Making sense of Agile (Joseph Pelrine)

People don't make rational decisions - it's not the way the brain evolved. Instead they make first fit (not best fit) pattern matches with prior experience (either their own, or others conveyed through stories) and then retrospectively justify them as "rational".

This is no way to run a development effort (among other things).

This fact means that you either have to convey a new message in such a way that it "resonates" with an existing prior pattern of success, or disrupt those patterns so that people see things from a different perspective, with a disposition to act. The Cynefin sense-making framework provides an unbiased, pre-hypothetical basis for analyzing situations, issues and problems, and serves as a basis for discovering novel, oftentimes optimal solutions to them.

This workshop will introduce parts of the Cynefin framework, drawing on a decade of theoretical research and practical experiments to work with the reality of human decision making, and will cover:

Complex systems approaches to the forced evolution of systems - allowing applications to emerge from the interaction of objects with people and processes; avoiding end state design.
New approaches to project management based on the ideas of social complexity, which legitimize formal, rapid and agile design methods within boundaries.
Gaining senior management acceptance to radical ideas.
The application of the Cynefin framework for problem-solving in the Agile domain.
Understand Agile techniques by mapping them to the Cynefin sense-making framework.

About the speaker

Joseph Pelrine is C*O of MetaProg, a company devoted to increasing the quality of software and its development process, and is one of Europe's leading experts on eXtreme Programming as well as Europes first certified ScrumMaster Practitioner and Trainer. He has had a successful career as software developer, project manager and consultant, and has spoken about it at such diverse places as IBM, OOPSLA and the Chaos Computer Club. A member of the International Association of Facilitators, he is strongly interested in properly applying soft skills such as communication techniques and retrospective facilitation to agile processes.