BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage Podcasts Dave Snowden on Liminality in Cynefin and Moving beyond Agile to Agility

Dave Snowden on Liminality in Cynefin and Moving beyond Agile to Agility

Bookmarks

In this Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave Snowden at the Agile People conference in Stockholm, Sweden, about the addition of liminal spaces in the Cynefin framework, pre-scrum techniques and the future of agility.

Key Takeaways

  • The Cynefin Framework provides a perspective on the world
  • The latest version of the Cynefin framework include two liminal domains
  • The strength of approaches like Scrum is holding things in a liminal state long enough to become right, before they move to complicated
  • In the complex domain the keys are identifying coherent hypotheses and running parallel safe-to-fail experiments
  • There is a whole body of techniques for addressing IT problems and there is no one right answer – use the techniques best suited to the nature of the problem  

Show Notes

  • 00:24 Introductions
  • 01:00 The Cynefin Framework provides a perspective on the world
  • 01:40 Including the liminal zones into the Cynefin framework – the state of transition from one perspective to another
  • 01:58 The strength of Scrum is holding things in a liminal state long enough to become right before they move to complicated
  • 02:11 Scrum works in the liminal space of complex with boundaries
  • 02:17 The liminal space between complex and chaos is a closed space where innovation can happen
  • 02:55 In a complex space do not apply a recipe based on partial research, which Lean Startup tries to do
  • 03:07 The value and importance of coherence – something may not be entirely right but coherence enables us to say “we don’t know everything, but we know we’re going in the right direction”
  • 03:30 In the complex domain the keys are identifying coherent hypotheses and running parallel safe-to-fail experiments
  • 04:00 Examples of “pre-Scrum” techniques for working in the complex domain
  • 04:10 Establishing multiple trios – groups of three people with very different backgrounds to explore a problem for a short period of time
  • 04:42 Triple-Eight – having three teams offset across timezones build and adapt a prototype; constraint-based rapid mutation
  • 05:28 Continuous mapping of unarticulated needs and looking for clusters of needs, then putting prototyping teams to work on the cluster to see if it is worth addressing the need discovered
  • 05:58 A critical gap in agile research is architecture
  • 06:00 Scaffolding as an architectural approach, and the need for discard the scaffolding when the product is robust
  • 07:01 Describing the cross-discipline research done over the last year on a new approach to design thinking
  • 08:13 Explaining how these approaches can be applied to real-world challenges – cybersecurity as one example
  • 09:22 If you want radical change, you want the significant outliers, not the dominant group
  • 09:32 The problems with “gathering requirements” and systems analysis
  • 09:52 The backlog in Scrum and Kanban is potentially disastrous because it over-codifies the wrong level of granularity
  • 10:13 Examples of different approaches in different domains
  • 11:12 There is a whole body of techniques for addressing IT problems and there is no one right answer – use the techniques best suited to the nature of the problem
  • 11:23 Approaches to analysing the space to select the method to use
  • 11:49 it’s much easier to say “it’s like one of these” than to analyse the specific qualities of a problem
  • 12:05 The commodification of agile and design thinking means there is an opportunity for new ideas to emerge
  • 12:21 Moving from agile to agility – reinvent the concept, whatever comes next needs to be trans-disciplinary, experimental, based on scaffolding and journey-based not goal-based

Mentioned:

More about our podcasts

You can keep up-to-date with the podcasts via our RSS Feed, and they are available via SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and the Google Podcast. From this page you also have access to our recorded show notes. They all have clickable links that will take you directly to that part of the audio.

Previous podcasts

Rate this Article

Adoption
Style

BT