Then it was onto the ballroom for the keynote address.  After some brief announcements (1400 participants representing 38 countries!!), Dave Thomas started his presentation. I took some notes, in the form of tweets from the Keynote, even though I was at first hesitant because of his slide forbidding any live tweeting due to copyright…but I was soon set straight that this was just a joke.  Here are some of the tweeted highlights from the keynote:

“Practices first, not about brands of methods. ”

“If you can’t do it with a card, you will do it worse with fancy tools.”

“If we are saying developers need to be enlightened, what about product owners?”

“Hire them young, they don’t know it can’t be done.”

“Lean is so simply, but it requires the ability to think, which makes it hard.”

“We do Kanban, we do scrum, we do XP, we’re all DUMB!” Haha, I liked this chant.

“Founders have magic powers. We need to nourish the leaders of tomorrow. Always seek to replace yourself.”

Here are some pics from the keynote address:

A quick scan of the ballroom.  It was packed!  Standing room only!

The rest of the day was filled with great presentations, including a hosted lunch where I shared a round table with David Hussman of Devjam.  The extended lunch was filled with great, thought provoking conversation, definitely worth the time.  I often find that most of the value of these types of conferences are in the connections you make and the conversations that happen outside of presentations.

For the remainder of the afternoon I popped in and out of several sessions, and had my regular conference anxiety of sitting in one session too long for fear of missing something else.  Definitely something I have to work on.  Now I look forward to heading to a Shipwreck party being sponsored by my good friends at VersionOne.

I plan on taking some video and pictures, so check back tomorrow to see highlights from tonight’s festivities.

Bill Gaiennie
@AgileAdvisor

Me snapping pictures!

20 minutes til keynote, and already filing up fast.

The Parfait line at breakfast was packed!

The rest of breakfast was awesome.  Those burritos rocked!!

More shots of the room.

Get here quick.  Between the time I took these photos until now, it is now almost completely full!
(At least at my table.  Come by, say hi, get your picture taken:)

Twitter: @AgileAdvisor

Twitter: @AgileAdvisor

Breakfast started the day, with a really nice spread, I wish I had a picture to show you, but believe me, it was great.  I got caught up with some old friends, met some new ones, and headed out to my first session “Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World.”  I was excited about the talk, but then soon realized that it was aimed primarily at folks new to Agile.  I was contemplating scooting to a new session when the fire alarm in the room went off, followed by an announcement stating we would have to evacuate the space and head outside.  So much for our session.  I joked as we headed out that it must have been those waterfall guys trying to throw a wrench in our conference.

Here is a short video of half the conference making their way outside:

After we all went back inside, the session picked up steam and stayed for the duration.  We ended up doing some team exercises, and it must have been the trainer/facilitator in me that had me on my feet with a marker in my hand before anyone could ask.

The second half of the day was great as well.  I spent a few hours in Jean Tabaka’s session “The Agile Organization: Apply Visioning and Learning Models.”  This session really hit home because of how much I relate to the Peter Senge type of materials about systems, learning organizations, and mental models.  So much about what I like to present within Agile is aligned with this aspect of the transition, the people factor.

That session took us through the end of the day, and here I am back in my room getting ready for the mixer and dinner with a friend.  I look forward to making more connections this week, so please find me if you happen to find this post.

Some things I wish they would improve on:

- Something other than coffee to drink!  At lunch, there was great food, but nothing to drink other than coffee, not even water!  I think this is a huge miss.

- Something to drink during the breaks.  The break snacks are great, but again, nothing to drink.  I think that if you pay $2,000 for a conference, they should offer something to drink.

That is about it.  Remember to follow me on Twitter for all the intraday jabbering!  @AgileAdvisor

My presentation can also be found there, titled “All You Need To Know Is That It’s Possible.”  My presentation addresses many of the excuses I have heard teams make over the years as to why Agile could not work for them.  Over time I came to find that most of these teams simply used this type of excuse to relieve themselves of the responsibility of having to try to make Agile work, a responsibility they would certain shoulder, but only if they allowed themselves to believe that the Agile approach might be able to offer the enormous gains that are touted.  These same teams spend great deals of energy in convincing themselves to believe that it is simply not possible for Agile (or seemingly any better approach) to work with their unique, product, team, culture, organization, etc.  They would tell me that they are just too different.  This presentation seeks to make the case that it is often the limiting beliefs held by people that keep them from being able to succeed with Agile.

Hopefully I will see some of you at Agile2010 in Orlando in a couple of weeks, I will be tweeting non-stop for those of you that cannot make it.  Follow me at @AgileAdvisor.

