Slides for my presentation at ALE2012, "Cargo Cult Agile Training & Coaching". About common problems and pitfalls related to how we think and judge, and how they may affect the way we act when helping others to learn and work around Agile

1. August 29th 2012
Barcelona (Spain)
Cargo Cult Agile training &
coaching
Jose Luis Soria
jlsoria@plainconcepts.com
@jlsoriat

2. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of
good materials, and they want the same thing to
happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things
like runways, to put fires along the sides of the
runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in,
with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones
and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's
the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to
land. They're doing everything right. The form is
perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But
it doesn't work. No airplanes land. — Richard
Feynman, physicist
(http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3043/1/CargoCult.pdf)

3. What is a Cargo Cult?
• Religious practice focused on
obtaining goods (cargo) by
means of magic and rituals
• Based on irrational beliefs and
behavior
• Used as a metaphor for many
fields (politics, economics,
journalism…)
• More info: http://bit.ly/lruvbd
http://bit.ly/zhWL

4. http://bit.ly/1alLpQ

5. Cargo Cults have repeatedly been used as
a metaphor for software development and
Agile practices…
• Steve McConnell http://bit.ly/5voCM4
• Maxx Daymond http://bit.ly/gZ57Kk
• James Shore http://bit.ly/aek5r9
…usually describing “doing Agile but not
being Agile” kind of behavior

6. Do we behave the same way
when we are involved in Agile
training or coaching?

7. Training or coaching?
Tell me and I will listen,
show me and I will remember,
involve me and I will understand.
Confucius

8. While being quite different disciplines, both
training and coaching deal with helping
people to benefit from knowledge.
So both can be affected by the same kind
of misbehaviors

9. Subject matter: things being
addressed while training or
coaching
Agile practices map (http://guide.agilealliance.org/subway.html)

10. Potential issues: behavioral
patterns affecting training or
coaching
• Cognitive biases: deviations in judgment
that affect decisions, memory, perception
and rationalism
• (Logical) fallacies: bad reasoning caused
by wrong assumptions or misconceptions
we can be prepared to avoid them

11. The 7 habits of
Cargo Cult
people

12. Habit #1:
Replicate (wrong or incomplete)
past circumstances, trying to
obtain the same outcomes

13. Bias: Confirmation bias
• Selectively pick only the evidence that
confirms my beliefs or whishes
• Several kinds: biased search for
information, biased interpretation, biased
memory

14. Avoiding: Confirmation Bias
• Casual observations are subjected to bias.
Try to get the whole picture before
recommending specific practices
• Try to explain always the underlying
principles supporting the evidence

15. Habit #2:
Fail to identify the cause of an
outcome

16. Fallacy: Correlation proves
causation
• Mistake two
correlated events
for one causing the
other
• Ignore other
correlated events
or factors

17. Avoiding: Correlation Proves
Causation
• Correlation is a necessary, but not
sufficient condition, for causality. Look for
additional evidence before
recommending or discarding particular
practices
• Don’t break inference rules while making
decisions

20. Habit #3:
Ignore how the practice
actually works

21. Bias: Dunning-Kruger Effect
• Unskilled, and
unaware of it
• Adherence to
superficial signs of
the idea
• “Ignorance more
frequently begets
confidence than
does knowledge” –
Charles Darwin

22. Avoiding: Dunning-Kruger Effect
• Keep in mind that you’re ignorant about
many things
• Don’t teach or coach a practice if you
are not confident enough about it
• Don’t be confident on a practice that
you’ve not experimented by yourself
• Knowledge unveils ignorance
• Make it very clear when you speak about
a practice that you don’t know

23. Habit #4:
Strengthen beliefs when
finding conflicting evidence

24. Bias: Backfire Effect
• Reject evidence contradictory to one’s
beliefs
• Strengthen support on these beliefs
• Favor process over principles

25. Avoiding: Backfire Effect
• Keep in mind that you’re ignorant about
many things
• Don’t teach or coach a practice if you
are not confident enough about it
• Don’t be confident on a practice that
you’ve not experimented by yourself
• Knowledge unveils ignorance
• Make it very clear when you speak about
a practice that you don’t know

28. Habit #5:
Pay attention only to success
and ignore failure

29. Bias: Survivorship Bias
• Draw conclusions from
people or things that
survived a process, or
succeeded, ignoring the
ones that didn’t
I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career.
I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been
trusted to take the game winning shot and
missed. I've failed over and over and over again
in my life. And that is why I succeed - Michael
Jordan

30. Avoiding: Survivorship Bias
• Beware that one or few successful cases
may hide lots of failed ones
• Failure contains more lessons than
success. Look for the cases where the
practice has failed and try to draw the
most information
• Don’t learn only from success

33. Habit #6:
Adopt a practice because
many others do so

34. Bias: Bandwagon Effect
• As more people
adopt a practice,
others “jump on the
bandwagon”,
without considering
the reasons or the
environment

35. Avoiding: Bandwagon Effect
• Consider if the practice might work for the
team being coached, regardless of how
popular it is

38. Habit #7:
Develop a preference for
familiar things

39. Bias: Exposure Effect
• “Better the devil you know” behaviour
• Preference for using familiar practices,
even if they’re not well suited for the
undergoing task

40. Avoiding: Exposure Effect
• Continuously recycle and improve your
knowledge
• Consider alternatives

41. Other biases and fallacies
affecting training/coaching
• Overestimate how much people agree with you
(false-consensus effect)
• Be unable to impartially think about a subject you
master (curse of knowledge)
• Draw different conclusions from the same
information (framing effect)
• Misuse games to model real-life situations (ludic
fallacy)
• Attribute success to yourself but failure to external
factors (self-serving bias)
• Believe that you can explain a thing because you
know its name (nominal fallacy)

42. Summary: what to look for
• Watch out for biases
• Watch out for fallacies
• Don’t jump to conclusions too quickly
• Be aware of your state of mind
• Avoid irrational behavior

43. Jose Luis Soria
jlsoria@plainconcepts.com
http://geeks.ms/blogs/jlsoria
@jlsoriat
http://www.slideshare.net/jlsoria
ALM Team Lead at Plain Concepts
Professional Scrum Trainer at scrum.org
We try not to train/coach like this! http://bit.ly/bCRBlI