Tag Archives: Tony Ponton

Episode 182: Unlearn-ing with Barry O’Reilly

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Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and (despite a bin rolling by) sit down with Barry O’Reilly, co-author of “Lean Enterprise” and author of “Unlearn” and they talk about:

  • Reminiscing about Barry’s resume that includes CitySearch (and its competitor Zip2 owned by Elon Musk), Snake, Wireless Pets on Nokia and Lilo & Stitch using J2ME and eventually onto ThoughtWorks
  • Lean Enterprise was written after “The Lean Startup” was released but to explain how it works if you are not a startup and increase experimentation in organisations
  • When people can design good disciplined experiments, you have system to break down problems and grow your system and people
  • Fortune 15 executives and successful startup leaders don’t sit around and ask “if we are doing the framework correctly”- they have their own system, in the same way as Toyota created their own system
  • If you choose an off-the-shelf framework it is just a starting point – you need to evolve your system of work to your context to have a competitive advantage
  • ExecCamp – take execs out of their business for up to 8 weeks with the aim to disrupt themselves in a safe environment
  • Unlearn – we are in an industry where we need to learn but that is not the limiting behaviour, it is our inability to unlearn our existing behaviours that holds us back from getting breakthroughs of higher performance
  • YOW! talk “Why Great Leaders Must Unlearn to Succeed“
  • Mean time to discovery – how quickly can you see that an assumption is invalid so that you can then make better decisions
  • How often are you spending time with customers, how are you getting customer feedback and how are you feeding that information back into your system of work to improve it
  • Think big but start small and learn fast – safe to fail experiments
  • Agility is hard…
  • Everybody has a need to unlearn

TheAgileRevolution-182 (37 minutes)

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Episode 181: Change it with the BOSSAnova with Jutta Eckstein

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Craig and Tony are at YOW! conference in Brisbane and chat with Jutta Eckstein, author of “Agile Software Development in the Large“, “Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams“, “Retrospectives for Organisational Change” “Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in Your Project Portfolio” with Johanna Rothman and “Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy: Survive & Thrive on Disruption” with John Buck

  • Smalltalk and pattern languages was where a lot of the early work and a lot of the early players converged
  • Scrum had great marketing and certification over Extreme Programming
  • Agile Software Development in the Large came out in 2004 and was probably way before its time
  • Craig Larman and Bas Vodde book “Scaling Lean & Agile Development“
  • IBM book “A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum“
  • A framework is not really necessary, stick with the Agile values and principles regardless of your context
  • Heart of Agile (and Tony’s rant on scaling)
  • 40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes
  • Retrospectives are great for any sort of change, not just software
  • There is no way of becoming Agile as a company without the CFO on board and moving from yearly budgeting – beyond budgeting assists from both the money side and the strategic side
  • Sociocracy looks at the organisation from the structure side – we need to build structures that allow us to make decisions more quickly through double linking and built in feedback loops
  • Open Space techniques are essential for facilitation and product liftoff and about using the passion of the people for innovation of your products
  • If you trust people maybe its cheaper than checking procedures
  • Need some background, come up with a hypothesis, design some experiments and measure
  • Experiments need to be safe to fail – either if the hypothesis is not true or the outcome is not valuable
  • Not “safe to fail” but “failing safely” or “safe to learn”
  • Publish your experiments so people can learn from each other (even if only internally)
  • agilebossanova.com – collecting stories
  • Agile Alliance Speaker Reimbursement initiative – support for Agile meetups and conferences to bring in external speakers and go towards cover travel reimbursements

TheAgileRevolution-181 (41 minutes)

Episode 180: Extreme Programming & 3X Explained with Kent Beck

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Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and have a rockstar moment and catchup with Kent Beck, the creator of Extreme Programming, the pioneer of xUnit and author of numerous books including “Extreme Programming Explained” and “Test Driven Development“:

