My talk at AgileNCR 2014 on exploring agile from the core foundations of what makes a great team, and whether agile is the panacea for everything that plagues the software development, or it is really a placebo in the sense that once you have all these pre-conditions that makes a team successful, irrespective of whether you practice agile methods, you will perhaps be equally successful, if not more.

1. AGILE:
PANACEA
OR
PLACEBO?
Tathagat Varma,
VP Strategic Process Innovations and HR,
[24]7 Innovation Labs
AGILE

2. Panacea
!
Greek Goddess of
Universal Remedy
!
Solution to all
problems; Cure-all

3. “There is no single development, in either technology or
management technique, which by itself promises even one order
of magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in
reliability, in simplicity.”
1987

4. IS AGILETHE NEW SILVER
BULLET?

7. Perkins Patent Tractors

9. SUBJECT-EXPECTANCY EFFECT
http://ozarker.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/n-p.gif

11. EXTRAORDINARY GROUPS
• A compelling purpose that inspires and stretches members to make
the group and its work a top priority
• Shared leadership that encourages members to take mutual
responsibility for helping the group be successful
• Just-enough-structure to create confidance to move forward, but
not so much as to become bureaucratic or burdensome
• Full engagement that results in all members jumping in with
enthusiasm, sometimes passionately and chaotically, regardless of role
• Embracing differences so that group members see, value, and use
their diversity as a strength
• Unexpected learning that translates into personal and group growth
• Strengthened relationships among members characterized by trust,
collegiality, and friendship
• Great results, tangible and intangible

12. LEARNINGS FROM NATURE
• Collective Leadership: Any group
member can take the lead.
• Instant Messaging: Instant whole-
group broadcast communications.
• Ecosystems: Small is Beautiful …
but Big is Powerful.
• Clustering: Engaging many through
the few.

13. BIOTEAMING RULES
1. Stop Controlling: Communicate information not orders
2. Team Intelligence: Mobilize everyone to look for and manage team threats and opportunities
3. Permission Granted: Achieve accountability through transparency not permission
4. Always-On: Provide 24*7 instant “in-situ” message hotlines for all team members
5. Symbiosis:Treat external partners as fully trusted team members
6. Cluster: Nurture the team’s internal and external networks and connections
7. Swarm: Develop consistent autonomous team member behaviors
8. Tit-for-Tat: Team members must learn effective biological and interpersonal cooperation strategies
9. Genetic Algorithms: Learn through experimentation, mutation and team review
10. Self-Organizing Networks: Define the team in terms of “network transformations” – not outputs
11. Porous Membranes: Develop team boundaries that are open to energy but closed to waste
12. Emerge: Scale naturally through nature’s universal growth and decay cycles

14. CONCLUSIONS
• Sorry, there are no silver bullets
• Agile provides great training wheels
• Focus on people, teams and culture
• Believe in what you do, but test it first!

15. REFERENCES
• http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/placebo-effect.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perkins_tractors
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
• http://www.fastcompany.com/41112/what-makes-teams-work
• http://www.medi-leadership.org/pdfs/TheNewScienceofBuildingGreatTeams-
HBRApril2012.pdf
• http://www.ambysoft.com/surveys/agileJanuary2014.html