Work Different

[Updated on further reflection – originally published 8/12 10:21 am)

Now I’d like to reflect a bit on Kevlin Henney’s excellent keynote.  People didn’t ask so many questions at the end, but as I heard from people around me, his talk was a lot to absorb and operated on many different levels (makes me think of Alistair’s Jazz conversations).  He challenged some of the fundamental assumptions that had been at work throughout the week.  These have to do with “value” as a motivator for workers and whether or not we learn from failures, as the “fail fast” methodologies seem to imply.

Kevlin began his talk saying it was about Code and then talking about how Code reveals itself when it breaks.  Below is an image of broken code on a sign in the Madrid airport.

The second level this operated on for me is that sometimes in failures people reveal themselves.  Look at the failure closely and you learn much more about what that software object, or, that person, is constructed of.

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I attended this very interesting session with Pete Behrens from Trail Ridge Consulting.  Really liked this session.

I liked that he first he asked who we are ( what level) and what session we liked.  He wanted to get an idea of who he was talking to.  I was the only manager in the audience!!  He did something very useful which was identify particular companies as having these cultures and then talk about how this works.

The main point of this talk was to use analysis of the culture of a business and figure out, from there, what Agile tools might be appropriate and maybe how to influence change within the culture itself.

Here is his deck – my notes follow.

What we do to succeed…

Culture is to an organization is like personality is to a person.
– shared within an organization and developed over years (more…)