Agile and Beyond 2016

Agile and Lean principles call for teams to delay decisions and activities until the “last responsible moment” so as to minimize rework and waste. While this sounds good in concept, sometimes teams fall victim to waiting until it is “too late” to make a decision or get started on a needed activity resulting in missed opportunities and/or down-to-the-wire heroic efforts to meet a deadline. At the same time, successful adoption of many agile and lean practices requires a culture of “organizational learning”. Come experience a “mash-up” of these concepts in the “Last Responsible Moment” LEGO Learning lab. In this workshop, participants will engage in a competitive LEGO simulation where teams will be asked to build a simple LEGO structure - each team’s structure will be scored based on its design, height, and how long the team waits to begin, whereby an incentive is provided to wait until the last responsible moment. The intent of the build activity is to allow teams to improve skills to make effective self-managing team decisions, as ultimately each team must decide when they wish to begin building, so experience is gained in identifying trade-offs, and using decision making protocols. After building, teams will debrief on what went well and where there were opportunities to improve seeking to increase their scores. The focus of this workshop will then pivot to focus on practices supportive of organizational learning between teams. Following the build challenge, participants will be given an “experiment canvas” and asked to define a problem, hypothesis, and indicator related to attempting to improve their score. The build challenge will then be repeated to allow participants to conduct their experiments and test their hypotheses. Participants will leave the workshop having experienced an engaging exercise they can use within self-managing teams to improve team decision making skills, and learned how to complete an “experiment canvas” they can integrate into practices such as retrospectives to improve organizational learning and sharing insights between teams.