Agile2014

You’ve been adopting Agile and want to scale. Perhaps you want to create an intrapreneurial practice in your organization. But as you scale Agile, you want to maintain or improve your speed. In fact you want and need to go faster. Merely being the incumbent while adopting Agile is death; it’s a winner-takes-all market. If you aren’t innovating quickly, you’re in danger of being eaten by those innovating faster than you. But going faster can be troublesome: you may be decreasing your thinking discipline either consciously or subconsciously. And that can lead to more opportunities to fall prey to cognitive traps such as biases and fallacies. The more biased you are, the more distorted your system view becomes.



Fortunately, as you continue to scale Agile and speed up your innovation, you have a variety of tools of discipline to prop up your thinking. In this talk, Jean brings her perspectives on how to apply intentionally slower thinking in order to reduce the distortion in how we innovate. With work by Daniel Kahneman in his book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, Jean shares perspectives on how Kahneman’s work can help us address our reluctance to admit to complexity as well as the distortion in how we perceive ourselves.



Fundamentally, how much distortion do you have in your system view, and what can you do to reduce it? For example, has hindsight bias diminished your ability to learn? Are you prone to traps of anchoring and priming as you set your estimates and evaluate your WIP? Failure to address your cognitive fallacies in these and other areas increase the risk in your ability to deliver.



The good news: You can apply a number of tools to surface, avoid, and even prevent these lures of distortion. Applying design thinking, lean startup practices, empathy work, A3 technology and other tools, you can be a disciplined explorer. You can think and act fast with Agile while also bringing in the rigor of slower thinking. And, you can reduce the distortion in your system view, reduce risk, and create your new market while maintaining health in your perspective.