To Agile and Beyond!
That was the question that opened the space two years ago at Agile Coach Camp Indy. It was also the question I ran into last week at Agile and Beyond 2016. And it is the question that every organization needs to ask when embarking on an Agile journey!
It turned out that Agile and Beyond was a well balanced dose of managerial and technical agility so I thought they were doing it right but I digress. :)
From Lean to Leadership: The True Source of Sustainable Growth
Jeffrey Liker, the author of The Toyota Way shared with us the secret sauce at Toyota. What was it, you ask?
The secret sauce at Toyota is developing leaders who engage and develop people in problem solving. He also gave examples of Toyota profound teaching. He explained that lean leadership starts with Values. The True North Values are: Challenge (Stretch and Develop Us to Creatively Reach the Goal), Kaizen Mind (Systematic Problem Solving that Never Ends), Go and See (Observe to Understand the Actual Situation), Teamwork (Highly Developed Individuals Working toward a Goal) and Respect (People are our only appreciating asset).
Also, it wasn’t just about the tools (or “methodologies”), it was a philosophy and a culture of continuous improvement. At the heart of this culture was Toyota leaders who were viewed as coaches and teachers. Jeff mentioned that Toyoda helped the Japanese think, not just copy.
Jeff reminded us that true lean-agile is a systematic, scientific way of working to meet a challenge. Jeff also introduced us to The Toyota Kata, a book and a scientific approach by Mike Rother which revolves around The Improvement + Coaching Kata. The Coaching Kata is teaching through questions. This is a systematic and scientific approach with specific questions that gets repeatedly asked to create small but constant improvement. I have to say that while I learned about the Toyota Kata some time ago, it was crystallized by hearing it from a lean pioneer.
Understanding Refactoring: Writing Healthy Code
I finally got a chance to attend this session after several unsuccessful attempts in the past. This session was by Bryan Beecham and I really enjoyed it. It was a mix of concepts, learning activities and a lot of insightful quotes. Bryan usually does this session using lego to teach refactoring however this time he used us (human refactoring). Imagine a room full of 40–50 people and suppose each individual represent a piece of code. Try to move the pieces of code based on the common patterns such as color of clothes. The challenge is some pieces of code are immovable. In essence, this is like defragmenting your hard drive. It makes more organized and enhance its performance which is what refactoring does to the code. The whole exercise was very enlightening and I think it would resonate well with technical and non-technical folks.
Building Blocks of a Knowledge Work Culture
Doc Norton went over the cynefin model which I found intriguing. I read his article a while back on contextual leadership so it was great to see him explain the cynefin model live. Doc explained that knowledge work lives in the complex (emergent practices) and complicated (good practices) which requires facilitation and collaboration. My main takeaway was there are no best practices in this area since knowledge work is often something that has not been done before and it usually varies from one place to another.
Technical Excellence: You Need it
This was the second keynote by James Grenning. I believe session was a really good story. It was not only inspiring but also entertaining. Not many keynotes tackle technical topics like Test Driven Development (TDD) and even less of them tackle it in a way that is entertaining and can resonate with technical and non technical audience like this session did.
James argued that the first step to recovery is to admit that you have a problem. I think that is very wise since the biggest problem is not knowing that you have a problem.
This one graph in particular resonated with me especially that I have witnessed this in a number of places, it is the unsustainable growth between development and testing. Risk accumulates in the untested code gap.
The main takeaway is summarized by the quote below: “We want to be problem solvers, not process followers.”
Modern Agile
I thought this session by Joshua Kerievsky was like the grande finale of the conference. Josh talked about two main ideas:
Safety (Psychological Safety, that is!)
The main point here is that people don’t contribute their best ideas if the environment is not safe. This concept was taken from Alcoa CEO Paul O’Neil who made safety a prerequisite when he took over as a CEO at Alcoa. Josh did an interview with Amr Elssamadisy about the concept of Safety. You can watch the full interview here.
Modern Agile (An upgrade to the Agile Manifesto)
While the values of the agile manifesto are still relevant, the need for values that are broader than just software and IT are critical for organizations to go to the next level. Josh wrote an initial article on modern agile here.
A few other sessions I planned to attend:
- Value focused prioritization and decision making by Matt Barcomb.
- I caught the last part of Take Back Agile by Tim Ottinger but I wish I was there for the whole session. Tim also wrote about this on his blog here and here.
- Mastering Responsibility with Christopher Avery. I hosted Christopher at Agile NOVA some time last year and earlier this year. You can watch the sessions here and here.
- The Experimentation Mindset by Doc Norton. I plan to invite Doc to Agile NOVA.
- Rethinking Agile Transformation by Jason Little. I hosted Jason a few months back at Agile NOVA. You can watch the session here and view the slides here.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider recommending it to others.
