Diana Larsen of FutureWorks Consulting gave a talk at Agilepalooza that was originally titled “Managing Agile: The Three Dysfunctions of Management.” She has since changed it from “dysfunctions” to “constraints” to sound less confrontational, but I actually prefer it as dysfunctions since she is talking about common psychological & behavioral patterns of management that is within the scope of their control.
The three behavioral patterns were:
- Wishful or Magical Thinking
- The Illusion of Control
- The Fantasy of Individual Blame
MAGICAL THINKING
Magical thinking is when decisions are made from what the manager hopes will happen or from a place of fear. For example, setting a completely arbitrary deadline date. Other examples are when they don’t expect change and insist on doing things just because they’ve worked in the past. Other examples are doing something just because other are doing it, or doing it because it “should” work. Larsen prefers changing the phrase of “that should work” to “that could work.”
Agile methodologies can help alleviate some of these thought and behavioral patterns because they emphasize collecting data over time that can be used to supply evidence for decisions. Holding retrospectives gives the team a voice to illuminate any impediments and blockers, and there is an ethic of continuously improving the process through Kaizen.
Larsen recommended Hard Facts, Dangerous Half- Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management as a good resource for this.
THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL
The second anti-pattern for management was having the Illusion of Control and using command and control micromanagement tactics. Larsen said that there’s really not enough time to do this well, and so it often turns into a hit-and-run type of situation. Knowledge workers are smart people who don’t really respond to this approach, and this approach runs the risk of having decisions be made by people who are too far away having the necessary information and expertise.
There’s a certain amount of variation, uncertainty and unpredictability within the software development process, and agile methodologies account for this by having frequent feedback loops that foster continuous learning. She also talked about how teams of human beings are complex systems, and these feedback loops enable teams to be adaptive to changing conditions. There’s also a certain amount of emergent behavior that can leveraged through self-organizing teams that have a culture of transparency and communication.
FANTASY OF INDIVIDUAL BLAME
The final dysfunction of management that Larsen talked about is the fantasy of individual blame. She is really against annual performance reviews because the evidence shows that they don’t actually improve performance. Instead of trying to isolate an individual’s contributions to a team effort, she recommended having quarterly development meetings that discuss how each individual is growing and how management could support them.
If there is a culture where employees are afraid of having blame being laid onto them individually, then that is going to cultivate a “Cover Your Ass” mentality, which is essentially waste within the system.
The Agile antidote is to create cross-functional teams who collectively own the work, and so individual performance reviews don’t exactly make sense within this context. I asked her afterwards how to handle accountability for people who are not performing on a team, and she suggested that one way to detect a red flag is to go around the team and ask each individual what they feel they are contributing to a team. She claimed that their answers to this question is a good litmus test.
The issue of how to deal with poor performance within an agile team came up at the open panel discussion on Intel’s Agile conference, and the solution that Mary Poppendieck provided was to emphasize a culture of mentorship and support for people who are not performing well enough.
There does seem to be an egalitarian ethic and mindset within an agile team context, and this issue of individual performance review and how to deal with poor performance is an interesting open question. One thing that Larsen told me is that compensation discussions should really happen independently from performance review discussions, and that money can be demotivating for performance. Instead, she suggested the approach of quarterly or more frequent development plan discussions.
Larsen put up the following quote from W. Edwards Deming “A manager of people needs to understand that all people are different… He needs to understand that the performance of anyone is governed largely by the system that he works in — the responsibility of management.”
Management should be more focused on improving the work environment so that the 12 value agile values of “collaboration, commitment, communication, courage, enjoyment, feedback, focus, learning, openness, quality, respect & simplicity” can foster and thrive.
She went on to talk about specific suggestions that managers could focus on in order to help create Value, Flow & a system that is supportive of the team.
I’ll be sure to link up the presentation once VersionOne posts it online, but it was certainly a great talk with lots of interesting insights and discussion.
Dr. Ahmed Sidky gave an amazing keynote at today’s one-day conference called Agilepalooza, which was sponsored by VersionOne. Sidky is also known as Dr. Agile, and he was talking a lot about how to spread agile principles from small teams to the wider company within the context of an enterprise organizations. He had a lot of great insights that could be applied to any waterfall team in how to slowly integrate agile principles without disrupting the existing pace and amount of required resources.
