Agile2013

Agile encourages and provides opportunities to keep learning from experience. However, short iterations create continuous pressure to keep delivering the working software. Enhanced visibility also robs any possibility of having hidden buffers to think, explore, discuss and learn. If you have experienced this and feel frustrated because you are caught in the present ways of working, then this session is for you.

Working with our project teams, I realized that there are ways to overcome this challenge once we understand what stops us from learning. What I noticed is that we focus too much on time management. It is a legacy from the days of mass production and time & motion studies. With work becoming more and more white collar in nature and especially with agile approach and its emphasis on responding to change over following a plan, managing attention has become far more important. Watching our attention in action is a great habit to develop and highly beneficial while working under pressure.

Another simple but very effective tip is to keep asking what next after completing each action. We always have multiple threads running. Each thread is not a continuous chain of actions, but typically quick actions followed by pauses in between. These pauses cause our attention to be lost from many of the threads we are currently not focused on. Just asking this simple question and making sure that we know what the next action is and when we can take it is so important. I have found this to be a great habit not just at work, but in every walk of life.

Learning from experience isn’t really about problems and solutions. It is more about exceptions and opportunities. The moment we think of an exception as a problem, we are in a hurry to either defend it or accept it, closing any possibility of looking for different opportunities for change and improvement. It is important to avoid this emotional attachment. Calling it exception helps, as it is a neutral term.

There are plenty of small exceptions whi