Flow: Reimagining Agile (WAF 2023 Panel: Hendrickson, Kerievsky, Kleiner, Denning, Kern)

Ready to unlock the potential of flow and examine the future of Agile? This episode promises to immerse you in a captivating discussion with our guests Chet Hendrickson, Steve Denning,  Jon Kern,  Joshua Kerievsky, and Mirko Kleiner, as we collectively navigate the realms of management, safety, human-centered design, and cognitive diversity. We take a deep dive into the essence of safety in eXtreme Programming (XP) and Agile, emphasizing its critical role in achieving optimized performance. Prepare for an insightful dissection of the status quo as we learn from the Hyatt housekeepers' innovative solutions to everyday problems.

Thriving in any industry requires a keen understanding of its evolution.  Imagine a future where mental health, psychological safety, and lifestyle habits such as food, exercise, and sleep converge to create a conducive environment for change. This episode is designed to push the boundaries of your thinking and awaken your curiosity as we explore Agile beyond the traditional "echo chamber."

To wrap things up, we cast a speculative look at Agile management's impact on CEOs and the future of businesses. Brace yourselves as we dive headfirst into the sea of artificial intelligence, assessing both the potential benefits and the risks involved. We envision what a multi-dimensional reimagination of management would look like and speculate on the implications of such a drastic change in business schools. With the aim to spark a revolution in your mind, we unravel the concept of an agile organization, from human factors to implementation, and consider the potential of 20% of firms to put the bottom 80% out of business. Are you ready to reimagine the future of agility and management with us? Let's get started!

Steve Denning
Joshua Kerievsky
Mirko Kleiner
Chet Hendrickson
Jon Kern 

Want to develop your organization’s capacity for free and independent action (Organic Success)? Learn more and follow us at:
https://www.aglx.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@AGLXConsulting
https://www.linkedin.com/company/aglx-consulting-llc/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/briandrivera
https://www.linkedin.com/in/markjmcgrath1
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevemccrone
https://flowguides.org/
https://www.getflowtrained.com/

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Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast Ep 113 – with Bob Gourley
No Fallen Heroes – with Whiz Buckley
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Connecting the Dots – with Skip Steward
The F-14 Tomcast – with Crunch and Bio
Economic...

Transcript

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:00

This no Way Out open discussion with Steve, John, Joshua and Mirko is recorded live at the World Agility Forum, Lisbon, Portugal, September 2023. Now you can join us next September in Lisbon, Portugal, to learn more about ice innovation, adaptive strategy, human factors, reimagining, management, the brain, neuroscience, flow and the flow system. Now in this discussion, Steve Denning does bring up the topic of flow, which is really about describing the state of optimized performance, where teams and organizations can achieve their goals with a heightened sense of efficiency and creativity. Now flow isn't just about individual productivity. It is also about harnessing the power of collective focus and aligned action. We also talk about safety why safety matters in the world of extreme programming and agile. We bring up the origins of human factors and human-centered design and wrap up the discussion on cognitive diversity. So let's go ahead and get airborne so we can disrupt your OODA loop.

: 0:52

So, without any further ado, brian, come on up. The floor is yours, thank you.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:02

Truth be told, I do have a face for radio. But let's go ahead and get airborne. Let's go back 80 years Very complex, volatile, uncertain, ambiguous environment, an air war over here in Europe. Let's put you in the front seat of an aircraft with four engines and a team of about nine people that are dependent on you. You go over, you do your mission, you lose an engine. Some of your crew members are injured. They need medical attention. You fly back to your home base. You're stressed out because your daily life consists of a cycle of caffeine, alcohol, cigarettes and everything that Dr McCabe said contributes to bad decision making. So people are dependent on you to land safely.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:53

After this tough mission, you find your airfield. You land, you look down, you grab a switch because the checklist says bring the flaps up. Boom, you're rolling out and the aircraft collapses. You failed your mission, right? You collapsed the aircraft. Why is that? Well, the handles of the gear and the flaps are exactly the same. They just happen to be right next to each other. So you're stressed out. You're doing all these things. You're going through the cycle of caffeine and alcohol. Everything is wrong in your brand. You just can't make decisions. But is it pilot error that caused that? No, so what's the solution to that? Well, you put a little round knob on one of the handles and that represents the gear, and you put a nice little flap on the other one, and that solution happened like that. By the way, that's where human factors came from. Did everybody know that? That story? Who here knew that? There's very few people that know why we're talking about human factors. Right, it came from the cockpit of aircraft in World War II, all right. So today I want to bring it back to safety.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 3:09

