Abstract (280 chars)

What if you could organize and motivate people to double their highest-expected productivity goals? Lessons from a large, distributed, volunteer group of online video gamers offer practical 21^st-century guidance for your workplace. Even if you aren't a gamer. Or a space pirate.

Abstract (full)

What if you could gather and motivate people to double even their highest-expected productivity goal? What if you had no authority over those people -- if they were all volunteers?

The future of leadership is emerging to guide 21st-century organizations beyond the small, cross-functional, green-field software development teams of the 1990s. Agile enterprises must respond to emerging markets, provide unity of purpose to workers with conflicting motivations, and foster order when change is the only constant. Agile leadership must cope with distributed teams, "gig economy," diverse skill-sets, and the impact to morale of unexpected changes. But the measure of success is still delivery to the market: volume, quality, reliability.

Early in 2017, a group of several hundred independent players of the online futuristic video game Elite:Dangerous faced all the above organizational challenges yet still managed unprecedented delivery to their market. And they did it despite the "me first" culture of online games.We'll explore the structural, social, and cognitive factors which enabled this large distributed team of casual volunteers to deliver twice as much as their nearest competition. And we'll uncover how to amplify those factors in your own workplace.

You'll learn the powerful effects of making individual contributions visible, expanding the scope of your regular team synchronizations, having a loose leadership hierarchy, and encouraging diffusion of innovation. And you'll see how community engagement is an essential quality of a servant leadership culture. This is a compelling story about leadership that's relatable to anyone regardless of their interest in or experience with Agile, online gaming, or space pirates.

The modern organization is at war with complexity. The code for a typical webpage is the size of a typical video game from the 1990s. "Standards are great, there's so many to choose from." Projects have multiple stakeholders and ever-changing, conflicting Priority One features. Despite gains from Agile methods, the multi-person development arena is typified by volatility, uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity — what the U.S. military calls "the fog of war."

Derek W. Wade’s background in Cognitive Science has shown him that humans have innate skills at managing this complexity. But too often, he sees leaders waste precious human capital because they don’t understand how these skills work. Over the last 6 years, Derek has explored Team Science — which evolved from studying aviation, clinical, and military teams — for practical insights into how people work best together.

If you want to help your teams cut through the “fog” and have fun doing it, Derek will use mini-games and stories to introduce you to these insights and how to apply them. Leave armed with knowledge of mental models, cognitive load, situational awareness, and boundary objects so your teams can use complexity to their advantage, solve the right problems, support each other, and finally use those whiteboards, stickies, and online tools properly.