1. THE SHORTCUTS TO SCALING
AGILITY…
(That won’t get you there)
Ram Ramalingam
2. My father’s name is Ramalingam Sumaithangi Sivarama Iyer
Ram Ramalingam
3. In the next 40 mins…
1. The shortcuts
2.How not to be led into one
3. Joseph Henrich -The twist in the tale
4.Some tools to manage the twist – understanding culture
Disclaimer
1. This is an exploratory talk
2.Not a completely researched field
3. There might be more questions than answers
4. Bit of a roller-coaster ride
5. A lot of terms I use may have a XP-tone when I talk Agile –
but, really, isnt XP the real agile ?
6.“All models are wrong. Some models are useful” – GEP Box.
4. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…
Quick,
Rewarding
Familiar
Tough,
Boring
Counter-intuitive
5. Some cognitive science
Loss aversion
Prospect theory
Endowment effect
Attribute substitution
Hindsight bias / availability heuristic
Framing
6. Loss aversion
You are offered a gamble on the
toss of a coin
If the coin showsTails you lose Rs. 100
If the coin shows Heads you gain $150
Would you take the bet?
Source: Daniel Kahneman
Most people don’t – people are more aversive to
A Loss than a gain by the same amount
7. Loss aversion
Being too invested in the work already done
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to
become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its
behavior accordingly.
Value is often perceived as what’s available in
house than what customer really needs
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through
early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
Throwaway code is anathema
Welcome changing requirements, even late
in development. Agile processes harness change
for the customer's competitive advantage.
Working software is the primary measure of progress
Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is
essential
8. Attribute substitution
Subjects asked two questions
among many others:
"How happy are you with your life in
general?”
"How many dates did you have last
month?"
In this order, the correlation between
the two questions was negligible. If the
dating question was asked first,
however, the correlation was .66
9. Attribute substitution - Framing
Framing Treatment A Treatment B
Positive "Saves 200 lives” "A 33% chance of saving all
600 people, 66% possibility
of saving no one.”
Negative "400 people will
die”
"A 33% chance that no
people will die, 66%
probability that all 600 will
die.”
10. Attribute substitution
Assuming that past experience is superior to end-
user empathy
Business people and developers must work together daily
throughout the project.
Reliance on experts and specialization over cross-
functional teams
Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the
environment and support they need, and trust them to get
the job done.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge
from self-organizing teams.
Comprehensive documentation leads to less errors
The most efficient and effective method of conveying
information to and within a development team is face-to-face
conversation.
11. Some typical anti-paths / anti-patterns
• It says working
product. Mine does!
Management
• Selfish-organization
Philosophy
• Freeze! I am Ma
Baker..
Practices
12. It says working product. Mine does !
Anti-path:
I am happy to accept change. But we will need a fool-proof
change control board and the customer has to pay for it
The customer doesn’t understand how good this feature/product
is
Agile Path take you must…
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.
Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive
advantage
Play games, visualize future etc. and help the team have a
good dialogue/vision to negotiate better
Management
13. Freeze, I am Ma Baker…
Anti-path:
But then I am delivering data to a system
But then my team doesn’t have a product owner
But we need some architecture, surely?
Agile Path take you must…
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and
continuous delivery of valuable software (Valuable to users!)
Keep goals visible – product mapping - etc
As an MIS
I want data from the old source
To continue to reach me when
am retired
So that I can rest in peace?
Philosophy
14. Self-organizationish
Agile Path
The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams
Anti-path
As a PM, I want productivity metrics, so that I can be sure the
team is not slacking away
We are completely self-organized within theTesting, DB, Dev and
UI teams
Practices
15. Two roads again diverged in a yellow wood…
Quick,
Rewarding
Familiar
Tough,
Boring
Counter-intuitive
16. The culture thing
“You like potato and I like potahto
You like tomato and I like tomahto
Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto.
Let's call the whole thing off.”
- Louis Armstrong
17. Joseph Henrich
WEIRD studies
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic
Culture-Gene co-evolution
Ultimatum game & Dictator game
Altruistic punishment vs Anti-social punishment
Framing - Mueller - Lyer illusion
18. Ultimatum game & Dictator game
UG: Give a pair of subjects a sum
of real money for a one-shot
interaction
Player 1 (proposer) offers a sum to
Player 2
Player 2 can agree/disagree
Dictator Game
Player 1 (proposer) offers a sum to
Player 2
Player 2 has no choice
It was observed
19. UG:
Measure of self-interest and tolerance to
unfairness
DG
Undiluted measure of fairness
Observations
WEIRD consistently extreme
Surprisingly some cultures rejected offers
that were not only too low, but too high
Ultimatum game & Dictator game
Joseph Henrich
-
Fairness andCooperation in E
conomic Decision Making
20. Altruistic punishments the norm?
Altruistic Punishment in
Humans -
Fehr and Gächter
(2002)
Herrmann,Thoni and G
ächter (2008)
> Strange behavior of
anti-social punishments
24. Power Distance Index
The degree to which the less powerful members of a society
accept and expect that power is distributed unequally
- http://geert-hofstede.com/
Source: http://geert-hofstede.com/
26. Individualism
Vs.Collectivism
The degree to which
individuals are
integrated into groups”
In individualistic societies,
the stress is put on
personal achievements
and individual rights
Source: http://geert-hofstede.com/
28. Uncertainty Avoidance
Society's tolerance for
uncertainty and ambiguity”
Extent to which members of a
society attempt to cope with
anxiety by minimizing uncertainty
Source: http://geert-hofstede.com/
30. Masculinity
The distribution of emotional
roles between the genders
Masculine cultures' values are
competitiveness, assertiveness,
materialism, ambition and power
Whereas feminine cultures place
more value on relationships and
quality of life.