Chet started the day off talking about safety and XP. That's where they wanted to go. Come on up, everybody as we start filtering in here. You heard a lot about complexity over the last couple of days the brain and how important that is, but I do want to point out a few things. Where are you going to sit? I'm going to sit over here.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 3:28

I do want to point out a few things. You cannot determine the character or nature of a system from within. We know that from Goodle's proof. We know that from the second law of thermodynamics, heisenberg's uncertainty principle. And how do I know these things? Because I have a podcast that talks about this, called no Way Out. There's simply no way out. But there is a way out, and that is if we go through a cycle of orientation, reorientation, taking that information from the outside, going outside of our system to find out what other people know about how to create agility. And that's what we're going to do today is kind of reimagine how agility works. Steve, are you coming up today, and Steve's going to join us as well. So, chet, you started the day off with safety. Talking about that, I'm in favor of safety, I like it too. And for those of you who are familiar with Joshua's book, the Joy of Agile, he talks about high reliability organizations in there, resilience, engineering. And is John Kern going to join us today? Johnson, I hear I don't know where John, where John.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 4:30

Okay well, by the way, john went to the Ohio State University and if you're familiar with the Ohio State University, we get a lot of resilience engineering out of that school. So there's an amazing connection, just on this stage alone, to safety. So, chet, why did you bring up safety today? Why is it so important?

Chet Hendrickson : 4:48

Well, I wanted to kind of ground us back into what all of this is supposed to really be about, which is bringing safety to people, primarily people. I care about people more than I do organizations, and so when we lose the focus on the fact that we are trying to bring safety, we wander off the path in ways that lead us to weird outcomes and those that that reduce the safety of people who are in the most vulnerable physicians. I don't know if I should say this or not, but it's the end of the session, the end of the week, whatever you want, I'll say whatever I want, but I, when I was listening on Friday to the story from Hyatt and replacing the batteries in the remote control you all remember replacing the batteries in the remote control what I heard was we took the people who make the least money in our organization and we added to their workload. We have the housekeepers now responsible for the remote controls where they weren't before and I sure didn't hear anything about, and we reduced the number of rooms they had to clean every day and brought in more people so that they had time to do this.

Chet Hendrickson : 6:12

And one of the things I often hear from different business agility kind of folks or stories where we At the last minute came up with some brilliant new idea and we Did this thing and they never say, and we reduced these other things so that the people doing the work we're not Overburdened, you know, and and we don't have safety when our solution is to whip the ponies harder. And so I think that's, you know, we have to, we have to have trade-offs if we're gonna have safety, and so John earlier today, sorry, welcome to the panel, by the way.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 6:53

Early today Peter Stevens mentioned how important the first line of the agile manifesto is. Now, I think you're familiar with that, right, just a little bit. Okay, so can you talk a little bit? I'm joking, by the way, everybody knows John Kern, but okay. So John is very familiar with the agile manifesto and he talks about connecting the dots all the time, maybe looking outside of systems as well. John, any thoughts on where we should be looking to really reimagine agile?

Jon Kern: 7:18

Well, I did. I did want to say thanks where, wherever he is to. Thanks for mentioning that, because that some of the things that I point out about the manifesto is the humility with which those the I guess you might call that the preamble to the manifesto the fact that we didn't come in here and say, hey, we came down from the mountaintop and we're going to give you all the one way, the one right way. Right, it's very much active voice and it still is. I frankly learned all the time, every day, a day, without learning kind of sucks, but it's. I think agile is one of the hardest things to To do because of the fact that you're still constantly Having to find better ways to do things. So for me, that was real important. Now I forgot the rest of your question.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 8:12

Yeah, just where should we be looking to do to do better? I mean, what? What? What do you recommend people do to really imagine agile?

