Are you experiencing vexing ambiguities around “what actually is Agile?” - is it the values and principles or the diagrams and processes? Have you hit a wall in your Agile adoption/implementation because of power games, ongoing tensions between top management’s focus on maximizing profit and Agile’s customer focus, management vs engineering, incompatibility with existing structures and mindsets, how to prove that agile actually works? ;~(

Perhaps the deeper issues that Agile surfaces are haunting you. The challenge with these deeper issues is that everyone assumes there is a solution to them. But actually you can’t know that. There may or may not be solutions - all you can do is probe to see what you can do, to try “uncovering better ways of developing software.” (Agile Manifesto). And that’s the adventure.

Yet another consultant or another certification offering ways to simplify complexity won’t solve your deeper issues; it’s just some more of the same snake oil disguised as a cure.

Don’t let your head spin. In this workshop, we’ll offer some very practical ways for you to approach your deeper than Agile challenges, based on our synthesis of complexity thinking (Cynefin and beyond) and an approach to company-wide agility. Prepare to be surprised.

The challenges companies face today in the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world call for Agile throughout the company. There are two challenges: companies in general are trying to survive intense disruption and companies with successful software departments are trying to expand Agile methods to the whole company, including the board and the legal structure of the enterprise. Both the VUCA challenge and the pressure to implement Agile beyond IT, demand guidelines for implementing company-wide Agility.

We discovered these needed guidelines in Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile. Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Human Systems Dynamics, and Cynefin provide additional insights.

However, in talking with various experts about how to address the challenges companies face , we got answers from within that expert’s framework. For example,

• A Beyond Budgeting expert said, “Stop fixing the budget annually, because otherwise you won't have the flexibility to react to frequent market changes.”
• An Open Space expert said, “You need to make space for what you don’t know and can’t control, for totally new things to emerge. If people can follow their passion, you will be able to implement company-wide Agility, otherwise people will just do what they are asked.”
• A Sociocracy expert said, “You first need to resolve the power structure, because as long as you have a hierarchy defined as top-down you will not become agile.”
• An Agile expert said, “You need to start inspecting and adapting by using regular retrospectives in order to react flexibly, otherwise you will neither be able to learn from the market nor from within your company.”

All of these perspectives are true, but each perspective was always from within the discipline. We synthesized the approach into a wider perspective dubbed BOSSA nova: B = Beyond Budgeting, OS = Open Space, S = Sociocracy, A = Agile.

The synthesis leads to a new organigram that reflects all the sources of guidance to a value center. The new organigram focuses board/CEO, inspiration, and resource and legal considerations on the value center. The value center is thereby free to focus on the customer.

We discuss how to use Cynefin-type probes that enable everyone to apply this new strategy for implementing company-wide Agility in their own organization.

Agile teams meet constantly. For some teams some of the time, decisions seem to emerge like magic - more nuanced and complete than any individual team member could have done. 

Too often, however, the meeting process feels like walking through deep mud. The team struggles with minor wording issues, or dominant personalities control the conversation while others feel bored and frustrated, or participants try to control the outcome of the meeting by scheming beforehand, and so forth. 

The factors that make a team effective are not particularly clear. Level of education of the team members, gender balance, age mixture, experience and expertise, venue, and other usual demographic factors don't seem to correlate. The only factors that seem to matter are equal voice and "framework intelligence," a combination of "emotional intelligence" and "perceptive intelligence." The latter refers to the ability to be aware of and manage the way assumptions and partial information influence and limit one's understanding of reality - and therefore limit one's ability to collaborate. Good listeners typically have good perceptive intelligence. 

Several of the elements of an egalitarian governance system called sociocracy support equal voice and framework intelligence. In this way, they support agile decision making. This session will interactively demonstrate several of those methods:

• Awareness of blind spots
• Both-and thinking
• Rapid prototyping
• Consent with your body
• Learning to estimate
• Use silence
• Be a super-organism - like an octopus
• Do rounds

Participants will have an opportunity to practice these methods by electing someone to a role and responsibilities using the consent election process.