permaling

I’ve been collaborating with leadership expert Peter Rennie and many others around Australia on a unique workshop From Bystanding to Understanding & Action.  I run the workshop with Peter in Sydney, and Peter has partners in many other locations.

This workshop teaches leaders powerful techniques around engaging people in an organisation and increasing the levels of awareness.  At its core, it promotes group learning and partnership as the mindset for bringing about system change.  It is a practical workshop in which you spend most of the time experiencing and participating, yet it is also well-grounded in theory.  Both attending and subsequently partnering with Peter on this workshop has helped me tremendously as both an organisational leader and social change agent.

We practice what we teach and the workshop has gotten better each time, and we have some amazing testimonials.

Please join us if you can on December 15 & 16.  If you know of any others, please forward them on the link to the website.  You can now register straight on the registration page. You still have another week to get the early bird booking, and there are group, pension and student discounts as well.

I hope to see you there.

In 1999 I took John McCarthy’s course, CS323 Common Sense Reasoning in Logic.  At the time I was heading down the road of being a probabilist, and I’ve wondered over the years about the role of logic, as I’ve become more aware of my own mental biases.  Or maybe the heuristics of common sense are a performance optimization.  Or maybe all that subconscious mental computation is smarter than logic.  I don’t believe we ever got beyond Missionaries and Cannibals.

It was the point in which John McCarthy, who died today, intersected my life, briefly.  He brought us LISP, timesharing, garbage collection, and changed the way we think about human intelligence.  These huge impacts were just side-effects of pursuing AI.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the what the post-Agile age will look like.  Maybe I’m just getting tired and a bit cynical of writing things on cards, writing tests and the emphasis on practices within the Agile community.

How well does Agile help us solve the important problems? I’d say it’s a good start but we can learn a lot from change management and system thinkers that can deepen and enhance our understanding.  In doing so, the Agile practices serve the mindset and not the other way around.

I’m interested in how software helps us solve wicked problems:

Rittel and Webber coined the term in the context of problems of social policy, an arena in which a purely scientific-rational approach cannot be applied because of the lack of a clear problem definition and differing perspectives of stakeholders.

Wikipedia goes on to say:

Thus wicked problems are also characterised by the following:

1. The solution depends on how the problem is framed and vice-versa (i.e. the problem definition depends on the solution)
2. Stakeholders have radically different world views and different frames for understanding the problem.
3. The constraints that the problem is subject to and the resources needed to solve it change over time.
4. The problem is never solved definitively.

Sound like any problems you’ve worked on recently?  Compared to, say, even 5 years ago, software developers are taking on more of these multi-stakeholder problems because organisations are getting pushed in this direction through the emerging forces of social media, corporate social responsibility and a great emphasis on networks in business.

For software developers, we’re building systems in the context of much greater social complexity.  There needs to be a much great awareness on our part of what is emerging around us.

I took a stab at capturing this in the context of Agile Planning:

How to Plan Agile Iterations  

Agile lends itself to dealing with high social complexity due to the emphasis on self-managing teams and collaboration.  The feedback loops in the Agile planning process provide the means for co-creating the solution with the stakeholders.

Retrospectives are an important part of this. In this presentation, I emphasis that a retrospective isn’t about learning from the past:

A retrospective can and should be used for incremental, iterative stakeholder engagement, which, to borrow from Theory U, taps a different source of learning.  It is an attempt to tune into the future that is emerging around us.

This Thursday and Friday I’m attending and helping facilitate the Carbon War Room Innovation Lab for creating climate wealth, here in Sydney.  It’s a hands-on workshop in which we’ll be designing our low carbon future with experts from a range of industries.  Tracks include Energy Efficiency, Aviation, Capital Quest, Shipping, Distributed Generation, Construction and Agriculture.  Speakers include Sir Richard Branson, CEO of the Carbon War Room Jigar Shah and Allan Jones from the City of Sydney.  I’m looking forward to it, and I’ll let you know if we solved it!