Jon Kern: 8:20

That's. That's something that my colleague, john Turley, wherever he is in the room here he we, we've really been working on a lot of that, because I've been a little bit rejuvenated by working with folks from around the world who aren't nearly as jaded as as others about agile. Like a lot of times, people, people will put something out there on LinkedIn and bash agile and you look at what they're talking about and I was like that ain't agile, yeah right, it's. So there's something missing, and I think there's a whole new well, probably lots of new generations that could benefit from truly understanding. To me, it's all about the first bullet, the first value individual interactions, and I think what's missing so much is it's not true collaboration.

Jon Kern: 9:07

We often talk about it as being cooperation like handing off a document or putting something in JIRA just go code it Versus really understanding how to collaborate, how to understand the vision, be able to use all the brains in the room, whether you're remote or not. So I think that's what's what's missing. People don't talk enough, they don't truly collaborate, they fake it, they don't understand the reason. They're treated like order takers. So to me, it's I Don't know the right phrase. I don't want to say get it's. You can't say, get back to something if you've never been there, so but I feel like this this year, and I'm working with Jim Highsmith. He feels the same way and I think we're going to have some other kind of a gathering of some sort. We'll invite you, josh, and check, because I think there needs to be something to help people realize Well, maybe not. I think it's a valuable document. I think we're. The values are still applicable.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:11

Yeah, so going outside of the I'm going to just call it the echo chamber for the moment, if you read. I just scanned Joshua's book recently. He talks about high reliability organizations, high reliability theory, resilience, engineering. There's some great stories in there, and the other night we were having dinner here in this room and he start telling me a story about Alcoa. So I knew right then hey, somebody's looking outside to figure out what works. Right, josh, do you have anything to add to this conversation about looking outside?

Joshua Kerievsky : 10:38

Yeah, I mean a lot of us. You know, early on in the agile industry, agile field it became its own little field, right, got a little tired 10 years in, you know, because you'd go to the conferences and there were a lot of vendors hawking their tools and trying to sell things to people and it was. It started to feel less and less like the early days of agile, which were much more revolutionary. You know we were questioning all these big heavy weight upfront ways of doing things and working with lighter weight approaches, faster feedback, learning quickly. So a lot of us, a lot of people that I know, sort of stopped going to the conference, the agile conferences, for a while. I was one of them and I started going to South by Southwest in Austin, texas, right, and some amazing teachers there, amazing incredible authors.

Joshua Kerievsky : 11:24

And I came across Charles Duhigg's book, the Power of Habit, and there's a chapter in there about. It's called the Ballad of Paul O'Neill and I was like who the hell is Paul O'Neill? Well, paul O'Neill was this CEO of Alcoa, the aluminum company of America, which when he became CEO, was 100 years old, 100 years of built up DNA and culture, and he was able to change that place because they were suffering. They were suffering. There were no innovation, terrible relationships with the unions, horrible morale, just terrible. Just not doing well, beating up by the competition. He completely turned them around.

Joshua Kerievsky : 12:00

How did he do that? He did it with worker safety. He basically said I am going to focus, I am completely focused on worker safety. That's what I'm gonna do. We're gonna make this the safest place to work in the world. And the stock brokers were all just like sell the stock. They got a madman at the helm, but what happened was it transformed the place and it was this doorway to excellence. Everyone got invested in making Alcoa better and they loved the guy because he protected them. So it's an amazing story well worth reading, and I talk about it in my book.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 12:34

So I've heard this before that mental health is psychological safety, and when we talk about safety being safe at work it means many things to different people. So on that, joshua, is there another connection to maybe leading with? Let's go back to what Deely McCabe brought up, that's brain and what we need to feel safe, the food that we put in our bodies, the exercise we get, the sleep we get all these things matter. So perhaps and I'm not saying this, this is how we start, but perhaps we start with that in mind. Any thoughts on that?

