Agile2013

[Real Options](http://leanprocrastination.com/blog/2012/08/real-options-a-mindset/) have been present in the agile and lean community for half a decade, helping methods like Feature Injection and Impact Mapping to evolve and improving decision making in general. We think it's time to give it a twist:

Moving further away from the maths/finance origin and adding trust to the concept we can focus on what Real Options can help us achieve: a raised state of awareness of our present's potential. This is a virtuous learning loop: learning more about our options leads to greater awareness, helping us to identify more options we can again learn more about...

Dave Snowden coined the phrase explore the potential of the present as guidance on how to deliberately experiment in a complex environment. Awareness of our options increases the discovery of things to try.

Our lack of trust and common wish for certainty in our lives leads to coercion: expectations, obligations, all these coulda-shoulda-woulda thoughts let us treat options as commitments. Trusting ourselves and others can lead to a state of deliberate serendipity: we grant ourselves the freedom to be pleasantly surprised. These surprises allow the deep learning we need to delight our clients in an agile team.

You will learn how to establish trust, how to increase the number of choices, and to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity to confidently make better decisions.

We will capture experiences and stories shared in this session in some way (maybe through phone recordings of conversations) so that we can afterwards share examples of the serendipitous effects of trusts with the greater community.