He talked about taking a phased approach of five different distinct stages. The first stage is to focus on increasing the amount of cooperation and communication, which has the least change to resource allocation and cadence of development. He’s not even talking about implementing iterations until the second phase, and so the first phase if focusing primarily on the principles that would increase the amount of connectivity and flow between the teams. See the green colored squares in the picture above for more specifics. (Incidentally, Diana Larsen would add the principle of learning to the first phase of communication and collaboration.)
Dr. Agile posted his slides at http://agile.santeon.com/agilepalooza, and there’s a slide that shows all five phases and all the various practices and goals within a generalized roadmap. He emphasized that his consulting company of Santeon usually goes to each company and designs a very specific roadmap for their transition towards Agile. Each company is going to have their own unique situation with a roadmap that would work best for them.
One really great concept that Sidky talked about was the idea of balanced scorecards, which tries to explain the benefits of implementing the agile mindset and various practices to the executive decision-makers within the company. The four categories that he shows in the flowchart shown above are in learning and innovation of the team, operational excellence, improved experience of the customer, and the reduced financial costs due to the increased efficiency. I love how this visualization relates all of these benefits in a way that is not always intuitively obvious for what the financial bottom line may be.
Sidky was an amazingly dynamic speaker, who very clearly talked about the process of transitioning companies from small-scale implementations of agile to the wider enterprise company. It’s very similar to the technology adoption curve and crossing the chasm from the innovators and early adopters and moving into a completely different mindset of the early majority and the late majority.
His slides were packed with a lot of amazing information that I highly recommend checking out as well as his consulting group of Santeon, and his http://www.doctoragile.com/ website which provides some assessment tools to see which agile practices your team is ready to implement.
Last night I went to the quantified self meetup group here in Portland. I saw Steven Jonas give a presentation on SuperMemo, which is a Flash card learning and knowledge management system that is based upon the principle of spaced repetition in order to translate information into knowledge.
The idea is that the best way to learn is to revisit information at specific intervals in order to retain it into our long-term memory. However, we can’t do it too frequently because then we can easily recall it, and the issue is that we have to try to find the point at which were about to forget the information and then review it. The problem is that this is an extremely difficult issue to try to solve without the assistance of something like computer program with a sophisticated algorithm that is tailored to do it for you. That is what the SuperMemo software does, which was written by Piotr.
Jonas has been experimenting with SuperMemo for the last four years, and he gave a presentation last night on some of his experiences and best practices for translating information into knowledge that is retained over time.
He also pointed to this Wired article about that gives an overview to the research that is encoded within the SuperMemo software.
Just a quick note on these annotations that are listed down below from the article. I am using the Web2PDF iPad app in order to convert an HTML page into a PDF file, and then I can sync that to a dropbox account that is then synchronized into the GoodReader iPad app. Within GoodReader, I can use the annotation tools to highlight passages, and then email the summary to myself, which is essentially in the format that is down below. Jonas showed last night that he’s able to email himself excerpts from an article that he’s reading online and have it directly entered into the SuperMemo system and have it be integrated into his collection of flashcards that he is actively reviewing.
File: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all
Annotation summary:
Highlight (yellow), Apr 11, 2012 10:08 AM:
SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget.
Highlight (yellow), Apr 11, 2012 10:08 AM:
Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.
Highlight (yellow), Apr 11, 2012 10:08 AM:
Long-term memory, the Bjorks said, can be characterized by two components, which they named retrieval strength and storage strength. Retrieval strength measures how likely you are to recall something right now, how close it is to the surface of your mind. Storage strength measures how deeply the memory is rooted. Some memories may have high storage strength but low retrieval strength. Take an old address or phone number. Try to think of it; you may feel that it’s gone. But a single reminder could be enough to restore it for months or years. Conversely, some memories have high retrieval strength but low storage strength. Perhaps you’ve recently been told the names of the children of a new acquaintance. At this moment they may be easily accessible, but they are likely to be utterly forgotten in a few days, and a single repetition a month from now won’t do much to strengthen them at all.
Highlight (yellow), Apr 11, 2012 10:08 AM:
One of the problems is that the amount of storage strength you gain from practice is inversely correlated with the current retrieval strength. In other words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal we’re learning well — easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something — are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future.
Highlight (yellow), Apr 11, 2012 10:08 AM:
The best time to study something is at the moment you are about to forget it. And yet — as Neisser might have predicted — that insight was useless in the real world. Determining the precise moment of forgetting is essentially impossible in day-to-day life.
Highlight (yellow), Apr 11, 2012 10:08 AM:
Our capacity to learn is amazingly large. But optimal learning demands a kind of rational control over ourselves that does not come easily. Even the basic demand for regularity can be daunting. If you skip a few days, the spacing effect, with its steady march of sealing knowledge in memory, begins to lose its force. Progress limps. When it comes to increasing intelligence, our brain is up to the task and our technology is up to the task. The problem lies in our temperament.
