THE AGILE COLONY

Getting insights from natural system to create anAgile “Living”Company

Speaker: RAZVAN OLARIU

- Geographer - bachelor thesis in Paleoclimatology;

- online student : Coursera and Santa Fe Institute of Complexity Science;

- 1 year and a half in a local IT company starting as

“The manager with the lowest income”in the company to later becoming an Agile enthusiast

(currently applying Agile in 2 projects)

- Lean Startup

FROM: “Industrial Era”Scientific Management (Taylorism)

- End 19th century until 1960-1970;

-Capital and labor;

- Bureaucracy;

- Hierarchies;

-Standardized work;

-“Squeezing” people;

-- machine-like model

TO: “Knowledge Era”

- Knowledge and information are the resources on which competitiveness is created;

-Emphasize on communication and collaboration;

- getting insights from natural living systems;

-Organizational Learning : creating, retaining and transferring knowledge;

-Knowledge Management: capturing, developing,-sharing, and effectively using knowledge;

Information Era

“Learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task

is teaching people how to learn.” (Peter Drucker)

“We should work on our process, not the outcomes of our process.”

(Edwards Deming)

Post Knowledge Era ?

- Increased connectivity and exponential growth of information;

- the returns of Information and knowledge have flattened;

- paralysis by analysis;

- next scarce resource: the ability to focus on the right information in the decision making process;

- Learning should become a collaborative process!!!

Describe how Agile is designed to acquire and spread knowledge

My Goals:

Offer my view through the lens of Complexity Science of how Agile brings insights from the realm of living networks to create a successful model for the Knowledge Era

Present a personal model of how Agile should be improved in order to make thetransition to a Post-Knowledge Era

“The best architectures, requirements and design emerge from self-organized teams.”

(Agile Manifesto)

Loren Carpenter Pong Experiment

AN AGILE

AS AN ANT COLONY

An ant colony:

No one is in charge

Emergent behavior through simple rules (ex. ant hill aging stages) cyclically applied

An Agile team:

“Simplicity –the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential”.(Agile Manifesto)

- Most of the Agile’s tools and processes are simple designed and applied daily and initerations: Scrum meetings, pair programming etc.

Daily Scrum - asking the same simple questions day by day can bring into light important insights

Recursiveness –nature’s strategy to generate complexity

Ant Foraging (NetLogo simulation):

- Ants move randomly in many different directions. When an ant encounters a food source it returns to the nest, leaving aPheromone trail.

- In the absence of reinforcement , he pheromone will dissipate;

- at any given time the existing trails and their strengths , encode the colony’s collective information about the food environment.

This information adapts to changes in environmental conditions.

Task allocation

-Workers in a colony divide themselves into:

-Nest maintenance - patrolling -foraging - refuse sroting

-How is it that at a specific time the ants decide what task to perform?

-The number of workers pursuing each kind of task adapts to changes in the environment

Ants decide to adopt particular tasks as a function of :

- what they encounter in the environment- Their rate of interaction with ants performing different tasks.

Emergence

– when networks have properties not present in constituent individuals;

-As a management principle – “The guiding structures that stimulate individuals to coordinate their activities, in a focused way, of their own volition”

(J. Birkinshaw)

-decision making is an act of collective wisdom

-allowing employees to decide what motivates them

Benefits:

-Responsiveness to a changing environment;

- it energizes the ones involved;

-Enables creativity;

Case Study: Valve

-Non hierarchical;

- no job titles, no job descriptions and no employees called “bosses”;

- every employee can initiate projects, and choose which projects to work on;

- each project decides for itself about testing, how often to meet (not very), -and what the goal is;

-Bonuses for top performances – peers review others performances – high

-Hiring - multiple rounds of interviewing by many employees

“A fearless adventure in knowing what to do when no one’s there telling you what to do.”

Self Organization

-No clear distinction with emergence;

-Stated as one of the principles of the Scrum Since it’s first definition by Takeuchi & Nonaka

Governing “at the edge of chaos”

- confused with anarchy;

-we should not be afraid by chaos and big fluctuations;

-Ken Schwaber “the pressure cooker of the deadline ”

Leadership in a self organized team?

-Influence by acting upon environment ;

-Managers set the goal and let the team to self organize to achieve it;

-Establish enough checkpoints to prevent instability, ambiguity and tension;

-Act to increase spontaneity and creativity;

-Takeuchi & Nonaka – “control by peer pressure” and “control by love”

So what makes an Agile Company

a “Living Company”?

Emergence

Self Organization

Recursiveness

AND …

“Responding to change over following a plan.”(Agile Manifesto)

”The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive

advantage.” Arie de Geus, “The Living Company”

-1983 – conducted a study on Shell on corporate longevity

-Companies being in place for hundreds of years = “Living companies”

-they depend on the ability of a company’s managers to absorb what is going on in the business environment and to act on that information with appropriate business moves

-they rely on organizational learning;

How does a company learn and adapt?

What is planning’s role in corporate learning?

Role of Management : Planning as learning

The only relevant learning in a company is the learning done by those people who have the power to act;

-facilitator, catalyst, and accelerator of the Organizational learning process

- changing the rules, or suspending them, could be a spur to learning

HOW DOES LEARNING TAKES PLACE IN AN AGILE COMPANY?

“The New New Product Development Game” (Takeuchi & Nonaka, 1986)

"At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly."(Agile Manifesto)

“Multilearning” Organizational transfer of learning

- members of the project team stay in close touch with outside sources of information;

-learning by doing - across two dimensions:

-across multiple levels (individual, group, and corporate) and -across multiple functions -Experts are encouraged to accumulate experience in areas otherthan their own

-through “osmosis”—by assigning key individuals to subsequent projects;

- by converting project activities to standard practice

LEARNING IN AGILE

Scrum

Kanban Task Boards

Pair Programming Iterations

Burndown ChartsCode Review Meetings

-These are tools for learning through collaboration;

- But most of the learning process takes place inside the team;

Question :

Are these tools enough to facilitatethe transition to the post knowledge era?

My assumption:

Agile leaves room for improvement especially in building communication channels among different teams

Agile practices to enhance knowledge transfer among teams:

Scrum of Scrums Attending workshops Online courses

Ex: Scrum of Scrums

- an hierarchical model rather than a networked one

Example:

- Online courses – internal or external trainers;

- Webinars and Techtalks

- Internal communication channels (IM Tools, E-mail)

- Online Library access

My Model:

1.From Online Courses to MOOC’s

-Better adapted for an era of information overload

-Way to connect and collaborate, to engage people in the learning process;

- emphasize on discussion forums;

- Teacher job is rather to facilitate exchanges between participants;

- goal is interaction and exchange : facilitating the production of additional elements of knowledge

-evaluation done by other peers in the course

2. Communication channels to store and structure information

3. TechTalks and presentations should be designed more for enhancing debate

- They should resemble more the Scrum meetings

4. Seminars on “learning how to learn” techniques and public speaking

Dealing with procrastination - doing more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones;

overlearning - continue to study what you've already mastered;

Einstellung - an idea that's already in your mind and you feel comfortable with may prevent a better idea to show up.

Conclusions:

-Agile resemble patterns from the realm of natural world in order to build a modelopposed to “Command and Control” specific for the Knowledge Era;

-Agile was designed to respond change and responding change is learning

- Agile leaves room for improvement

-Agile should emphasize more on cross-team harvesting of knowledge in an era of Information overload