Joshua Kerievsky : 13:04

Well, I'm leaving this conference with Deelya's thoughts about how our brains are tired and we're trying to help people change and they're exhausted. There's no change gonna happen. So, being aware of people's mental state and how balanced or unbalanced are they mentally, emotionally that is huge and that's outside of the most people in the Agile field don't talk about that. They're talking about sprints and other things. They're not talking about emotional health and balance. So, yeah, I think there's so much we can learn. If we're gonna take Agile forward, we gotta look outside of Agile Sports arenas, sports heroes, sports coaches and the folks like Deelya looking at mental health, neuroscience all that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 13:49

Steve, this morning you and I were in the room when Dr McCabe was doing her webinar and she brought up something that you and I commented on, and it was leaving bread crumbs. It means, hey, at the end of the day, it's okay to have a little bit of work to leave for yourself the next day. Now this kind of conflicts with the stop-starting and start-finishing mindset, and then the things we tell our kids to get done. So the neuroscience is telling us something that is opposite of what we're demanding, of not demanding that we're suggesting to organizations when they try to create agility. Steve, any thoughts on that or anything you wanna add?

Steve Denning: 14:22

Yeah, and, I think, related to psychological safety, which we actually touched on on the first session of the first day on Friday I'm not sure how many people were there and I told you about my meeting with Amy Edmonds and the most famous management thinker in the world, number one, and whose theme is psychological safety, and I asked this is great books, you've written about this, but how many firms are actually creating that psychological safety?

Steve Denning: 14:54

And after a bit of discussion she said not many and she had the honesty and the courage and the foresight to say we need to look beyond psychological safety. We need to look beyond teams the things I've been writing about we need to reimagine management, we need to reinvent the whole complex array of things and to some extent, this event is about busting those boundaries, busting the boundaries of software and breaking down the motes that we've built around the technology and start to say well, collaboration is not just collaboration between the software people, it's actually collaboration with everyone and the whole organization. And that's a radically different agenda than, to some extent, that we've been discussing for the last eight sessions of this conference.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 15:42

So I wanna bring up something you may not be aware of, but Amy Edmonds' work followed what we call crew resource management and aviation. We also call it human factors. So when you go back in time and you have a conversation with Amy Edmonds and Dr Edmonds said about this she'll make the connection back to aviation and say the healthcare organizations that she was studying, learned from human factorists in aviation to create psychological safety. And the number one way that we propose you create psychological safety is in the art and science of effective debriefing. And then you were talking to Joshua. You were asking how many organizations are? Would it slow down to speed up? And we just had a quick conversation about that a few minutes ago before it came up on stage. Any other thoughts on that?

Joshua Kerievsky : 16:30

I mean if you're not regularly learning, so slowing down to speed up debriefing, doing excellent retrospectives where you really do improve, right, I mean if you don't have the ability to do that and really just not treat it like complaining but actually find things to improve and then go about improving them, that you can't get better. I mean it's critical.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 16:49

Any thoughts?

: 16:52

Well, I'm listening to all this famous guys here. I haven't been one of the one of the authors of the of the money festival, but I think it's what was said was very true. It's still valid, right. But I would like to add what you said. You know we need to go outside. Yeah, definitely. I'm, for example, in other communities, like driving the whole procurement movement in in the Agile community, but with the procurement community and supply chain, etc.

: 17:27

And now that brought me up as I was reading again the title of this session today Reimagined Agile. You know what is the core of Agile? You said it's it's it's safety. I think it's delivery right, it's it's delivering value. And what? What inspired me? Working with those commercial people who also picked up topics like ESG, diversity, etc. We start to integrate that. So Agile, the future Agile, in my perspective, is about solving bigger problems, purposeful problems, and then we need to collaborate, right? So we had an excellent talk this morning about how Pfizer, bintech and and Fozum were able to co-create the vaccines for the COVID-19. And they did it without the contract that just started. Would they ever do that under under different circumstances? No, there's no money in there. I don't know. But there was, there was a pain, there was a purpose, it needed to be as fast as they could, and so they just started right and I think we need to see those options, those, those problems and all the challenges, and then you know, whatever we call Agile will follow.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 18:55

I'm going to shift it up a little bit and start talking about what is on a lot of folks' minds with large language models, chat, gpt, what may be happening here in the future with artificial intelligence. So in that context, and then push us over to Steve and and John, the idea of reimagining human factors, what would a conference look like or an event look like tomorrow, if you were to do it again? I mean what? What would you do differently? What would you keep?

