Agile Roots 2012

June 2012, Salt Lake City, USA

05 Jul 2012, By Stephan Schwab

The main hall was offered to me to give my talk Smarter Software with Activity-Centered Design to a slightly larger audience. Activity-Centered Design is an extensive topic and within only 45 minutes it was only possible to introduce the audience a bit to Activity Theory and outline how it can be used to develop smarter software. I invited the audience to download my book in progress to learn more and several people took me up on the offer. After the talk some came up to me and thanked me for the introduction of ideas from a field outside traditional software development. The talk was videotaped. The video is currently in post-production and as soon as I know where it's published, I will post a link to it here.

Corey Haines and Linda Rising gave two keynotes about the agile mindset. They both explained that it's about being agile instead of doing Agile. Working in an agile way is not following a process but instead is rooted in humanistic values. It is an entirely different belief system.

Ghennipher Weeks talked about Bringing Agile to Marketing and showed how marketers are taking advantage of feedback loops and other agile techniques. However, my impression was that there is still a lot of mechanistic thinking in the sense of applying a process to the work. The good news is that it's an example of a field where people are interested in employing agile techniques outside of software development. That's a very good start.

Fun is part of this type of conference. Gil Nahmias dressed like a wizard, completely with the pointy hat and a robe with stars on it, to tell the audience in Black Magic for Scrum Masters how to mix the magic potion that allows the Scrum Master to be more effective: ways to get them to like you, to trust you, negotiation tips, handling resistance, establishing leadership, motivating teams and even some unethical tactics. At the end, after all the ingredients were in the pot, he threw it at the audience. Thankfully he swapped out the pot with another one that only held candy instead of all the liquids he had used to mix the magic potion. People ducked and were scared for a second.

In Influence Strategies Linda Rising demonstrated that, based on many scientific studies, humans are incapable of rational decisions. We are completely controlled by our emotions and only later on justify our decisions with rationality. Psychological tools can be used to take advantage of hardwired traits of human nature in order to influence others. The hardwired traits are: liking, reciprocity, social proof, consistency, authority, and scarcity. The workshop left people a bit scared of themselves, which is a good thing.

As an extension of Linda's workshop Arlo Belshee provided a lecture about how the brain learns. It was a primer in neuroscience in which everyone learned about how the brain grows neurons and pathways between them based on external input. One particular detail I found interesting is that confusion leads to better memorization of a new fact. The advice Arlo gave was to present first a wrong assumption to a learner and then correct it. That leads to confusion and after a while, when neu pathways have been established, the new information enters long-term memory, which means the person has learned something.