  • Extreme Programming (XP) was born at Chrysler by letting go of conventional wisdom and pushing practices to eleven
  • Software development is a social process, not a sum of individuals process
  • Nobody cares about certificates, we care about competence
  • It’s time for a renaissance and reboot of XP – this time it needs to be inclusive and no barriers to entry
  • We know how to make a difference – it starts with execution and continues to empathy
  • Big tent agility can become an excuse not to tackle hard problems
  • “Not thinking about all the legs on the stool leaves you sitting on the ground” – some of the legs of agility require a fundamental change in belief
  • As a programmer am I responsible for my code running – once you have that belief, unit testing falls out of that
  • TDD is a set of feedback loops and an incentive system to encourage confidence and certainty
  • Test, Commit, Revert takes TDD further – run the tests, if they pass you commit and if they fail you revert the changes – incentive to take small steps
  • “Silence is the sound of risk” – you need feedback (unless you are perfect)
  • XP was a better product, but it lost (round one)
  • Electric or blade?
  • If XP starts with the premise that we want a process that anyone with talent and skill can contribute and grow at maximum velocity, the rest will take care of itself
  • Agile as a name is so attractive, nobody doesn’t want to be agile – the brand of Extreme Programming means if you are not extreme you are not going to say that you are
  • The fundamental question to ask first is “what do we have to lose” – if you have nothing to lose you need to try short and crazy experiments to find things nobody else is doing
  • 3X model (explore, expand, extract) – YOW! keynote “3x Explore, Expand, Extract” – depends which part of the curve you are on as to which tools in your bag you should use, rules of the game change depend on whether you are looking for a new source of value (explore), growing fast and trying to keep up (expand) or continue growing to pay for new explorations (extract)
  • poker vs software development
  • we will win with community and inclusion

TheAgileRevolution-180 (45 minutes)

Episode 179: The Heart of Agile Distilled with Alistair Cockburn

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Tony and guest host Phil Gadzinski talk to Alistair Cockburn for a brief overview and understanding about the Heart of Agile (and the link to how it all started in Australia):

  • Scrum training had turned into training wheels and consistency – wanted to get back to the essence of Agile
  • Progression from shu (follow techniques), ha (collect techniques) and ri (fluency) – wanted to move to a fourth stage – kokoro (heart or essence of being a samurai – master the basics)
  • Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve – simple and direct, just do this and you will get all the benefits out of Agile
  • Normally you start with collaborate (because it’s the easiest and most obvious place to start) but there is no real starting point
  • Deliver is misunderstood – forget software and product, we are delivering decisions, it is the molecule of our work, every decision needs to see the harsh light of day so we can find the bad decisions early
  • What is the smallest that we could expose to review to try and correct decisions early before we build too much (directional decisions)
  • Create a culture of listening

This interview was originally recorded as a video for the Agile Brisbane meetup.

TheAgileRevolution-179 (17 minutes)

Episode 178: YOW! Speaker Vox Pop with Randy Shoup, Dean Wampler, Mark Hibberd, Dave Thomas & Michele Playfair

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Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and wander around the hallways talking to different speakers, hosts and attendees:

TheAgileRevolution-178 (33 minutes)

Episode 175: Self Selecting Teams & Olympic Lessons with Sandy Mamoli

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Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and chat with Sandy Mamoli, Agile Advisor and Coach at Nomad8 and co-author of “Creating Great Teams” and they chat about:

  • Nomad8 is a managerless agile coaching collective in New Zealand, based on the Crisp model
  • The lost podcast
  • Kanbanfor1 (and Jim Benson – Personal Kanban)
  • “Creating Great Teams” book with David Mole – based on the journey at Trade Me, if people can organise themselves for a Ship It day it should work for everyday work
  • You do not need to change reporting structures to make self selection work nor does the size of the organisation matter
  • Original paper on Self Selection
  • Larger companies should probably split to tribes of no larger than 150-200 people
  • Heidi Helfand – “Dynamic Reteaming” book and podcast
  • Should do self selections again every 6-9 months
  • Team structures can change during a self selection as required
  • You usually need multiple rounds of self selection, rounds are usually about 10 minutes long
  • YOW! 2017 talk “How the Olympics Can Make You a Better Person” and Agile Australia talk
  • “Be the worst player on the best team that will take you” – allows you to amplify learning
  • AgileWelly
  • State of Agile in New Zealand – along with Australia are ahead of the USA due to smaller companies, age of companies, less fear and more innovation
  • Agile Principle and Modern Agile  and Liftoff cards
  • Holocracy – pushing decisions into circles has allowed fast and good decisions, this will continue to evolve
  • #JAFAC conference

TheAgileRevolution-175 (40 minutes)

Episode 173: Modern Agile (Is Not A Framework) with Joshua Kerievsky

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Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and catch up with Joshua Kerievsky, CEO of Industrial Logic and founder of Modern Agile and they talk about:

