Lean Agile Brighton 2019

Most Agile processes (Scrum, Kanban, etc.) are built upon the notion of empiricism. According to the Scrum Guide, “Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is known”. The implicit assumption here is that Agile teams are comprised of rational actors who will gather the right information, and--when presented with that right information--will always make the correct process decisions around how to perform/improve. However, we know that in reality Agile teams are comprised of humans--each of whom bring their own biases, are guided by their own beliefs, and otherwise behave “irrationally” from an empirical point of view. In this session, we will discuss how this irrational behaviour actually makes teams very predictable in the mistakes they will make and what you can do to nudge your team from inept and inapt towards inspect and adapt.