Agile and organizational learning

1. THE AGILE COLONY
Getting insights from natural system to create an
Agile “Living”Company

2. Speaker: RAZVAN OLARIU
- Geographer - bachelor thesis in Paleoclimatology;
- online student : Coursera and Santa Fe Institute of Complexity Science;
- 1 year and a half in a local IT company starting as
“The manager with the lowest income”in the company
to later becoming
an Agile enthusiast
(currently applying Agile in 2 projects)
- Lean Startup

3. FROM: “Industrial Era”
Scientific Management (Taylorism)
- End 19th century until 1960-1970;
-Capital and labor;
- Bureaucracy;
- Hierarchies;
-Standardized work;
-“Squeezing” people;
-- machine-like model
TO: “Knowledge Era”
- Knowledge and information are the resources
on which competitiveness is created;
-Emphasize on communication and collaboration;
- getting insights from natural living systems;
-Organizational Learning : creating, retaining
and transferring knowledge;
-Knowledge Management: capturing, developing,
-sharing, and effectively using knowledge;
Information Era
“Learning is a lifelong process of keeping
abreast of change. And the most pressing task
is teaching people how to learn.”
(Peter Drucker)
“We should work on our process, not the
outcomes of our process.”
(Edwards Deming)

4. Post Knowledge Era ?
- Increased connectivity and exponential growth of information;
- the returns of Information and knowledge have flattened;
- paralysis by analysis;
- next scarce resource: the ability to focus on the right information in the decision making process;
- Learning should become a collaborative process!!!

5. Describe how Agile is designed to acquire and spread knowledge
My Goals:
Offer my view through the lens of Complexity Science of how Agile brings
insights from the realm of living networks to create a successful model for the
Knowledge Era
Present a personal model of how Agile should be improved in order to make the
transition to a Post-Knowledge Era

6. “The best architectures, requirements and design emerge from
self-organized teams.”
(Agile Manifesto)

7. Loren Carpenter Pong Experiment

8. AN AGILE
AS AN ANT COLONY

9. An ant colony:
No one is in charge
Emergent behavior through simple rules (ex. ant
hill aging stages) cyclically applied
An Agile team:
“Simplicity –the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential”.
(Agile Manifesto)
- Most of the Agile’s tools and processes are simple designed and applied daily and in
iterations: Scrum meetings, pair programming etc.
Daily Scrum - asking the same simple questions day by day can bring into light
important insights
Recursiveness –nature’s strategy to generate complexity

10. Ant Foraging (NetLogo simulation):
- Ants move randomly in many different directions.
When an ant encounters a food source it returns to
the nest, leaving a
Pheromone trail.
- In the absence of reinforcement , he pheromone will
dissipate;
- at any given time the existing trails and their
strengths , encode the colony’s collective information
about the food
environment.
This information adapts to changes in environmental
conditions.

11. Task allocation
-Workers in a colony divide themselves into:
-Nest maintenance - patrolling -foraging - refuse sroting
-How is it that at a specific time the ants decide what task to perform?
-The number of workers pursuing each kind of task adapts to changes in the
environment
Ants decide to adopt particular tasks as a function of :
- what they encounter in the environment
- Their rate of interaction with ants performing different tasks.

12. Emergence
– when networks have properties not present in constituent individuals;
-As a management principle – “The guiding structures that stimulate individuals
to coordinate their activities, in a focused way, of their own volition”
(J. Birkinshaw)
-decision making is an act of collective wisdom
-allowing employees to decide what motivates them
Benefits:
-Responsiveness to a changing environment;
- it energizes the ones involved;
-Enables creativity;

13. Case Study: Valve
-Non hierarchical;
- no job titles, no job descriptions and no employees called “bosses”;
- every employee can initiate projects, and choose which projects to work on;
- each project decides for itself about testing, how often to meet (not very),
-and what the goal is;
-Bonuses for top performances – peers review others performances – high
-Hiring - multiple rounds of interviewing by many employees
“A fearless adventure in knowing what to do when
no one’s there telling you what to do.”