Steve Denning: 19:26

I would say this this is the, this is the forerunner, if you like, of the first conference in the world that is dealing with reimagining management. It's not just a technology conference, it's looking at the whole, the whole complexity of the array of things. So it's not just about reimagining Agile. It was about reimagining the whole of management. It was about reimagining the implementation. How do we do the how of this? Very differently Yesterday about reimagining human factors and today reimagining Agile. So this reflects that this is a multi-dimensional concept and weaving together those multiple dimensions is key to actually making a success. So something that I mean the theme of the conference is absurd.

Steve Denning: 20:14

I think that a bunch of us here in Lisbon again, who reinvented the subject has been the discussion of the brightest people in the world for the last several hundred years, and we are going to put forward something quite different from what all of the business schools are putting forward, quite different from what all of the most famous professors in those business schools are writing books about. We are saying there's something different happening in the world, and technology is part of it, but it's much bigger than that, and so we are attempting something. And so there's a wonderful book called the Art of the Impossible. The Art of the Impossible by Stephen Corkler, and he talks about crazy people like us who are attempting the impossible, and he has a step by step process of achieving that. And it starts by being curious by being curious that there's something that's not working here, and then moving on to what could be, how could we start to make process on us? And what he writes in that book is what we've been pursuing here.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 21:17

That's amazing. You bring Steve Corkler up because, hugo, we just talked about that right before we got on stage, because even his book, narc Country, talks about gaining the state of flow in your 60s and 70s. But the Art of the Impossible is about that. How do you have create novelty with risk and teams? It's amazing. So, hugo, you hear me. Oh, you got me All right. So you heard it from Steve Denning too. I love his work and, by the way, flow is a growing concept, it's not just the flow system, so keep your eyes out for that. And it's just fantastic to hear it from Steve. John, what's that? Yeah, there's secrets. Out, the secrets out. So John was there, was it?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 22:00

22 years now it was 2001., I can't do math in public, so roughly, we'll call it 22. Okay, we'll call it 22. Thanks, 22 and a half, okay. Going back to then and now, how would you reimagine or what would you do differently tomorrow?

Jon Kern: 22:17

Maybe five bullets, no, I don't know. Well, I think the I don't know. You mentioned chat EBT and all the stuff that's in the rage. But in collaboration, yes, actually, you collaborate with the environment. There's a lot of things that affect us and I think, as far as reimagining Agile, it's more about understanding the value of the interactions.

Jon Kern: 22:52

And I I'm okay to be proven wrong, but I just can't imagine chat be, you know anything automating out ingenuity, creativity, innovative. I can't. I mean I might be wrong, but I'm not afraid of chat EBT because it most maybe maybe it just leverages, like, really, the average, the average sucks, yeah, and it might eliminate certain things that are boring and boring, but I don't see how it's going to inspire, be leaders, be anything that I actually care about or anything that I've seen change things. Pretty sure it's not going to tell SpaceX that you know it'd be really cool if you landed the damn booster back where it started, what. Who thinks of that? Apparently, not chat GPT. So, anyway, I'm not worried about the Terminator he's really strong, but I'm not sure. I'm sure I'm worried about chat GPT. Unless it can write articles, it can probably write blogs.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 24:09

It can write things that you know, but it's not interacting with the environment, it's not actively doing something. So we have that ability as humans.

Jon Kern: 24:17

That's well, except if we break. I think the flaw that we make is we take those fuzzy ideas not all of us, like some people don't, but the mistake is we turn them into, instead of enjoying the fuzziness and the fact we don't know it and being able to celebrate that and live with it, the discomfort. No, we must turn them into this. It could be complicated because it's still just big and gnarly, but it's knowable. So we try to turn the unknowable into knowable and I think that's where chat GPT plays and the real value and the real innovativeness is in the unknowable.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 24:56

Absolutely so. On the interaction piece you brought up, one of the things we learned over the last couple of days is Sonia Blinio talked about not having an adversarial relationship with complexity, to embrace it, and we had learned a little bit about the brain from Dr McCabe. If you look at emergence, the interactions, the quality of interactions between agents, if you will, you get agility, safety, innovation, culture, emotions, resilience, our emergent properties of complex adaptive systems, and it goes back to that first line of the agile manifesto. Right, it's interactions and, from my world, it's people, ideas and things. Right in that order. So when we talk about emergent properties, we just don't know what we're going to get when we're interacting with AI yet, and I think that that it may be a good thing, may be a bad thing, we don't know exactly. But I want to bring it back to safety a little bit. Any thoughts on that chat or Joshua, when we start looking at what does safety look like in this new world of artificial intelligence, where we may not have the situational awareness we had in the past?