Highlight (yellow), Apr 11, 2012 10:08 AM:
I find myself thinking of a checklist Wozniak wrote a few years ago describing how to become a genius. His advice was straightforward yet strangely terrible: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life.
Highlight (yellow), Apr 11, 2012 10:08 AM:
Piotr Wozniak’s quest for anonymity has been successful. Nobody along this string of little beach resorts recognizes him as the inventor of a technique to turn people into geniuses.
(report generated by GoodReader)
One of the best summaries of the similarities and differences between Scrum and Kanban that I’ve seen.
via “Kanban and Scrum: Making the most of both” by Henrik Kniberg
File: HenrikKniberg_KanbanVsScrumAPracticalGuide.pdf
A visual comparison illustrating the differences between scrum and Kanban by Henrik Kniberg. Scrum has sprint iterations where the work resets while Kanban has more continuous flow since they are limiting the Work-in-Progress (WIP) at any given state. It helps to create swarm behavior when there are bottlenecks.
is more geared towards having QA specialists whereas scrum tends to use generalists.
The Kanban board has the WIP limits specified on the board so that limit can’t be exceeded.
The Kanban kickstart example really shows how the workflow of the team can be visualized by all the members on the team to help make their invisible progress more visible for coordination of collaboration as well as “Kaizen” or continuous reflection & improvement.
Finally, the Kanban board visualized over time shows how teams can recognize a bottleneck and prioritize helping to unblock it.
via “Kanban and Scrum: Making the most of both” by Henrik Kniberg
File: HenrikKniberg_KanbanVsScrumAPracticalGuide.pdf
These principles of the lean manufacturing innovated by the Toyota Production System form the basis of Lean/Agile software development.
via “Kanban and Scrum: Making the most of both” by Henrik Kniberg
File: HenrikKniberg_KanbanVsScrumAPracticalGuide.pdf
The pillars of the Toyota production system are focused more on growing people than growing profits. You can see that juxtaposition by comparing the employee-focused challenges versus the shareholder owners target-driven, financial goals.
File: 4.21 3.45pm Poppendieck WhatsWrongWithTargets.pdf
I love this breakdown of Kata and how the first step of visualizing the end goal is chronologically last. The 4th state of obstacles repeats so that you’re slowly moving from the current state to the incrementally defined “target condition on the way to perfection.”
Kata also emphasizes mentorship and learning above a laundry list of required skills or specific results.
File: 4.21 3.45pm Poppendieck WhatsWrongWithTargets.pdf
Peter Drucker and W. Edwards Deming come up a lot in the Lean adaptations of Agile software development. Mary Poppendieck lists out five popular paradigms for leadership
File: 4.21 3.45pm Poppendieck WhatsWrongWithTargets.pdf
File: 4.21 3.45pm Poppendieck WhatsWrongWithTargets.pdf
—- Page 9 —-
“We build people before we build cars.” (Toyota)
—- Page 14 —-
When it comes to people, the things that make a difference are skill, pride, expertise, confidence, and cooperation.
—- Page 15 —-
Setting goals doesn’t remove common cause variation. Trying to eliminate common cause variation will amplify it!
—- Page 17 —-
“Aggressive goal setting within an organization will foster an organizational climate ripe for unethical behavior.”
-“Goals Gone Wild” Harvard Business Review Working Paper by Ordóñez, Schweitzer, Galinsky, & Bazerman, 2009
“The Empirical Process - at the very core of agile” by Daniel Brolund.
Adding too much of a delay into a feedback system can make it too unstable to tune.
This is a subtle video of ripple patterns that are happening within the sediment of the White Salmon River where Northwestern Lake used to be. At first, it may look like nothing is happening and that this is a boring video, but watch how the evenly-spaced ripples start to slowly move upstream in unison and then completely dissipate. You can use the stumps on the ground as a reference point. I love to watch one spot in nature and see the patterns that emerge, and this is a rare video that is able to capture some truly bizarre behavior.
Columbia Riverkeeper published a series of different clips of the aftermath of the Condit Dam breach including some arial shots of the mouth of the breached dam, the silty water reaching the Columbia River, and some shots of the initial wave of water rushing down the lower part of the White Salmon. They even come back the next day to shoot some more footage of how the sediment is getting carved out of what used too be Northwestern Lake.