14. Self Organization
-No clear distinction with emergence;
-Stated as one of the principles of the Scrum
Since it’s first definition by Takeuchi & Nonaka
Governing “at the edge of chaos”
- confused with anarchy;
-we should not be afraid by chaos and big fluctuations;
-Ken Schwaber “the pressure cooker of the deadline ”

15. Leadership in a self organized team?
-Influence by acting upon environment ;
-Managers set the goal and let the team to self organize to achieve it;
-Establish enough checkpoints to prevent instability, ambiguity and tension;
-Act to increase spontaneity and creativity;
-Takeuchi & Nonaka – “control by peer pressure” and “control by love”

16. So what makes an Agile Company
a “Living Company”?
Emergence
Self Organization
Recursiveness
AND …

17. “Responding to change over following a plan.”(Agile Manifesto)

18. ”The ability to learn faster than your competitors
may be the only sustainable competitive
advantage.” Arie de Geus,
“The Living Company”
-1983 – conducted a study on Shell on corporate longevity
-Companies being in place for hundreds of years = “Living companies”
-they depend on the ability of a company’s managers to absorb what is going on in
the business environment and to act on that information with appropriate business moves
-they rely on organizational learning;
How does a company learn and adapt?
What is planning’s role in corporate learning?

19. Role of Management : Planning as learning
The only relevant learning in a company is the learning done by those people who
have the power to act;
-facilitator, catalyst, and accelerator of the Organizational learning process
- changing the rules, or suspending them, could be a spur to learning

20. HOW DOES LEARNING TAKES PLACE IN AN AGILE COMPANY?
“The New New Product Development Game” (Takeuchi & Nonaka, 1986)
"At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective,
then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly."(Agile Manifesto)
“Multilearning” Organizational transfer of learning
- members of the project team stay in close
touch with outside sources of information;
-learning by doing - across two dimensions:
-across multiple levels (individual, group, and
corporate) and
-across multiple functions -Experts are encouraged
to accumulate experience in areas other
than their own
-through “osmosis”—by assigning
key individuals to subsequent projects;
- by converting project activities
to standard practice

21. LEARNING IN AGILE
Scrum
Kanban Task Boards
Pair Programming
Iterations
Burndown Charts
Code Review Meetings
-These are tools for learning through collaboration;
- But most of the learning process takes place inside the team;

22. Question :
Are these tools enough to facilitate
the transition to the post knowledge era?
My assumption:
Agile leaves room for improvement especially in building
communication channels among different teams

23. Agile practices to enhance knowledge transfer among teams:
Scrum of Scrums Attending workshops
Online courses
Ex: Scrum of Scrums
- an hierarchical model rather than a networked one

24. Example:
- Online courses – internal or external trainers;
- Webinars and Techtalks
- Internal communication channels (IM Tools, E-mail)
- Online Library access

25. My Model:
1.From Online Courses to MOOC’s
-Better adapted for an era of information overload
-Way to connect and collaborate, to engage people in the learning process;
- emphasize on discussion forums;
- Teacher job is rather to facilitate exchanges between participants;
- goal is interaction and exchange : facilitating the production of additional elements
of knowledge
-evaluation done by other peers in the course

26. 2. Communication channels to store and structure information

27. 3. TechTalks and presentations should be designed more for enhancing debate
- They should resemble more the Scrum meetings

28. 4. Seminars on “learning how to learn” techniques and public speaking
Dealing with procrastination - doing more pleasurable things in place of less
pleasurable ones;
overlearning - continue to study what you've already mastered;
Einstellung - an idea that's already in your mind and you feel
comfortable with may prevent a better idea to show up.

29. Conclusions:
-Agile resemble patterns from the realm of natural world in order to build a model
opposed to “Command and Control” specific for the Knowledge Era;
-Agile was designed to respond change and responding change is learning
- Agile leaves room for improvement
-Agile should emphasize more on cross-team harvesting of knowledge in an era of
Information overload