Abstract: The modern organization is at war with complexity. The code for a typical webpage is the size of a typical video game from the 1990s. "Standards are great, there's so many to choose from." Projects have multiple stakeholders and ever-changing, conflicting Priority One features. Despite gains from Agile methods, the multi-person development arena is typified by volatility, uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity — what the U.S. military calls "the fog of war."
Derek W. Wade’s background in Cognitive Science has shown him that humans have innate skills at managing this complexity. But too often, he sees leaders waste precious human capital because they don’t understand how these skills work. Over the last 6 years, Derek has explored Team Science — which evolved from studying aviation, clinical, and military teams — for practical insights into how people work best together. If you want to help your teams cut through the “fog” and have fun doing it, Derek will use mini-games and stories to introduce you to these insights and how to apply them. Leave armed with knowledge of mental models, cognitive load, situational awareness, and boundary objects so your teams can use complexity to their advantage, solve the right problems, support each other, and finally use those whiteboards, stickies, and online tools properly.
Learning Outcomes: - Attendees will be better prepared to lead teams in emergent, complex domains (such as software development) by learning:
- 1. Our ability to solve problems depends on our ability to internally model the world around us;
- 2. Cognitive limits of this ability, and examples of work practices which respect (and ignore) those limits;
- 3. Refactoring team communication: multi-person use of models vs. mere transmission of information;
- 4. Leadership stances which foster effective mental models at the multi-person, multi-team level;
- 5. Explicitly managing meta-information about the organization/team. Product goals, objectives, and tasks are only half of the work in knowledge-work.
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