Making Sense of Agile

• Presenters: Joseph Pelrine & Steve Freeman
• Type: Tutorial with hands-on exercises
• Duration: 90 minutes
• Audience: general

Introducing the Cynefin framework, Part 1 - Sense-making & Complexity

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.

Benefits of attending

Participants will learn about the complexity and sense-making aspects of the Cynefin framework, will learn techniques for making sense of situations, issues, and problems, thus helping them decide the most effective tools to use for problem-solving, and will learn how to apply these tools and techniques to the Agile domain.

What will the organisers learn

Interaction with attendees will allow us to validate the applicability of the framework to agile development by exploring numerous development scenarios we otherwise don't have access to and knowledge of.

Session Outline

• Introduction to the Cynefin framework (30 min.)
• A run of the Butterfly Stamping exercise (30 min.)
• Applying the framework and exercise to Agile (30 min.)

The Butterfly Stamping exercise is a technique for understanding the nature of activities and how they should be managed. For example, compilation and build is a simple activity, it should have no variation and be automated, whereas Requirements Discovery is a socially complex activity, the result can be hard to predict and may require people to change their perceptions of a problem.