XP2011 Day 3
Conversations
What can I say? The restaurant open bar last night was epic. Actually I wasn’t saying very much at all to anyone this morning…
Sessions
Keynote: What Forms of Work and Life Make Sense for Us? w/Brian Marick
As usual Brian’s keynote was eccentric, enlightening, and above all else, unique. At about the halfway point he actually had the entire room stand up and he gave a tango lesson (which was no surprise, he had been talking about it on twitter for weeks). Still, there were a lot of European men arm-in-arm dancing with each other. Perhaps not so unusual. The talk itself covered some interesting subjects.
First he talked about gift economies vs. money economies. The way I understood it, he described the agile team as using a gift economy. Favors are exchanged freely with no exchange of money. However outside the team and especially within the corporation at large, it is a money economy. I think the point was to suggest that we need to be conscious of the different economies at work and adjust our expectations and behavior accordingly.
He also talked about the influence of context on behavior, basically debunking using assessments like Myers-Briggs for any predictive purpose. Instead, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that context matters much more when it comes to predicting people’s behavior. So, my take away from that is that we need to create the right environments for people to be successful.
Grumpy Old Agile Coaches w/Rachel Davies
This was a fun session with Olav Lewitz, JB Rainsberger, Kati Vikki, Mike Hill all sitting on park benches and Rachel Davies acting as moderator. While the conversation was good, I have to agree with some of the participants, that the grumpy old agile coaches looked pretty happy for a bunch of grumps! I was interested to hear about the lonely-coaches-sodality google group which I definitely want to check out.
Agile at Scale
Apparently this was another fishbowl – I enjoyed it and jumped right in with the big fish. It was fun to bounce some of my thoughts off the group and get their perspective. Mary Poppendieck was a hoot and provided some lively conterpoint and tough questions of her own. Jutta Eckstein was the moderator and did a great job.
After Hours
It’s a quiet evening for me. I have to give my Silo Busting tutorial tomorrow morning, so it’s early to bed.