overcoming your fear of change

Three techniques to drive continuous improvement through experimentation

Laura Burke

@agilenvironment

Discussion

Pair up

Discuss: (3 min per person)
What are some of the changes or improvements that you've made in your Agile adoption?
What techniques have you used to make these changes?
What are the biggest barriers to change?

Share at the end

agile requires constant change

no matter how far along on your transformation you may be, you need a way to manage it

Use experiments,

prepare for the complex

overview

Why experiment?

How are people doing this today?

3 Techniques

background

overview of technique

example

Getting started

Close and Q&A

Why experiments?

But experts know what to do,

right?

http://freakonomics.com/2011/06/30/freakonomics-radio-hour-long-episode-4-%E2%80%9Cthe-folly-of-prediction%E2%80%9D-2/

bias

Business Insider's 57 "most notable"

information bias

hindsight bias

priming

post-purchase rationalization

recency

reciprocity

status quo bias

http://www.businessinsider.com/cognitive-biases-2014-6?op=1

Experimentation:

it's happening

lean startup

design thinking

Philosophy

Techniques

Cynefin framework

Image credit: Karl Scotland, http://www.infoq.com/articles/kanban-heuristics-common-sense

In the complicated domain there are right answers which can be discovered either by deployment of expertise or research of some type.

In the complex domain we focus on safe-fail experiments rather than fail-safe design.

Experiments are not necessarily
designed to succeed but to create insight and understanding about what is possible.

Experiment #1

http://cognitive-edge.com/

Lean

http://hakanforss.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/lean-lego-the-red-brick-cancer/

What is an a3?

A3 Proposals typically use the word "countermeasure" rather than "solution."... the wording recognizes that even apparent "solutions" inevitably create new problems.

http://sloanreview.mit.edu/files/2009/07/50408-s2.pdf

Experiment #2: Problem A3

http://www.reliableplant.com/Read/22984/a3-problem-solving-lean

More information: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/files/2009/07/50408-s2.pdf

examples:

"Every A3 is no more than a visual manifestation of a problem-solving thought process involving continual dialogue between the owner of an issue and others in the organization. "

toyota kata-inspired

http://hakanforss.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/agile-lego-toyota-kata-an-alternative-to-retrospectives/

Retrospectives

Experiment #3: IMPROVEMENT THEME

http://blog.crisp.se/2013/05/14/jimmyjanlen/improvement-theme-simple-and-practical-toyota-kata

Things to remember

Talk to people

Identify the problem first

Don't change too many conditions at once

Limited WIP is your friend

Start small

Take biases into account

develop your own experiment

Work individually
Think about a problem that you want to
try to work through
Decide on an experiment format
Spend 5 minutes working through a draft
Share with a partner

Use simple,

disciplined experiments

to manage change in

your organization