Chet Hendrickson : 25:57

Well, you know, every time some new technology comes about, it causes disruptions, and it's we've never been able to predict what those disruptions were going to be, and I can't imagine the chat GPT will tell us what those disruptions are going to be, and so I expect we'll be surprised.

Chet Hendrickson : 26:17

I think that as a culture, as a, as humanity whatever level we have to to make sure that we do a better job in protecting people from the impact of these changes.

Chet Hendrickson : 26:36

In the past, we've not necessarily done a very good job of doing that, and we hope we do that. You know you would like to be able to leverage whatever new tools and technologies come about to make the lives of everyone better, and perhaps tools like the large model language model tools will will allow us to do some of those things. I recall that that back in 19. 85 or whatever it was before Top Gun came out before Top Gun came out, he, everything is before after Top Gun, one of the guys I worked with was involved in doing early AI stuff at General Motors, and, and one of the vendors who was working with had given them a little sticker that said artificial intelligence is better than none at all, and and and that may be the truth. I'm not quite sure, but we'll see it, and and the only thing we can be sure of is it will be different than we imagine.

Joshua Kerievsky : 27:46

Yeah, josh. The subtitle of the book extreme programming is embrace change, and so I think it's better to be in that mindset of embracing change and being resourceful. And how could AI benefit humanity While also protecting us from the damages that can do? I mean, I'll never forget trying to board a flight. I had this Microsoft laptop at the time and it decided it needed to like Install of the. Some opera ends like don't close the laptop down and they're calling my plane. I'm like who's in control here? You know I I should be able to tell this computer that I've got to go right now. But it not cake. I can't AI as fast forward AI. We got to still be in control, otherwise we got some big problems and that's the danger.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 28:32

Yeah, keeping the human in the loop there, steve.

Steve Denning: 28:34

There's one other thing that we can be sure of about AI, and that is it can be abused. Any tool can be used for a bad purpose. That's, a hammer can be used to hit the nail, or it can be used to commit murder, nuclear power the same, and AI is a very, very powerful tool. It can be abused and it probably will be abused. So it's very important that governments and organizations think about the risk of abuse, and this particularly powerful.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 29:04

So we are gonna open up for questions, if you do have questions. I believe there's a few mics, microphones arcing around, so if you have questions, go ahead and raise your hand and what we'll get to you. Until we see a question generated, anyone have anything yet?

Joshua Kerievsky : 29:17

I just have one quick.

Joshua Kerievsky : 29:17

Thing here, you know, we're at the world agility forum, right, and the thing that is I don't know that we all agree on this is that we have reimagining management and we have reimagining agile, and then we have reimagining human factors. Is agile, Is agile in all three of those things management, human factors and an agile or is it is agile not part of management or not part of human fact? I love it. To me it's part of all three and I don't, I don't get. If I'm you know, you know, cockpit, I want to be agile in terms of putting those flaps down or whatever. If I'm a man in management, I want to have the most easy, graceful and quick way of Doing management. You know, I want it to be agile. I want my management to be as agile it could possibly be. So to me that's. There's a bit of a something, something off there and some tension there, I agree.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 30:04

What yeah?

