Agile at the team level fosters self-organization by leveraging constraints. Timeboxes, Work in Progress (WIP) Limits, and clear operational definitions are excellent examples of the kinds of constraints teams regularly employ to deliver reliably. Are you familiar and comfortable with these ideas, but uncertain how to apply them at larger scales? Are you looking for techniques that will allow you to harness the creativity of your teams to enable self-organization at scale? If so, this session is for you.

I’m passionate about applying concepts from Complex Systems Theory (as developed by Dave Snowden, Alicia Juarrero, Bob Artigiani, etc.) to the work of software teams. My colleagues and I at Excella have been exploiting these ideas by using a variety of patterns borrowed from different theories and frameworks to allow our teams to grow like healthy plants in a garden. From Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) we leverage the concepts of a single product backlog and a shared cadence. Kanban principles of visualizing the work and limiting WIP help align the teams and foster greater collaboration. Dave Snowden’s emphasis on Homo Narrans—the human as storyteller—has provided a framework for clarifying and promulgating common values, which are essential for decentralized decision-making. Collectively, these mental models created an environment that helped us scale one of our engagements from three teams to eight over the course of a single year.

Customers weren’t satisfied! The process took too long! The end product didn’t perform to specifications! Does this sound familiar?

A century ago, the U.S. Navy’s ship design process had serious problems, ones we would recognize and understand today. Come learn how these problems were solved in a large, real-world, organization through minor changes in structure and process. These changes illustrate the importance of:

• Gathering early feedback
• Rapidly iterating to expose unknowns
• Using multi-disciplinary problem-solving
• Employing Agile techniques outside of IT

Are you excited by the idea of Business Agility, but unsure how to create it? Learn new techniques by looking back. In the early 20th century, the U.S. Navy successfully leveraged Agile approaches to harness new technologies, encourage organizational learning, and develop a sustained pace of innovation, all key aspects of Business Agility. Find out how!

I’ll describe what the Navy achieved, explain why it worked, and illustrate how similar approaches can be used today to create greater Agility in our businesses and organizations. Some specifics include:

• Fostering innovation by the use of regular feedback.
• Employing safe-to-fail experimentation.
• Promoting evolvability through loose coupling and bounded autonomy.
• Balancing exploration and exploitation to identify and harness new ideas.

Organizational agility requires more than “scaling.” It requires deliberately finding the balance between exploring new, innovative ideas and exploiting proven ones. Agile software techniques can enable individual teams to find this balance, but few established patterns exist for harnessing it at an organizational level.

One successful model is the Trimble Software Framework (TSF), introduced by Trimble Navigation in the early 2010s. Borrowing from Agile, Lean, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), and other proven methods, the TSF provided effective feedback to Trimble’s diverse collection of software teams on the effectiveness of their approaches. Where the TSF differed from other models was in its respect for variability.

The other authors of the TSF and I recognized that by promoting continuous improvement without dictating the path it should take, software teams would be free to experiment with new methods and explore new patterns. This increased overall organizational agility as teams tailored known good practices to their specific contexts and developed new ones. The TSF became a feedback loop that enabled software teams throughout the organization to learn from one another and constantly improve. Come hear how this was done, what we learned along the way, and how we used variability to permit a more effective balance of exploration and exploitation.

Excited about the Cynefin Framework, but uncertain how to use it? This workshop will take you through a “four corners” exercise, using well-known movie scenes and historical events to place the Cynefin domains in context for you.

Customers weren’t satisfied! The process took too long! And the end product was bug-ridden and didn’t perform to specifications. Does this sound familiar?

The US Navy’s ship design process had all the common problems we see in product development today. Come learn how these problems were solved in a real-world, large batch system over 100 years ago through minor changes in organizational structure and process design.

Static designs and monolithic structures are brittle and prone to failure. How can we progress beyond them? By understanding the nature of our challenges and applying the right tools at the right time. This talk will describe how to use evolutionary principles to foster changes in your architecture and infrastructure so that you can create antifragile systems.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb spoke to these ideas in “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.” Join us as we describe how we can:

• Move beyond planning for known failure modes and instead develop antifragile systems that are safe-to-fail in unanticipated ways.
• Leverage the Cynefin framework and its 5 sense-making domains to better frame problems and drive action.
• Employ microservice architectures to make the variability of our environments work for us, not against us.
• Gain knowledge more rapidly through multiple parallel experiments.