Here are some of the details:

Website (and Registration): http://www.southernfriedagile.com

When: Friday, July 23, 2010. 8:30a – 4:30p

Where: The Crowne Plaza Charlotte Hotel. 201 S. McDowell Street, Charlotte, NC 280204

How Much: $49 (super cheap!!)

Twitter Hashtag: #sfa2010

Want more information: Go to the website for a list of sponsors, speakers, and the sessions currently scheduled.

See you there!!

I frequently work with teams of people from a range of companies, industries, and backgrounds, and its during these sessions that I think back to those larger thoughts about how we experience our lives as individuals and as members of teams.  What makes some teams click, thrive, and deliver?  How do some groups of people truly share a common goal and work creatively to achieve it?  Why do some groups of people seem to only suffer through projects and then deliver dismal results, consistently?  What is the definable difference between the experiences of these different groups?  Why are some people happy with their job, their company, their project, their healthcare, their family, their car, their house, their spouse, their life, while others would seemingly choose to be dissatisfied no matter what they may be blessed with?  Where are the connection of neurons responsible for our ability to be happy and productive on a team?  And does this ability to choose happiness relate to better relationships and results at work?  How do I grant the gift of effortless success and indomitable growth to teams that struggle endlessly to achieve even modestly positive results?

To help me answer these questions, I turned to an insightful book The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. In the book authors Katzenback and Smith define a team as “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and a common approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”  Although I agree wholeheartedly with their definition, the book did not satisfy the curiosity I had about what components make certain teams tick and others tock.  I needed an understanding at a deeper level, I needed to examine the DNA of teams.  So instead of reading more about teams from a business perspective, I instead looked into those double helixes that seem to determine everything about us, our very own DNA, to see if any insight could be found.

The human genome project promised to finally unlock the secret recipe for what makes us who we are.  And like so many other great scientific promises of the past, it failed to yield an answer to everything, but rather provided a perfect foundation for even greater questions.  Although our DNA provides the building blocks for our physical being, it cannot alone explain the curiosities of individuals, from our personalities, to our attitudes, to our propensity for success, or our ability to trudge inexorably to failure.  This mysterious exclusion is expressed effectively in the observation of identical twins, where the DNA encoding remains identical, but where nearly all else is unique, especially when the brain is examined.

Like our DNA, we often cannot choose the members that make up our team, but equally similar to DNA, it is not simply the members of our team that pre-determine our possibilities.  Too often I hear individuals complain that consistent success would be possible if only they were assigned to the right team or if the right team were assigned to them.  This superficial failure of perspective can often become a self-fullfilling prophecy, yielding the expected negative results as a consequence of subconscious actions driven in support of the consciously expected outcome.  As with many mysteries of life, perspective and belief are more powerful than we allow ourselves to consider.  We seem to be more content to apply unreasoned reasons to our perceived consequences rather than seeking to drive meaning from those things for which we could have affected the outcome.

Recent discoveries in the world of science confirm the notion that we are more than our parts, both on the individual and team levels.  These scientific revelations point to a beautiful aspect of life that affirms that we are not limited by our structure, but are allowed infinite possibilities through the wonder of chaos; an inability and impossibility of perfectly predicting results based solely on observing conditions, thus free will is born and an infinite number of possible minds follows.  Author Jonah Lehrer states “that [this] is the triumph of DNA; it makes us without determining us.  The invention of neural plasticity, which is encoded by the genome, lets each of us transcend our genome.  We emerge, character-like, from the vague alphabet of our text.”  And as is true for individuals, it is equally true for how effectives teams can be, regardless of their own DNA, regardless of the individual components of the team.

Supporting these ideas, in a 2002 Science paper entitled “Stochastic Gene Expression in a Single Cell” Michael Elowitz of Caltech demonstrated that biological “noise” (a scientific synonym for chaos) is inherent in gene expression.  His results further solidified the unfolding scientific belief that it was this “noise” that held most of the possibilities for emergence in design for organisms, which contradicted the earlier collective belief that natural selection alone held this potential.  These discoveries, by extension, illuminated the idea that without this inclusion of chaos, then every cell that was created by the same DNA would operate, behave, and produce the same results, but we know that this is not the case.  In fact, without this beautiful inclusion to our evolution, we would not experience the diversity of life that we do.

Digging more deeply into what constitutes success in these complex adaptive systems (organized as teams), yields the result that diversity in experience, knowledge, personality, and drive is what allow them to truly excel.  The equivalent in nature was captured by Darwin when he wrote that ”the more diversified the descendants from any one species become in structure, constitution, and habits, by so much will they be better enabled to seize on many and widely diversified places in the polity of nature.”  A team’s diversity is one its greatest strengths, so long as the diversity is expressed and exercised regularly.