Steve Denning: 30:05

are we thinking about three? Steve? It's just in the design of the conference. What we were saying is that there was a whole array of things in an organization and you, because it is so complex and has multiple dimensions, you can look at it in from different angles. So one angle we're looking at it as the whole, the how does the whole fit together as a whole? On the Saturday we looked at the how of the implementation. How do you make change? It hasn't been happening. How do you get into a different mode of implementation? Obviously, the human factor is one part of that hole and agile is another part of the hole. In the previous Conferences, but it's been all about agile this is an expansion of the agenda and saying we need to be looking at the multiple dimensions of this phenomenon and understanding them all. And If ever we get into the mode of saying, well, we're only gonna look at our particular Little corner of it and someone else will have to sort everything else out, we are in deep trouble.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 31:09

Yeah. So Joshua brought up something in his workshop, and I may get it wrong here, but we're it's not a noun, right Okay? So now we talked about agility, emerge, or agility, innovation, resilience, safety, our mental health being emergent properties. So why would we just be talking about one thing, right, yeah, is that? Is that your point?

Joshua Kerievsky : 31:30

Sort of, yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's, it's great to look at all of it. So, yeah, resilience is an incredible thing. We know these high reliability organizations are amazing, so what could we learn from them? What could we learn from you know, all these these Neuroscientists and stuff, right, but I think, I guess I think we're ultimately after a better Existence, right? Better results.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 31:50

So, steve, here's an idea. What if we brought it all together? What would it look like? What would you call it? I mean, if we're looking at safety, resilience, innovation, mental health, all these, what do you call that conference? What do you call that movement?

Steve Denning: 32:01

well, we're discussing different names and reimagining management is is one name. There are other names out there. I think the Reimagining management name has the advantage of this that it doesn't have many Sort of pieces of baggage attached to it, and many other labels have have baggage, and so I think if we should be exploring different labels, we I don't think the label is the important thing. The important thing is to understand what we're talking about and understanding that it's quite different from what we've been talking about before, and this has Radical implement implications for society and for us as human beings. It is something very different and very important, and I'm so glad that we have a conference that's actually addressing this really for the first time.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 32:55

Okay, any question?

Speaker 6: 32:56

we have questions back here.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 32:58

Of course Brian has a question. I.

Chet Hendrickson : 33:01

Surprised. Brian needs a microphone.

Speaker 6: 33:03

Yeah, sorry, I'm Brian with better hair. No, so the question I was thinking about, you know, is y'all were discussing sort of a future of Conferences. The future of what we were going to talk about Started to reflect on the different industries, the different backgrounds that I've enjoyed hearing from during the during the conference. But maybe taking a different lens at it, what blind spots might we have? What are some? What are some areas that we may not be exploring? I was thinking about a bio mimicry conference I went to about 15 years ago and one of the things there is an intentional look at areas of nature that Industry can, can copy. Yeah, what are some things that we may not be exploring or we may have taken a too shallow dive into that we may be whizzing past?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 33:46

Yeah, so Brian brings up bio mimicry and auto mimicry In the concept of aviation. If you put a pane of canopy on the bottom of an aircraft it slows down my decision-making. It gets inside of what we call my oodaloupe, my observe oriented side active. It slows me down so that you see in nature quite often. So maybe I don't know if you want to have a nature reimagining, nature conference, but I agreed we. There's so many other sources of pull from to do this.

Steve Denning: 34:12

I think we anybody want to follow up with Brian just want to say we're I mean we're scratching the surface. This is a vast subject that will take many decades to get to the bottom of, so, obviously, then, many things we haven't even begun to scratch, so Realized that we're on the beginning of a journey. But the most important thing, we've started. We've started on this very important different journey.

Chet Hendrickson : 34:37

Well, well Josh probably remembers this back in the early days of conferences we talked about a whole range of subjects in places where we could go, find ideas and places to look and, and it'd be nice to get back to that as opposed to the rather calcified World relive in now great, great I was.

Jon Kern: 35:09

I Was gonna say that Some of the Things that I've been learning with mr Turley is, I think the deeper dive might be more than just psychological safety. There's what you feel, like it's I think you would call it the embodied, felt, felt sense and a lot of what I Believe explains some of my behavior. When I'm thinking about it sounds goofy, but even modeling or doing things for software development, you can sense quite often, am I going the right direction? So I think, tuning in a little bit more, being able to understand how your body is telling you Sometimes, especially when you're in these complicated and complex environments, the fuzzy things that you're not sure, if you have a lot of unknowns, I often realize you can just take a step and then feel if it's the right step. It sounds goofy as hell. No, it isn't.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 36:18

Interceptive skills are like the number one skill to have on the market. When you're trading on the market, it's not your technical skills or your subject matter expertise. It's what you actually feel, that connectedness it really is. I don't think it's goofy.

