SenseMaker - Actionable Data Combined with Substantive Narratives

Agenda

• 6:30 Food and Social Time (brought to you by Plaster Group & Getty Images)

• 7:00 Main Program

• 8:15 Retrospective

Summary

Executives and managers are obsessed with surveys and assessments. In response, the Agile community delivers an array of surveys and assessments intended to understand customer requirements to identifying an organization’s agility health. But do surveys and assessments really work? To answer this question, consider recent global events such as Brexit, Arab Spring and the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election. How did those surveys and assessments work out?

During this presentation, Chris Alexander and Brian Rivera will lead an interactive session designed to introduce attendees to the power narratives have over biased surveys and assessments. Using lessons from Dave Snowden’s Cynefin (https://www.aglx.consulting/cynefin) framework and his SenseMaker® (https://www.aglx.consulting/sensemaker) Scan, attendees will write a quick narrative and self-signify against that narrative using a few triads, dyads and multiple-choice questions. Following this quick exercise, Chris or Brian will provide some additional narrative insights to include Fitness Landscapes, the advantages of increasing cognitive load, weak signal detection, and the dispositional nature of complex adaptive systems.

Intended Outcomes:

· Attendees will gain a new perspective on the dangers of trusting traditional assessments and surveys while gaining an awareness of the power of narrative scans.

· Attendees will walk away with a basic understanding on how they can start their own paper scans for use in events ranging from retrospectives to measuring agility health.

Presented by

Brian “Ponch” Rivera

Brian is a recovering naval aviator and co-founder of AGLX Consulting, LLC, a Seattle-based teaming consultancy. Ponch is the co-creator of High-Performance Teaming™–an evidence-based approach to rapidly building and developing high-performing teams. Inspired by John Boyd’s OODA Loop, Crew Resource Management (CRM) and High-Reliability Organizations (HROs), High-Performance Teaming™ is a holistic teaming system that focuses on the cognitive and social skills needed to accelerate human performance in today’s VUCA world.

Chris “Deuce” Alexander

Chris is a former F-14 Tomcat RIO & instructor, co-founder of AGLX Consulting, High-Performance Teaming coach, Agile coach, Scrum Master, and is passionate about high-performing teams, teamwork, and enabling people to achieve great things. http://www.high-performance-teaming.com/