Keynote: Agile Leadership & Teams – Lynda Rising
- 2 minsLinda Rising is an independent consultant who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Linda is an internationally known author and presenter on topics related to patterns, retrospectives, influence strategies, agile development, and the change process. With a Ph.D. from Arizona State University, Linda’s background includes university teaching and software development in a number of different domains. You can catch up with Lynda on Twitter.
This is a live blog. Please excuse any spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and nonsensical sentences.
Linda surveys the audience to see who uses Agile. Unsurprisingly we all do.
None of us used science to come to this decision. We used gut instinct and friends opinions. If you want to convince someone of something, tell a story. Science is not convincing. Using both at the same time you can achieve a much more convincing argument.
Do you need evidence for something that’s common sense?
Is medicine science. Leeches were used for hundreds of years. In some cases this even caused deaths. Even scientists were not convinced that the evidence was true. This was due to the generations of stories told in the communities.
Linda tells the story of semmelweis trying to convince his peers tha washing hands when moving between autopsies and births was a good thing. Logical arguments did not work for him. He died in an insane asylum and had a pauper’s burial.
Could agile be a placebo? It has no scientific evidence. It has high priests. It works, and when it doesn’t it because you don’t believe in it!
Scientists, and the rest of us, suffer from a huge range of biases. Even knowing who is taking the real drugs can cause the scientists to affect the outcome, hence the move to ‘double-blind” studies.
Education is an old model, where one person speaks and the rest listen. That’s the issue with stories. We listen, repeat and take it as gospel. But this in not how we get better.
How can we use science in Agile. Laurie Williams used science to demonstrate the benefits of Pair programming (Pair programming illuminated). Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman is highly recommended.
Richard Dawkins expressed that you don’t need to do science in order to benefit from it. Just knowing the principles of the scientific process can help you to improve the cognitive process.
No one ever won a Nobel Prize for checking email. Enjoy lunch together and share ideas.
Agile is a trial…. And experiment…. A learning process. Return to the mindset of a learner.