  • Episode 20: Lean Start-ups with Joshua Kerievsky
  • Industrial Logic and the Extreme Programming Playing Cards
  • If you are a consulting company and don’t have your hands dirty building a product, you are missing out – try it out on yourselves before you try it out on your customers
  • Episode 116: The Heart of Modern Agile
  • Modern Agile recognises that there are other people who are not building software who also want to be agile and want to leverage the agile and lean concepts
  • Modern Agile principles – Make People Awesome, Make Safety a Prerequisite, Experiment and Learn Rapidly and Deliver Value Continuously
  • Lightweight methods movement came out of minimalism, but now we are in the Agile Industrial Complex – Agile has lost its simplicity and lightweight qualities
  • People need recipes to get started but we often get stuck on these
  • Forrest Gumping – stupid is as stupid does!
  • A lot of methodologists don’t pay attend to economics – be too idealistic and you won’t make money
  • We are in the business of helping individuals be agile, not organisations
  • Make people awesome is about being obsessed with our customers and making each other awesome in our organisations
  • Kathy Sierra – “Badass: Making Users Awesome” – focus on making the user awesome, not the product
  • Make safety a prerequisite – anzeneering – you can’t make anyone awesome if you can’t protect them
  • Project Aristotle – psychological safety is important for high performance
  • Modern Agile Meeting Agreements Poster
  • “Modern Agile is not a framework” – sing along!
  • * “The leftovers” – we value the things on the left over…
  • Modern Agile activities catalogue
  • Modern Agile Show
  • YOW! 2017 talk “Modern Agile“

TheAgileRevolution-173 (41 minutes)

Episode 167: Unlearning and the Improv Effect with Jessie Shternshus

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Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and with guest revolutionist Toby Thompson (who was sitting at the table and initially didn’t want to speak on the podcast but then we couldn’t keep him quiet!) catch up with Jessie Shternshus, CEO at The Improv Effect and author of “CTRLShift“:

  • Agile 2015 keynote “Individuals, Interactions and Improvisation“
  • CTRLShift – 50 games for different types of days you might be happening
  • Agile Australia keynote “Unlearning: The Challenge of Change“
  • When you are facilitating you need to know your audience and believe in what you are doing – to get people involved, do things in small groups in partners so nobody has the attention on them initially and then build them up to group activities
  • Make people safe and get them to laugh – then you have them for the ride
  • Tony imitates a dinosaur (which we keep telling him doesn’t work on a podcast)
  • Introduction Tiebacks – introduce yourself as the facilitator and then when it comes to your turn tie your introduction back to the person who came before you
  • Game ideas come from twists on old games or from things people say
  • Last Letter Conversation – use the last letter from what someone just said to be the first letter of what you say
  • Improv Encyclopedia and a bunch of books are good resources but are usually made for actors (so you need to amend for the workplace)
  • “Improvisation For The Spirit” and “Improv Wisdom” are books more geared towards people and everyday life
  • Agile Australia keynote from Martin Fowler “Agile in 2018” around faux agile
  • Our brains have a hard job letting go, need to help people figure out what’s in it for them (the haveta versus the wanna)
  • The Backwards Brain Bicycle
  • Helping people change comes back to listening and empathy
  • Walkshop – 4 day hike for leaders to help them unlearn and connect
  • Unlearning – need to find experiential learning that helps people unlearn – backwards number game or name things around the room differently
  • Mayor of Weirdsville – dealing with pushback, pretend you are the mayor, make a proclamation and then the rest of the town has to poke holes in your idea

TheAgileRevolution-167 (25 minutes)

Episode 166: A Trip Down Agile Memory Lane with Jeff Smith

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Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and talk to their former leader Jeff Smith, EVP and COO at World Fuel Services and former CEO of Suncorp Business Services:

  • Australian Agile journey took him from Telstra, to a small startup and then to Suncorp, and later IBM and World Fuel Services
  • Scale of thought is more important than scale of people
  • The Suncorp Agile Academy was born out of the fact that learning matters, but the idea was for other companies to create content that could be shared in the Agile community which did not happen
  • Suncorp Building Quality In program
  • It all comes down to great people and working through problem
  • It’s hard for companies to build great leaders that are interested in building great teams
  • Jeff Smith keynote “Leading an Agile Company“
  • Availability is not a skillset
  • Thinking from a team point of view is important – at World Fuel for example, the MTR dropped 80% due to this approach
  • Don’t waste time on people who don’t want to follow what you want to do
  • Most companies surround themselves with the companies being disrupted, not the disruptors – need to work with people and companies who want to change the game
  • You learn a lot from being around better people
  • For ANZ, the key to their Agile journey has been that CEO Shayne Elliott was willing to spend time outside the organisation and learn
  • You need to be structured to support end to end cross functional teams formed around the work – the structure of the team matters
  • The next disruption is the physical versus virtual world, in particular what happens to things like networking appliances
  • It’s easy when something is new to find ways to shut it down, its harder to keep it going

TheAgileRevolution-166 (33 minutes)

Episode 165: Two Years and Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad

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Craig and Tony sit down for a personal chat with the microphone turned on for the first time in 2 years (that is not an interview) (wow, time files…), unfortunately without Renee who was out sick:

TheAgileRevolution-165 (69 minutes)