Dave Snowden's Keynote at XP 2012, Part 2 of 2

This is part two of Dave Snowden's keynote. Great stuff.

 Part 1 is here.

Dave Snowden's Keynote at XP2012, Part 1 of 2

Dave Snowden talks about complexity thinking and contrasts it with design thinking and systems thinking in his XP 2012 keynote.

This is one keynote worth listening to. I was very fortunate to get it all on video.

Part 2 is here.

LESS! is released!

Whew! After six months of hard work, LESS!: Essays on Business Transformation is released. I should write something brilliant about this, but I just feel tired and happy. I'll go play with my son instead. I have deserved it, and so has he.

Just one thing: You may recall an earlier cover picture:

You may notice that the cover has changed slightly compared to the earlier version:

John Hagel III has written an excellent Foreword. Check him out. I am immensely proud that he wanted to do that for us. John is a great management writer. He is also Co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, and Director Deloitte Consulting LLP. I am currently reading his latest book, The Power of Pull.

Chances are you already do know about some of the LESS! authors, but I'll give you a list with links so you can have a look:

Dan Bergh Johnsson - Technology evangelist and blogger

Bjarte Bogsnes - Chairman of the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable Europe

Peter Bunce - Co-Founder and Director of the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable

Steve Denning - Consultant and former Director of the World Bank
Ola Ellnestam - Co-founder of Agical. Organizer of the excellent Agical Geek Nights(!)
Håkan Forss - Lean/Agile coach, creator of Visual WIP
Brian Hawkes - Founder of Foresite SPA
Maarit Laanti - Agile and Lean coach at Nokia
Henrik Mårtensson - Happy and exhausted
Karl Scotland - Advocate and pioneer of Kanban Software Development
Ari-Pekka Skarp - Coach and organizational developer at Nokia

James Sutton - 2007 Shingo prize winner, CEO of the Jubata Group, co-founder and president of the Lean Software and Systems Consortium

We have a wide range of expertise spanning finance, management, Agile, Lean, strategy, systems thinking, and complexity theory.

What can you, as a reader, do with it? You can start putting the pieces together. When laid out the way we have, it quickly becomes obvious that there are common themes, things we all need to do to make our companies work better. If we work together, we'll get better results. It is that simple.

By the way, in his Foreword, John does speak very clearly about what happens if one does not change. The things we are writing about used to be nice to have competitive advantages. Now they are necessary for survival. On the up side, once you try, they are fun and exciting to do. :-)

Now, I will go play with my son. Be seeing you!

Agile Company Presentation at XP 2012

It nearly did no happen because of my workload, but I will go to XP 2012. Here is a brief description of my presentation:

Agile Company - Win by doing LESS!

Over the past 50 years there have been many attempts to change how business organizations work: BPR, Deming's System of Profound Knowledge, McGregor's Human Enterprise, de Geus Living Company, Semler's Three Ring Model, Theory of Constraints... Despite great initial success, all these initiatives have failed.

Now Lean and Agile show signs of failing, for the same reason their predecessors failed.

The problem is that when a small system, like an Agile team, tries to change a large system, like a company and its customers, through long and continuous contact, the small system will change much more than the large system.

This is also known as Prescott's Pickle Principle:

Cucumbers get more pickled than brine gets cucumbered

Can Agile and Lean avoid getting pickled the same way they predecessors have been? Yes, the solution is doing LESS!