Source: http://geert-hofstede.com/
32. Pragmatism (vs. Normative)
How people relate to the fact
that so much that happens
around us cannot be explained
In societies with a normative
orientation most people have a
strong desire to explain as much as
possible
With a pragmatic orientation, most
people don’t have a need to explain
everything, as they believe that it is
impossible to understand fully the
complexity of life
Source: http://geert-hofstede.com/
34. Indulgence vs Restraint (IVR)
Indulgence stands for a society that
allows relatively free gratification of
basic and natural human drives
related to enjoying life and having
fun.
Societies with a low score in this
dimension have a tendency to cynicism
and pessimism
Restraint stands for a society that
suppresses gratification of needs
and regulates it by means of strict
social norms.
Source: http://geert-hofstede.com/
36. Are we ready for it?
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
PDI
IDV
UAI
MAS
PRA
IVR
Ideal
India
Source: http://geert-hofstede.com/
37. Self-organizationish
Agile Path
The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams
Anti-path
As a PM, I want productivity metrics, so that I can be sure the
team is not slacking away
We are completely self-organized within theTesting, DB, Dev and
UI teams
Practices
38. It says working product. Mine does !
Anti-path:
I am happy to accept change. But we will need a fool-proof
change control board and the customer has to pay for it
The customer doesn’t understand how good this feature/product
is
Agile Path take you must…
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.
Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive
advantage
Play games, visualize future etc.
Management
Agile value embrace you must
39. WVS - distribution
There is still hope
World values survey
Source:Worldvaluessurvey.org
41. I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and
I— I took the one less traveled
by,
And that has made all the
difference
- Robert Frost
Notes de l'éditeur
Welcome. This is a talk about Agile – some secrect shortcuts to Agile – some ideas from Cognitive science and anthropology that could impact the way we practice AgilityWhy this talk for me:The idea for this talk started when I was having a friendly banter with a well known author/Agilist – who said of my former organization, that they are making a basic mistake in Agility – the PM role!Why should you listen:This is what I looked like before I learnt all this. Then now I became like thisMy name is Ram Ramalingam – My father’s name is Ramalingam SumaithangiSivaramaIyer
The path to Agility, like everything else in life, you would have come to realize has a fork along the way..There is always an easy way out – What makes us take the easy way. The cognitive biases…
Will do a brief intro into cognitive science, as that is not the main idea behind this talk. Cognitive science: This road-forkis a metaphor to congnitive science as well – as described by Daniel KahnemanSystem 1 & 2 – the two roads divergingLeads to Congitive biases<8 min>
<Explain>
Some of the ways in which this cognitive bias creeps into our lives:<15 min>
Now, let us take a couple of anti-patterns, that involves taking a shortcut to Agility – and see why our cognitive biases cause it to happen
So why is this an Anti-path – well, probably because the story isn’t very user-centric. Its too systemic.
Is it all happy path with Agile? Or is the ideal path to Agility that we know becoming the Quick, rewarding, Familiar path?<25 min>
Why does it matter?If the assumptions behind what motivates people, what makes them more creative is different, then should the paths that lead to better software be the same?Are we teaching a swimmer to be a body builder or releasing a domesticated tiger in the wild? (survival of 33-50%)
Case in point is research done by Hencrich et al, in the last decade for Univ of Br Col.Disclaimer:Game theory is not a good enough predictor of real-worldbehaviourAxelrod’s simulations are fairly good estimators of evolutionarily stable strategies in Prisoners Dilemma
pair of anonymous subjects with a sum of real money for a one‐shot interaction.If subjects are motivated purely by self‐interest, responders should always accept any positive offer; knowing this, a self‐interested proposer should offer the smallest non‐zero amount
In the ealier research, reputation was key to driving co-operation. Is even that always true? What if the society celebrates free-riders and punishes co-operation?
Professor X<35 mins>
Otheralternatives - Trompenaars andHampden-Turner'sSevenDimensions of Culture
The degree to which individuals are integrated into groups". In individualistic societies, the stress is put on personal achievements and individual rights
The degree to which individuals are integrated into groups". In individualistic societies, the stress is put on personal achievements and individual rights
society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity". It reflects the extent to which members of a society attempt to cope with anxiety by minimizing uncertainty
The distribution of emotional roles between the genders". Masculine cultures' values are competitiveness, assertiveness, materialism, ambition and power, whereas feminine cultures place more value on relationships and quality of life.
The distribution of emotional roles between the genders". Masculine cultures' values are competitiveness, assertiveness, materialism, ambition and power, whereas feminine cultures place more value on relationships and quality of life.
That said. All is not lost – for those of us passionate about a world that is truly seeking Autonomy, Mastery and Connectedness - future doensnt have to be that bleak