Agile Leadership Patterns, by Dan Greening

In agile, we have broad ambitions with no behavioral discipline. We often talk about agile teams, people, departments, organizations and political campaigns, as if the definition of "agile" was obvious. And yet the Agile Manifesto and its principles were written for software development teams. Furthermore, many CEOs tell us how agile they are, because "we can move teams around on a whim" or because "we run sprints every week," but their teams can't produce working products rapidly, increasingly add technical debt, or shamble into work demoralized. Some agilists talk about the "essence" of agile, such as Scrum's 5 values: focus, courage, focus, openness, respect. But these values don't tell us what to do.

This talk frames agile as a well-defined economic science, with a small handful of concepts that generate agility: the ability to rapidly sense, adapt and create in chaotic economies. You'll see that agile is definitely about doing before being. You'll gain some simple tests to figure out whether people, teams and companies are agile or not. All agile methodologies (Scrum, XP, SAFe, Lean/Kanban, GTD, PDSA/PDCA, Quantified Self and Pomodoro) have practices that fall into these "agile base patterns", and waterfall methodologies violate every one:

• Measure Economic Progress,

• Adaptively Experiment for Improvement,

• Limit Work in Progress,

• Embrace Collective Responsibility, and

• Solve Problems Systemically.

We’ll explore these base patterns and some interesting sub-patterns, such as Feedback Loop, Backlog, Chunking, Root Cause Mapping and Information Radiator. Leaders at all levels need a deep understanding of agility to provide effective coaching to Agile teams and protect agility from hostile forces. Leaders can easily apply these scale-free patterns to any creative field—marketing, finance, business development, sales, military combat, corporate governance, strategic projects, personal projects, and, you guessed it, software development.

Dan R Greening, PhD, CSC

Dan previously led agile coaching at Skype and Citrix Online, and led data science and engineering at Overstock.com. He has pioneered and published agile portfolio management approaches (now used in SAFe), metrics for large agile enterprises, and agile capitalization approaches (also now in SAFe). Dan has trained Scrum, Agile and Lean methodologies to hundreds of people worldwide. He co-founded three startups. He spent a few years pondering his navel at IBM Research (it's an "inney"). He holds a PhD in computer science from UCLA, where he studied emergent properties of a complex adaptive system called simulated annealing. His current passion is converting agile to a science, so we can better study and apply it to improve our collective happiness. You can check out his recent thoughts at http://senexrex.com/blog.

Please Note:
Doors open at 6 for dinner and mingling. Pizza and drinks will be provided. The main body of the Meetup will start at 6:30pm.

General security process of the facility will apply - the participants may be photographed for security.

How to get to the Citrix office:

In your GPS, put: 7406, Hollister Ave, Goleta, CA - 93117.

Driving North from Santa Barbara, reach Hollister Ave and Entrance Rd intersection. Turn right into the Citrix campus.

The road will curve left and this building will be on your right after crossing the the curve and the right hand side parking lot.

IMPORTANT: You will find both Citrix and Moog signs at the entrance of this building. Plenty of parking around.

Unable to attend in person?

Join the event via GoToWebinar. Register here: http://bit.ly/webinar-jun2015