AgileByExample 2022: prof. Dave Snowden - Keynote - Rewilding Agile

[@OlafLewitz]

13:15 … this is why terms like mindset and mental models are outdated … brilliant!

[@jimallen8186]

How is riding a horse Complex while training a dog isn’t?

[@owqe8ytgweiqtg]

I find very interesting and useful many of the ideas and theories shared in large part of the video after the initial few minutes. Personally, I find the first 2 minutes incongruent with my own experience of software development and Agile software development. > you can’t rely on your organisation being made up by highly gifted people In software development for sure, we always had and have many gifted people. Most of us, the majority. The problem has often been the environment around software developers that makes it harder to use their gift to achieve the goals they are asked to achieve. To the point that most of the efforts to make allegedly less competent people (in reality just less experienced people that can be paid less, and then left alone or without good examples to follow) productive with more processes, policies and "controllers" ended up in very expensive failures. Again and again and again. There is a track record of this that predates good Agile, and that is why Agile was born, for a reaction to those problems. The idea of going back there again, with not empirical evidence that this time it will work is not confincing to me, > it is not about individuals is about process > ... > …they take ordinary people and make them extraordinary by good processes and good training Before Agile turned the tide on the high percentage of IT project failures, there were a lot of focus on processes and a lot of ex-cathedra talking from the SEI institute and Software Engineering academics with little experience in commercial/professional software development and no empirical experiments to prove their recipes. Toyota before and later Agile have discovered that people do play a central role. Empirical processes that are needed in presence of unknowns, changing circumstances and novel situations require people to play a central role. Eiji Toyoda highlights: Agile Manifesto: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools As this does not means that processes are useless, in knowledge and intellectual work they are just not the most important aspects. In the Agiel community we saw that learning is a social activity and professional learning is best achivede by collaborating with good professionals (our gifted software developers) allowed to do the right thing. > ------------------------- To summarise, I find those two initial minutes dissonant. ------------------------- On the topic of rewinding Agile, I see a growing awareness of the dysfunction of the latest Agile Industrial Complex (2010 .. now) and a rethink around bringing back good Agile (the one that in 2000...2008 created a streak of success that turned the tide and brought Agile from a fringe movement into a mainstream). Vocal members in the Agile Community like Chris Matts and Daniel Mezick but also others like Yves Hannoun are contributing to this movement of ideas. So maybe the rewilding of Agile will be the result of another bottom-up movement as it was the initial Agile movement and good Agile, and this may happen if it will reach a tipping point. Or maybe something completely new will take over. But I guess that just like the open-source movement, Agile may be here to stay. We will see.

[@Wowzer123]

“Science doesn’t like perpetual novelty” 19:10 “I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.” Richard Feynman I can’t think of a single legitimate scientist who doesn’t thrive on novelty, or even believes that if a Theory of Everything were discovered, it would be the end of uncertainty. Nor as is commonly asserted - is science in the business of proving things. Both accusations are not just false, but the opposite of the truth.

[@jimallen8186]

If we’re pattern matching in our thinking, which we are as we run off heuristics and past experiences, how is that not the same as having mental models? For that matter, how are computers different than us in that they too are pattern matchers? As for mindset, I’ve always seen the word as synonymous with perspective not as a requisite mood, demeanor, attitude toward some effort. For whatever reason I hate the word “lens” when talking about perspective, changing perspective, changing scope of perspective. But if you use ‘mindset’ merely as perspective, you won’t have these issues with it while you’re still completely free to work around agency, assemblage, affordances. As for consciousness and decisions, they only happen in our brains. Languages, experiences, culture can all influence such as can current bodily dynamics and functions but the decisions only happen in the brain. No action takes place without direction from the brain. His bit here is too much an overstep while his view to epigenetics is too much a neo-Lamarkism. The hypothesis that RNA could make portions of DNA more or less accessible has coherence, it makes sense. The idea that culture is inherited and attributes are inherited based on such is garbage. As Neil deGrasse Tyson tells us, sometimes you need to step back from the leading edge of science as “it isn’t there yet” while too often published papers are too fantastical to accept while we don’t have the replicate work as motive is to publish novel and fantastical. See also Veritasium on these.