Teams are not doomed to failure as an inevitable consequence of the composition of it’s members.  Similarly, individuals are not merely limited to the sum of their specific DNA coded sequences.  And if these statements are true, how do we then affect better outcomes from both teams and individuals?  Just as individuals are formed by their experiences that shape their neurons, bringing temporary neural order to chaos, so too can teams also allow their experience to help bring consistency in results to their previously unpredictable outcomes.  But in order to make this happen, teams need two very important components in place: 1. An ability to clearly define their current state set against their preferred results (this allows the team to define the state of dissonance between reality and possibility, thus developing creative tension in the structure).  2. A mechanism that allows the team to utilize experience to shape future team decisions.

I am a firm believer that:

- Given the opportunity, most people would rather succeed than fail.
- People are very well aware of organizational constraints that limit their ability to achieve and succeed.
- Most people feel limited in their ability to affect change in their job.

So what is the answer?  How do we elicit better results from our teams?

If you are still with me this far, then it is only fair that I provide you an answer, right?  Unfortunately, as much as I would like to, I cannot provide an answer, only a direction.

The potential source for your organization’s power lies in the unexplored richness of experience and understanding held by your people.  You may believe that your organization actively solicits input and feedback, but if your organization is like most, you don’t, at least not well enough.  You will know when you have breached the barrier that separates average teams and corporate culture from their extraordinary equivalents.  You will know because you will discover the roar that exists on the other side of silence.  Do not dig unprepared for what you may find, the roar is often deafening.

Seeing this huge gap between team types begs the obvious question, what is the difference between the teams?  Is it company size? No. Is it the industry?  Nope, seen great teams in every industry including DoD, government, tech, and finance. Is it the goodies provided for free in the kitchen?  Maybe, but I don’t think so.

So what is the secret sauce of these hyper-productive teams?

As you might guess, it is not any one thing, but a combination of many different factors that all support the single-headed direction to support the creation and continued operation of a highly productive team.  So what are the ingredients?  Here is my unscientific, and definitely un-exhaustive list:

1. Great people.
   We cannot pretend that only process matters.  Spend any amount of time digging into great teams and you are likely to find a fair number of great people, people that would be great on any team.  Get enough of them together and you have a good shot at a great team.
2. Organizational culture supportive of making mistakes in pursuit of greater return results.
   Teams that are comfortable at making mistakes often find that they also produce extraordinary results.  True success is often comprised of multiple failed efforts that did not sink the team, but rather allowed the team to learn things they could not have learned otherwise.  Working within a corporate culture that recognizes this is a key component to super teams.
3. True team based delivery culture (which means this is also taken into account during things like individual’s annual reviews.)
   Teams that recognize that we are not simply individuals working in close proximity, but a team where we must all be engaged with one another’s work.  I tell teams looking to achieve amazing results that each member of the team must care as much about their neighbor’s work as they do their own.
4. Team members that share a sense of purpose, vision, and passion for their work.
   If team members believe that they are contributing to something greater than their individual part, then they will care at a much greater level than their individual contribution.  Work to ensure that a team can share this vision and goals begin to shape themselves.  Better yet, teams begin to manage their own incremental improvement, otherwise know as the team holy grail.
5. A company that cares as much (if not more) about their employees as they do about their customers.
   At the base of it all, we must feel appreciated at our place of work, or we may not be able to cobble together the above components.  Companies that treat their employees as commodities will likely only experience amazing, hyper-productive teams sporadically, rather than as a expected result of a team-based product development environment.

[Let me state clearly, this list could likely be much, much longer, so please feel free to add to it in the comments. Whole books can, and have, been written on the subject.]

A the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states “any system development activity inevitably changes the environment  out of which the need for the system arose” so true is it that any team activity will likely change the culture out of which it was born.  Corporate culture, although seemingly unchangeable when our teams operate seemingly at its mercy, is always in flux, as this cultural effect evolved not from proclaimed edict, but the work done by teams and the resulting response from the company in which they operate.  Changing this culture to enable and encourage hyper-productive teams is a joint effort from the great team that seeks to produce extraordinary results and the company that chooses to support the behavior that these teams exhibit.  Although it sounds like an easy choice for companies to make, you would be surprised just how often I encounter organizations that seem to want to thwart these great teams.

Have you had the pleasure of working on a team that was hyper-productive?  One that truly exemplified the notion that the whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts?  What was the secret that you found to be the linchpin to success?  Did you notice that happy teams produce better results?  Did you notice that teams that have fun together are able to more easily maneuver around obstacles that might otherwise sink an average team?  I hope so, because it is these experiences that will continue to push me to better define what those magical, secret ingredients are for those teams that define what it truly means to get work done.  And as my friend Rod Behbood says, “Do Work Son.”

Happy Easter everyone!