Cargo Cult Agile training &

coaching

Jose Luis Soria

jlsoria@plainconcepts.com

@jlsoriat

August 29th 2012Barcelona (Spain)

During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. — Richard

Feynman, physicist(http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3043/1/CargoCult.pdf)

What is a Cargo Cult?

• Religious practice focused on obtaining goods (cargo) by means of magic and rituals

• Based on irrational beliefs and behavior

• Used as a metaphor for many fields (politics, economics, journalism…)

• More info: http://bit.ly/lruvbdhttp://bit.ly/zhWL

http://bit.ly/1alLpQ

Cargo Cults have repeatedly been used as a metaphor for software development and Agile practices…

• Steve McConnell http://bit.ly/5voCM4

• Maxx Daymond http://bit.ly/gZ57Kk

• James Shore http://bit.ly/aek5r9

…usually describing “doing Agile but not being Agile” kind of behavior

Do we behave the same way

when we are involved in Agile

training or coaching?

Training or coaching?

Tell me and I will listen,

show me and I will remember,

involve me and I will understand.

Confucius

While being quite different disciplines, both training and coaching deal with helping

people to benefit from knowledge.

So both can be affected by the same kind of misbehaviors

Subject matter: things being

addressed while training or

coaching

Agile practices map (http://guide.agilealliance.org/subway.html)

Potential issues: behavioral

patterns affecting training or

coaching

• Cognitive biases: deviations in judgment that affect decisions, memory, perception and rationalism

• (Logical) fallacies: bad reasoning caused by wrong assumptions or misconceptions

we can be prepared to avoid them

The 7 habits of

Cargo Cult

people

Habit #1:

Replicate (wrong or incomplete)

past circumstances, trying to

obtain the same outcomes

Bias: Confirmation bias

• Selectively pick only the evidence that confirms my beliefs or whishes

• Several kinds: biased search for information, biased interpretation, biased memory

Avoiding: Confirmation Bias

• Casual observations are subjected to bias. Try to get the whole picture before recommending specific practices

• Try to explain always the underlying principles supporting the evidence

Habit #2:

Fail to identify the cause of an

outcome

Fallacy: Correlation proves

causation

• Mistake two correlated events for one causing the other

• Ignore other correlated events or factors

Avoiding: Correlation Proves

Causation

• Correlation is a necessary, but not sufficient condition, for causality. Look for additional evidence before recommending or discarding particular practices

• Don’t break inference rules while making decisions

Habit #3:

Ignore how the practice

actually works

Bias: Dunning-Kruger Effect

• Unskilled, and unaware of it

• Adherence to superficial signs of the idea

• “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” –Charles Darwin

Avoiding: Dunning-Kruger Effect

• Keep in mind that you’re ignorant about many things

• Don’t teach or coach a practice if you are not confident enough about it

• Don’t be confident on a practice that you’ve not experimented by yourself

• Knowledge unveils ignorance

• Make it very clear when you speak abouta practice that you don’t know

Habit #4:

Strengthen beliefs when

finding conflicting evidence

Bias: Backfire Effect

• Reject evidence contradictory to one’s beliefs

• Strengthen support on these beliefs

• Favor process over principles

Avoiding: Backfire Effect

• Keep in mind that you’re ignorant about many things

• Don’t teach or coach a practice if you are not confident enough about it

• Don’t be confident on a practice that you’ve not experimented by yourself

• Knowledge unveils ignorance

• Make it very clear when you speak abouta practice that you don’t know

Habit #5:

Pay attention only to success

and ignore failure

Bias: Survivorship Bias

• Draw conclusions from people or things that survived a process, or succeeded, ignoring the ones that didn’t

I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career.

I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been

trusted to take the game winning shot and

missed. I've failed over and over and over again

in my life. And that is why I succeed - Michael

Jordan

Avoiding: Survivorship Bias

• Beware that one or few successful cases may hide lots of failed ones

• Failure contains more lessons than success. Look for the cases where the practice has failed and try to draw the most information

• Don’t learn only from success

Habit #6:

Adopt a practice because

many others do so

Bias: Bandwagon Effect

• As more people adopt a practice, others “jump on the bandwagon”, without considering the reasons or the environment

Avoiding: Bandwagon Effect

• Consider if the practice might work for the team being coached, regardless of how popular it is

Habit #7:

Develop a preference for

familiar things

Bias: Exposure Effect

• “Better the devil you know” behaviour

• Preference for using familiar practices, even if they’re not well suited for the undergoing task

Avoiding: Exposure Effect

• Continuously recycle and improve your knowledge

• Consider alternatives

Other biases and fallacies

affecting training/coaching

• Overestimate how much people agree with you (false-consensus effect)

• Be unable to impartially think about a subject you master (curse of knowledge)

• Draw different conclusions from the same information (framing effect)

• Misuse games to model real-life situations (ludic fallacy)

• Attribute success to yourself but failure to external factors (self-serving bias)

• Believe that you can explain a thing because you know its name (nominal fallacy)

Summary: what to look for

• Watch out for biases

• Watch out for fallacies

• Don’t jump to conclusions too quickly

• Be aware of your state of mind

• Avoid irrational behavior

Jose Luis Soria

jlsoria@plainconcepts.com

http://geeks.ms/blogs/jlsoria

@jlsoriat

http://www.slideshare.net/jlsoria

ALM Team Lead at Plain Concepts

Professional Scrum Trainer at scrum.org

We try not to train/coach like this! ���� http://bit.ly/bCRBlI