The Symptoms of Succesful Agile Enterprise

Anand Murthy Raj

Who am I?

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1. 20+ years of Industry experience

2. One of the first to be nominated for SPCT in Asia

3. 6 years of experience in Agile Transformation

4. Work for Blinklane Consulting NV

(http://www.blinklane.com/)

5. Clients worked – Hewlett Packard, Symantec, SKF,

Healtyhways and Philips

6. Currently part of the Global Agile Transformation Program - Coach @ Philips

7. Part of a NGO www.nisvartha.org helping 700 rural talented students to see

and realize their dreams by providing “Education”

The Twin Transformation Challenges

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Transforming the Organization Transforming the People

Agile – Transformation Journey

Sep 20164

Large

Slow

Bureaucratic

More Productive

More Adaptive

Response-ability

Unpredictable

Unreliable

Unable

Great!! Oh! My God

Successful Agile Orgnaization patterns

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Flow

Solution Alignment

Design Failures

Critical defects

Integration

Unknown-unknowns

Mindset

Silver Bullet

Superficial Adoption

Local vs Global Optimization

Unrealistic Promises

Kaizen

Inability to learn

Practices over Principles

Unscientific Learning approaches

Vision

Vision propagation

Global thinking

Outcome over output

Vision validation

Measuring Success

Learning

Systems thinking

Personal Mastery

Mental Model

Shared Vision

Team Learning

Learning Disabilities

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Peter Senge in the book “The Fifth Discipline“ talk about the 7

Learning disabilities

1. I am my position

2. The enemy is out there

3. The Illusion of “Taking Charge”

4. The “fixation of events”

5. The parable of “Boiled Frog”

6. The delusion of “Learning with Experience”

7. The Myth of “Management team”

Learning Disabilities

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I am my position

1. Lack of “system thinking”

2. Silo mentality

3. Auto Industry: Japan engg vs American engg

4. America vs Argnetina Soccer match

5. “Some one else screwed it up”

Learning Disabilities

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The Enemy is out there 1. By-product of I am my position

2. Passing on the blame

3. Non systemic view of the world

4. Lack of accountability

5. Manufacturing � Engg�Marketing� Sales

6. American companies who lost their share to foreign competitors

1. Blamed the cheap foreign wages

2. Labor union

3. Government regulations

4. Customers betrayed

Learning Disabilities

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The illusion of taking charge1. Proactive � Antidote of being reactive

2. Face difficult issues, solve problems before it gets into crisis

3. Crisis and Chaos teaches us great lessons

4. Mistakes make us hard

5. Pro-activeness is reactiveness in disguise

6. True proactive comes from seeing how we contribute to our own

problems (Bangalore steel flyover)

7. It’s a product of our way of thinking, not our emotional state

Learning Disabilities

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The fixation of events1. Conversations are dominated by events

2. In org : Sales, Promotion, fire, new product

3. Focusing into such events leads to “Event

explanations”

4. Distract from seeing long term pattern for change,

underlying causes

5. Focus on real issues like

Employee attrition, Technology updates,

Customers’ business dynamics, Employee

happiness, Pollution and issues like why are insane

humans getting into such barbaric acts

Learning Disabilities

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The parable of a boiled frog

Year Japanese

Share

1960 0%

1962 < 4%

1967 10%

1974 15%

1982 21.3%

1990 25%

2005 40%

1. Learning to see slow, gradual requires

us to keep off the pace

2. Look for gradual processes that

define fate of the frog

3. Look for folks going back to waterfall

model way of thinking (metrics,

plans, documentation)

4. Pay attention to human side of

development

Learning Disabilities

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The delusion of Learning with

experience 1. Walking, Eating and , crawling and communicating

– Trial and Error

2. Observe the consequences of our actions

3. Learning Horizon

4. Now being perfect, being predictable, reliable

estimates

5. No scope for error

6. “We learn best from experience but never

experience the consequences of some of our

important decisions”

Learning Disabilities

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The Myth of Management team1. Can the mgmt. teams can surmount these learning

disabilities ?

2. Maintaining the appearance of a cohesive team

3. Most management teams break down under pressure

4. Schools trains us never to admit that we do not know the

answer, Corporations reinforce that lesson by rewarding

the people who excel in advocating their views

5. No one dares inquiring into complex issues

6. Skilled incompetence’—teams full of people who are

incredibly proficient at keeping themselves from learning

Dealing with People Challenges

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The working model

Mary Poppendieck – The friction 15

The Communication model

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The Thinking Model

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The Communication Language

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1. Out of 24 words in English that

expresses emotion only 6 of them

are positive !!!

2. A phycologist analyzed 558 words in

English language only to find 38%

words positive and 62 % negative

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SOUL

SOLE

SelfishOutdatedUnderperformingLethargic

SelfOrganizedLearningEnvironment

The first step..

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The right step..

Practical WisdomThe moral will to do the right thing

and the moral skill to figure out

what the right thing is – Aristotle

Wisdom makes a transition from

Efficiency to effectiveness

1. An ounce of information is worth a pound

of data

2. An ounce of knowledge is worth a pound

of information

3. An ounce of understanding is worth a

pound of knowledge

4. An ounce of wisdom is worth a pound of

understanding

Questions21

References:

The fifth Discipline - Peter Senge

Switch – Dan Heath and Chip Heath

Vimeo.com – Mary Poppendieck- The Friction

Agile Adrea - Mary Poppendieck- The Scaling Dilema

The Paradox of Choice – Bary Schwartz

Systems thinking by Dr. Russell Ackoff – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbLh7rZ3rhU