's a behavioral economist. He's one of the new young guys who's coming in who's gonna change forever the field of economics. So there are just three examples. There are many more of people who are outside our industry but their research, their scientific research has direct application. We can use that. We can piggyback on what they're doing even if we can't do the science. I know you're gonna think this is crazy but I think one of the most powerful things we can do in order to be better is to get together and talk about it while you're eating. I'm a believer in the power of food. And to back me up I had this wonderful quote from a Nobel laureate at Cambridge and he said it used to be at Cambridge that we all had lunch together. And when we were together we would talk about ideas for experiments, ideas for making things better. And he said what happens now? Well, everybody eats alone, back at their desks doing their email. He closes, you can't learn anything by doing email. So we're hiding behind a lot of tools that we think help us. And some of those tools are getting in the way of the most insightful app we have in our environment which is the other people that we work with and just having human interaction and talking about ideas for small, cheap experiments in better ways. Don't lose that, don't hide behind tools and apps and other electronic things when you've got wonderful brains sit around a table with some food. Make sure that your teams are as diverse as possible. Here's another paper from Harvard, I'll be happy to send it to you. It shows that having one woman on the team or somebody from another culture or somebody who believes differently, somebody who maybe doesn't like agile. That's a good thing. We talked about firing people who say I don't want to pair programming. No, no, keep them around. I even have a role for them in my pattern language field has changed. You need somebody who doesn't want to go along with the herd. You need the point of view. Somebody says, I'm not sure this agile stuff is really all that great. That's a valuable person and you should listen. You should pay attention. You shouldn't just say, well, it's my job now. I have to convince them. I have to influence that person so they'll be just like the rest of us and we'll all march together. We love to march together. We love to march together. We love to sing together. That's what the military does. So we all think alike. We think that's a good goal. We are all, we are all going agile. Maybe not. What agile has done that has changed everything. He said, here's what it's all about. It's about taking little tiny steps. How big are those steps? Well, they used to be 30 days, but now they're shrinking. Two weeks, a week, talked to a team, last couple of weeks ago, hours. How big are those steps? Well, they're smaller and smaller. And what happens in those steps is we do a little experiment. We try something and then we deliver it and then the customer says, hmm, that looks okay, but maybe this part over here, I'm not too sure about. And we're back in the scientific experimental mode of trying something just as we did when we were babies. Let's try that little step and maybe we'll fall down but we will start over again and we'll get better. And we will learn even well, there is no such thing as a failed experiment. Every experiment tells you something that's gonna be useful. So we're back in the role of being a natural scientist regarding development as a series of experiments and maybe for some of us, even doing that in our own lives, who should be agile? It's not your project or your team or your organization. All of those components are made up of individuals. You should be agile, that's the goal. Agile has brought values, human values to the table and said, hey, remember, software is developed by people. We need to be better. And the way to do that is little tiny steps, learning every step of the way. So the conclusion of the talk is you need both. You need real science to validate whatever it is that you're doing but people are not convinced by data. They're influenced and they begin to believe because they hear a good story. So you need the power of both but I would be happy to see more science in what we do every day. So I encourage you to try to find ways of doing little tiny experiments. Now I wrote a paper about this. It was published in IEEE Software back in March, April and again, if you can't find it or think it's on my website, send me some email and I'll be happy to send it to you. I don't know if we have time for questions. Do we? We'll do a couple of quick questions. We'll do a couple of questions but I so appreciate your time and attention. You've been absolutely wonderful. So let me take this opportunity to see. All right, two quick questions. Anyone? Two quick ones. Oh, come on. There we go. Teams often ask us particularly when they start their agile journey. A question that teams often ask us, tell us the benefits. Tell us what promise agile can offer. So can you say that again? So when teams... No, no, no, just what's the question? So I'm gonna say the question. So one question that teams ask us before they move to agile is what is the promise that agile offers, right? Show us benefits, show us data. Are you saying from, what understanding from this talk is you've got to experience that. You've got to experience that and see this. Is that what you're trying to say here? What I'm saying is that we don't have any data. What I'm saying is all we have right now, you couldn't even dignify what we have now as a case study. There is a formal case study that you can do on teams or organizations to show something about the way they operate. We don't even do that. All we have are stories. And some of those stories have numbers. We talked about this last night. They have numbers in them, but they are not, to my mind, credible numbers. They're just things like how we measure velocity. And so they are not scientific numbers. They're not scientific data. So the real answer is right now, we don't have any. So if they're looking for proof, I think if you, did you listen to the panel last night? I get that question all the time. Linda will, and I've gotten it for everything. Linda will patterns make us better. Will adopting OO something make us better. And I say, how good are you now? And the answer is we don't know. We don't have any measuring going on now in our organization. So how can we hope to say you will have a 20% improvement? If you don't know how good you are now, how are you going to improve by 20%? It's nonsense. Thanks. Sorry. That's a very increasing answer, thank you. Yes ma'am. Linda, thank you so much. It's more an observation or a sharing that I'd like to place for everyone. We believed that we were good at one point when we were doing waterfall. And it worked for us. And I was a disbeliever in agile. I resisted the change. I, we came to an organization that prescribed agile to us, mandated it out. They threw it at us, said adopted. You know, this is what the next thing is. And it's terrible if you are somebody who doesn't want to take agile. Yeah. And we struggled. We struggled. And we struggled and we started seeing some benefits. Sure. We saw some benefits. It's hard to be the guy who reaches. We saw some benefits. And I'm still learning. And I'm happy that there are some things that are happening well. But there's also a fine balance that we have to find. And I don't think we've found that because now we've gone overboard. I don't see. You should be up there. I don't see what we used to do before. We've lost some precious things in our team. We've given up the enthusiasm and the speed with which we were willing to change. We change because we're expected to do something that an organization wants us to do. We've seen loss of the, what do you call it? The willingness and the enthusiasm to do stuff in the product. There's so much, we talked about safety Joshua yesterday and there's a loss of safety at some point because you feel that if I did it this way and I did it rapidly and I did it differently something's gonna go wrong. There are risks and the risks stand up much taller than you want them to be. So at the risk of sounding very skeptic in an agile or a conference I'd like to say that I'd love to see it as an experiment and I wish that an organization would be willing to stand up and say, try it if it works for you, great if it doesn't, find what works best for you. And I wish we could do that. And I think it's the fear and I'm hoping that we're gonna step beyond the fear. So thank you for reassuring that I'm not one of those crazy ones who needs to be locked up in the asylum but I can stand up and say this to an organization and to a conference where everyone is agile. Thank you everyone for this here, thank you. Is this a brave one? This is courage, this is what courage looks like and what I hope she gets in response from you is respect. And a lot of you should be saying, I should go talk to her. I should find out how she feels. I should make sure that in my organization, just because I believe in agile that I'm not denigrating or treating other people who don't agree with me with lack of respect, making them feel stupid, taking the heart out of everything they do. If agile is simply about we're all gonna get on the same bandwagon and we're gonna sing the same songs, we're not gonna make progress. So I hope maybe the true voice of agile should be, we listen, we should listen and we should learn. Thank you so much. Thank you, Linda, you just shook the crowd. It's fantastic to have talks like this. So again, thank you very much.