It's systems all the way down! - XP2016

@chrisvmcd - it’s systems all the way down!
it’s systems all the way down!

Chris McDermott
@chrisvmcd
Lean Agile Coach/Conference Organiser
http://leanagile.scot
@LeanAgileScot
5th, 6th & 7th of October 2016

A plan
• Why we work the way we work
• Appreciation of a system
• A shallow dive into complexity
• Thoughts on methods
• Guiding principles
• Examples of practices
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower

What words or phrases spring to mind when
you hear the words…
Analysis
Discuss with someone sitting next to you
Synthesis

United 173

Crew Resource Management

US Airways 1549

Why we work the way we work

Chunking

Mechanism

Adam Smith
“Division of labour” -
Wealth of Nations - 1776

Fredrick Winslow Taylor
The Principles of Scientiﬁc
Management - 1911

Alfred P Sloan
Decentralised operations
with coordinated control -
1920

Karl Marx
[The worker then
becomes] "depressed
spiritually and
physically to the
condition of a
machine"

Appreciation of a System

What is a system?
“An interconnected set of
elements which is
coherently organised in a
way that achieves
something”
Donnella Meadows

“Meaning exists in the
interaction between
things, not in the things
themselves"
Alicia Juarrero
Interaction

Interdependence
“Each part of the system,
when it affects the system, is
dependent on its affect for
some other part
In other words the parts
are interdependent”
Russell Ackoff

Defining Properties
“The essential or deﬁning
properties of any system
are properties of the
whole that none of its
parts have.”
Russell Ackoff

Feedback

Balancing & Reinforcing

Time

Boundaries

Holistic
“The systems
approach to
problems focuses
on systems taken
as a whole, not on
their parts taken
separately.”

Operation Cat Drop

Fundamental
Attribution Error
“We're blind to our
blindness.We have very little
idea of how little we know.
We're not designed to know
how little we know.”
Daniell Kahneman

System v Individual
95% of the
performance of
an organisation is
attributable to
the system
(processes,
technology, work
design,
regulations, etc)
and 5% are
attributable to
the individual
W Edwards
Deming

GM Freemont

NUMMI

Shallow dive into Complexity

Complicated systems
“[Taylor] has probably
had a greater effect on
the private and public
lives of the men and
women of the
twentieth century
than any other single

Complex systems
“Linearity is seductive"
Dave Snowden

Volunteers

Is software development complex?
“It's tough to make
predictions, especially
about the future.”
Yogi Berra

Thoughts on methods

Waterfall
• Analytic thinking
• Constrains self organisation - governing constraints
• Doesn’t appreciate the impact of time
• Highly constrained - rigid structure

Purpose
“The whole problem with the world
is that fools and fanatics are always
so certain of themselves, and wiser
people so full of doubts.”
Bertrand Russell

Agile
A way of working that accepts we
can’t know everything in advance and
things we do know about might
change.
We manage this by intervening in
social systems through the use of
processes that promote learning
which enable organisations to adapt
quickly when new information
emerges.

Scrum

Sub-optimisation

Lean
“All we are doing is looking
at the time line, from the
moment the customer gives
us an order to the point
when we collect the cash.
And we are reducing the
time line by reducing the
non-value adding wastes.
Taiichi Ohno

Kanban on Systems

Kanban on Emergence
• Start with what you do now
• understanding current processes, as actually practiced
• Agree to pursue improvement through  
evolutionary change
• Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally

Kanban on Interactions
“Kanban provides a linear
view of your social
network” - Jabe Bloom

Kanban on Time
• Knowledge work is
perishable
• Establish ﬂow

Kanban on Resilience
• Defer commitment
• Create Slack

Holistic Kanban
• Who asks us to do the work?
(boundaries)
• What do we do with the work?
(interactions, feedback)
• Where does it go when we are done?
(boundaries)

Kanban’s Constraints
• Limit work in progress
• Make policies explicit
• Cadences

@chrisvmcd - it’s systems all the way down

Continuous Delivery
"potentially shippable"... seriously, "do
or do not, there's not bloody
potentially shippable software"
- Torbjörn Gyllebring

Devops

“There is nothing quite so
useless, as doing with great
efﬁciency, something that
should not be done at all.”
Peter Drucker

Lean UX

Exploration Exploitation
Complex Complicated
LeanUX
LeanStartup
Kanban
BDD
Continuous Delivery
Scrum
Prince 2 (?)
Six Sigma (?)

Principles for managing complex
organisations

Situational Awareness

Shared Understanding

Common Purpose

Decentralised Decision Making

Experimentation

Trust
“Trust is the metric for the quality of social
connection”
Marc Burgauer

Examples of practices

Teamverløtung

Cross functional autonomous teams

Collision space

Community of Practice

Pareto Team Stability

Organisational Split

Anything else you can think of?
• Visualisation
• …
Discuss with someone sitting next to you

Thinking in Systems
• Think:
• Interactions
• Interdependence
• Feedback
• Temporally
• Holistically
• Resilience
• Emergence
• Purpose

Thank you!

References

Sources
“What is the value of Social Capital” - Jabe Bloom : https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=7n4a1VOW7H8
“Culture is theTrue North - Scaling at Jimdo" - Arne Roock : http://www.infoq.com/articles/
scaling-at-jimdo
“Nilan Peiris and the culture of growth atTransferWise” - Boss Level Podcast : http://
www.bosslevelpodcast.com/15
Anything from Russell Ackoff  
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=russell+ackoff
Jabe Bloom on SystemsThinking  
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/jabe-bloom-systems-thinking-lean-ux14
John Seddon Keynote Rethinking IT  
https://vimeo.com/19122939

Images
http://a1.files.biography.com/image/upload/c_fit,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,h_1200,q_80,w_1200/MTMxMTc0MTUyNTc1OTIwNzcx.jpg
http://bridgeforcefinancial.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/BIF-BIF7DanPink976.jpg
http://valao.de/images/cms/jimdo/jimdo-logo.png
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Angell-Yogi-Berra1-1200-630-23191047.jpg
https://www.flickr.com/photos/27764576@N06/17241876888/in/photostream/
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/7e/f9/1b/7ef91b6d360d4a6fd2e338bccde68078.jpg
http://wisedecisions.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Fotolia_8284502_M.jpg
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1295422/images/o-SCOTLAND-FANS-WEMBLEY-facebook.jpg

More Images
https://pixabay.com/en/clock-mechanism-hour-s-watch-works-544426/
http://ackoffcenter.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8345244ea69e20111688f4568970c-pi
http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/53a4944aecad042a40e04921/daniel-kahneman-investors-need-to-stop-believing-they-can-know-the-future.jpg
http://content9.flixster.com/question/53/76/67/5376679_std.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Fugle,_%C3%B8rns%C3%B8_073.jpg
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/192pmyvahzkfsjpg/original.jpg
http://5cience.net/userdata/images//275/b3e2b00a.jpg
https://sherhaps.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/16959-helmet_cat.jpg
http://gloriumtech.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/coolv-moss-mh-round-2500x1443.jpg
https://www.flickr.com/photos/27764576@N06/16831729184/in/album-72157651963367835/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/27764576@N06/14074504295/
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/actiontrumpseverything/files/2012/05/47311_Papel-de-Parede-Planeta-Terra_1600x12001.jpg
https://nothinginbiology.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/doc.jpgP[

It's systems all the way down! - XP2016

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It's systems all the way down! - XP2016