The XP2011 conference took place last week in Madrid, I had the pleasure of participating. This will be the subject of several articles on this blog because these two days were quite dense and quite a few things seemed interesting enough to be discussed.
I’ll start here by emptying my notebook and describing my itinerary more or less. Here’s a status report of the first day.
I had decided to participate in the two conference-oriented days (so I didn’t attend the workshops on Tuesday or Friday). When I arrive Tuesday evening around 10:30 pm, the weather is nice (it’s Madrid), and most of the participants are at the bar across from the hotel enjoying “cerveza” and tapas. I quickly meet Jurgen Appelo (@jurgenappelo) and I discover that the Olaf Lewitz from twitter (@OlafLewitz) is quite a fellow.
The first conference day begins with a keynote “Still no silver bullet” by Esther Derby (@estherderby) which I’ll come back to but which highlights a loop (which can prove to be endless) between what agile will recommend and the constraints of current companies, between centralization and decentralization. She also insists on the role of metaphors and our great receptivity to them. She reminds us that the current state of things: running companies based on budgets established every quarter is just absurd. And above all she asks us to take care of this diamond that represents communication between contextual knowledge, and knowledge of the moment, day to day (see the image below).
Esther Derby seems to be quite a funny and friendly woman, always pleasant during off-the-record discussions. (But that’s the case with everyone at this event). She mentions in passing that our “awareness” of best practices starts with reflection on ourselves (and I quote “almost with your psychoanalyst” // analyst coach).
This first keynote is very interesting and I decide to continue with a discussion session with Esther Derby immediately after. This proves to be a tad less exciting because more expected, without surprise. We come back to certain concepts mentioned during the keynote.
Firmly attached to my seat I stay in the room (by the way the hotel is nice without being extraordinary). A lady with multicolored hair arrives -really-. It’s Kati Vilkki (from Nokia). What follows is an open, very interesting discussion. She highlights what for her constitutes a series of illusions:
- illusion of hierarchy (hierarchy is absolutely not respected, the idea that hierarchy is well established and works is false)
- illusion of “command & control” (we think we can really command and control, it’s often false).
- illusion of the notion of “power is elsewhere” (we think power is elsewhere, that we don’t have the means for certain actions, it’s false)
But who then trains managers to become managers she wonders? (and I can only think: and who trains agile coaches to become coaches…).
It was a fascinating, frank, direct discussion. Kati Vilkki appears healthy, simple, efficient. I really appreciated…and impossible to forget her with her multicolored hair!
I’ll take this opportunity to highlight a fact: this conference is the women’s conference: Esther Derby, Kati Vikki, Elizabeth Keogh (and Mary Poppendieck who was also hanging around). And all the better!
The afternoon starts for me with a speech by Jurgen Appelo (@jurgenappelo) on “purpose of leadership & governance” (the slides are here !) during which Jurgen refers quite a bit to the current adventure of the ALE network. Jurgen’s conferences are precise and efficient. His approach was in 4 points:
- We manage through constraints and not by imposing rules
- It is essential to protect teams and shared resources (he refers to the tragedy of the commons)
- Understand well the goals and objectives of each person (and notably the intrinsic goal, the extrinsic goal, and the emergent goal, I’ll come back to this)
- Objectives: don’t set numerical targets
And it’s with a large ALE Network meeting (what actions do we want to take?) that I continue the afternoon (see the photo by Olaf Lewitz @OlafLewitz opposite). You’ll find the results of these reflection groups on the ALE Network site (but I’ll have the opportunity to talk about it again). We worked in reflection groups of 5/7 (with as few duplicate nationalities as possible: easy for me I was the only Frenchman at this meeting, and overall the French represented 1% of participants…) and we tried to bring out ideas to put this ALE Network into action. For the results I refer you to Olaf Lewitz’s gallery (thanks to him)
The evening ends with an outing of all participants (~250 according to the organizers) to an extremely noisy restaurant (and not very good). However I had the pleasure of meeting an entire Bordeaux team from f-secure.
Esther Derby wanted to start a “Werewolf” (or a werewolves of Thiercelieux) in the evening but everyone was quite knocked out by this terrible restaurant room. So bedtime before attacking the following day.