Jon Kern: 36:29

Yeah, I think the point is we've honed that skill for a really long time.

Steve Denning: 36:38

We should also recognize that the business schools by and large are basically aimed at eliminating that discussion and talking about management as a set of processes. All of that stuff is goofy and it's about planning and controlling and monitoring and then replanning and remonetering and all of this goofy stuff about mindsets and values and assumptions which is actually driving the most valuable firms in the world. That's off the table in those discussions and so every year 250,000 more MBAs are sent out in the world with that learning in their heads. We have a lot of opposition out there to complete this agenda, so we just need to be aware we don't have an easy path ahead of us.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 37:26

We have other questions. Hello everyone.

Speaker 6: 37:32

Hello.

Speaker 8: 37:33

I have a question kind of a challenging question actually, since we have the privilege to be here reimagining the future of the management and we are talking about human factors. I would like to ask you how do you see diversity in gender and in skin color?

Chet Hendrickson : 37:55

I think that's an incredibly important area. In addition to those easily-noticed kinds of diversity issues, there is the whole question of neurodiversity that not everyone thinks the same way. One of the things that impacts that is not only things you're born with, but the place you're born into and how you live your life. In order to have a well-functioning organization, I believe that we need to look at diversity and work towards it. Years ago, back when we were inventing XP, one of the members of our team was a wonderful woman by the name of Ann Anderson. We co-authored the extreme programming install book. When we were working together, she would say things that just made absolutely no sense to me At the time. It was very frustrating, but in retrospect I know now that that is a wonderful thing to have. Having people that approach problems differently for whatever reason, who look at the world in a different sort of way, give a team, an organization, a community power that it would not otherwise have.

Chet Hendrickson : 39:35

My good friend Michael Hill talks about these things. One of the ideas, certainly in extreme programming, is you want to put as many brains on the problem as possible. That's why we do pairing, that's why we do mobbing to have more brains on the problem. But if all those brains think the same way, you really only have one brain. You just have a lot of them but you only have one. You need to have that diversity because you want to increase the brains on your problem. You want to have people who approach problems differently, who have different backgrounds, and all of that. If John's going to put together a meeting, I would be happy to give up my spot to a woman, to a person who came from a different background, to something to increase the diversity. I'd love to be there, but I want to be in a diverse spot because I know the power of that.

: 40:48

Your question just triggered me and reminded me what Kevin Nolan, ceo of G Appliances, once said to me. He got upset about this whole discussion about diversity. It's not my opinion. He's saying that Interested. Tell me more. He said look, if you look all and it ties into what you said around the MBAs, etc. Look at the boardrooms. It makes no difference if the color, the gender, all MBAs, all of them think the same. It's this one brain and I'm Kevin Nolan is the only engineer who has no MBA. He's one of the single CEOs without an MBA. He said that's part of the problem and I'm not saying something against the MBA schools. Right, it's just as it is. So my personal opinion, my learning from that was well, we should not look at the people, but what are their behaviors, beliefs, experiences and so on?

Steve Denning: 42:06

We did try to disprove your proposition that they're all the same by presenting it with a CEO on Friday. Ceo of Hyatt big hotel chain, and he was different. He is agile, he embraces agile, he's passionate about agile. He's obviously been to business school. He's indoctrinated and he's survived. He's recovered and we need to have more recovery wards for those CEOs so they become human again.

Steve Denning: 42:36

And it was so exciting that Miriam offered to recruit him. As he was the first CEO she'd heard. I asked him for his resignation. He could work for me. So there's 20% I would say 20% of firms where the good things are happening. 20% of the firms are being hugely successful by having embraced the kind of management we're talking about. They are the most valuable firms on the planet. They are more valuable than all of the bottom 80%. They are growing faster than the bottom 80% and so they are basically putting those firms out of business, whether they realize it or not. So those CEO that are continuing in the old mode that their firm is doomed unless and until they get into the recovery ward and start talking like the CEO we heard on Friday.