Join Dan Greening for a conversation on Agile Leadership Patterns on June 17, 2015 at 6:00pm in Santa Barbara, California. Remote participants can join the meeting online. Dan first used and researched Scrum and agile methods at Citrix Online, several of his publications discuss practices and data from that early work. Now, Dan has distilled our understanding of agility into a small set of practices: if you do them, you’re agile; if you don’t, you’re not.

Please register and mark your calendar!

Description

In agile, we have broad ambitions with no behavioral discipline. We often talk about agile teams, people, departments, organizations and political campaigns, as if the definition of “agile” was obvious. And yet the Agile Manifesto and its principles were written for software development teams. Furthermore, many CEOs tell us how agile they are, because “we can move teams around on a whim” or because “we run sprints every week,” but their teams can’t produce working products rapidly, increasingly add technical debt, or shamble into work demoralized. Some agilists talk about the “essence” of agile, such as Scrum’s 5 values: focus, courage, commitment, openness, respect. But these values don’t tell us what to do.

This talk frames agile as a well-defined economic science, with a small handful of behaviors that generate agility: the ability to rapidly sense, adapt and create in chaotic economies. You’ll see that agile is definitely about doing before being. You’ll gain some simple tests to figure out whether people, teams and companies are agile or not. All agile methodologies (Scrum, XP, SAFe, Lean/Kanban, Extreme Manufacturing, GTD, PDSA/PDCA, Quantified Self and Pomodoro) have practices that fall into these “agile base patterns”, and waterfall methodologies contain none of them:

• Measure Economic Progress,
• Proactively Experiment to Improve,
• Limit Work in Progress,
• Embrace Collective Responsibility, and
• Solve Problems Systemically.

We’ll explore these base patterns and some interesting sub-patterns, such as Feedback Loop, Backlog, Chunking, Root Cause Mapping and Information Radiator. Leaders at all levels need a deep understanding of agility to provide effective coaching to Agile teams and protect agility from hostile forces. Leaders can easily apply these scale-free patterns to any creative field—marketing, finance, business development, sales, military combat, corporate governance, strategic projects, personal projects, and, you guessed it, software development.

Dan R Greening, PhD, CSC

Dan previously led agile coaching at Skype and Citrix Online, was VP Engineering at Macromedia (acquired by Adobe) and Chief Scientist at Overstock.com. He has pioneered and published on agile portfolio management, metrics for large agile enterprises, and agile capitalization. Dan has trained Scrum, Agile and Lean methodologies to hundreds of people worldwide. He co-founded three startups. He spent a few years pondering his navel at IBM Research (it’s an “inney”). He is a Certified Scrum Coach. He holds a PhD in computer science from UCLA, where he studied emergent properties of a complex adaptive system called simulated annealing. His current passion is converting agile to a science, so we can better study and apply it to improve our collective happiness. You can check out his recent thoughts at http://agilecanon.wpengine.com/blog.