04 Jul 2012, By Stephan Schwab
In the heart of San Francisco about two hundred software developers, managers and founders of new companies from the United States, Europe and even as far as New Zealand gathered for three days to share and learn about new ways of working and running businesses. The content of the conference was crowd-sourced and determined based on votes by the attendees.
My own session Deeper Understanding of User Stories Through Activity Theory was well received. Participants learned how to discover what users want to do through software. Equipped with a new tool developers can now better determine what the right problem to solve is.
In Enabling Emergent Betterness Through Lean Procrastination I learned from Olaf Lewitz and Matt Barcomb how to postpone decision making by decomposing the batch size of decisions and decoupling, which allows us to have real options open for as long as possible.
The second day started with an impressive keynote by Jim McCarthy who was only using his voice with no slides or other visuals. He preached to the audience about the need to do a lot of good. Lots of good will then become greatness. By having lots of greatness we finally will achieve magnifience. His speech resonated well with the audience and set the tone for the day.
In The Why of Scrum Tobias Meyer explained that the purpose of a restrospective is to figure out how to stop doing Scrum and helped us to understand that Scrum is basically a kind of training wheels. I was happy to find confirmation for my own point of view by someone who has been working with the Scrum Alliance in a leadership position. The Cynefin Lego Game with Olaf Lewitz and Brad Swanson allowed me to experience and observe simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic situation by means of a game. We were asked not to communicate verbally, observe a number of rules and build several structures with Lego pieces. When eventually a project manager showed up and replaced team members our productivity came to a halt and our teams slipped into chaos.
Lisa Crispin and Matt Barcomb demonstrated in Growing The Concept Of a Whole Team how a team acquires skills over time with the help of the Dreyfus model for skill acquisition. It was a guided conversation with the audience that resulted in a huge "cave drawing". We all understood how important it is to keep teams together so that they can go from the stage of novice all the way up to the expert level. If we disbandon teams after a 6 months project, we will always have novices or advanced beginners working on important solutions. No wonder they won't get it right.
Probably due to the fact that the sessions for this conference were selected by the audience in advance the event itself provided for a very family-like experience. There were a lot of hugging and deep conversations at dinner and in bars every day after the official program.