Slides for our talk at Agile on the Beach: The 'Just Do It' approach to change management. Forget about seeing. Doing is believing. The As-If principle, coined by psychologist William James, tells us that changing behavior will change thinking, not just the other way around. Is that why ‘shock therapy’ Scrum works? Does this Stockholm syndrome approach to change management actually work in practice? And if so, how does that relate to current thinking about complexity and management? Based on real-life experiences, we describe the effectiveness and limitations of decisive leadership as an application of redirecting situations from the Cynefin chaotic domain into the others. We describe steps taken, contexts misinterpreted, other mistakes made, and lessons learned. All this illustrated with a tale of a failed multi-million euro project that was turned into a success, then a failure again caused by the unexpected success, and then… Well, come and listen.

1. The 'Just Do It' Approach
To Change Management
@wouterla
Wouter Lagerweij
@C_G_ONeill
Ciarán ÓNéill

2. “If you want a quality,
act as if you already have it.”
- William James (1842-1910)

4. sometimes a very directive
Just Do It
approach
is the best way to get people
into an agile mindset.

5. What is an agile mindset?

6. @wouterla
Wouter Lagerweij
www.lagerweij.com
@C_G_ONeill
Ciarán ÓNéill
nimble-b-jack.blogspot.com

8. The Project

13. Automated Testing
Mindset
Execution

14. MVP

15. Change
kScrum
Testing
Automated Testing
Continuous Delivery
MVP
Kanban
Kanban again
Specification by Example
Kanban PO team
One backlog

16. References
The As-If Principle - Richard Wiseman (UK, US)
‘Pencils’: Strack, F., Martin, L.L., and Stepper, S (1988). ‘Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: A
nonobstrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 768-77.
‘love and poker’: Wegner, D.M., Lane, J.D., & Dimitri, S. (1994). ‘The allure of secret relationships Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 287-300.
J. Sutherland, S. Downey, and B. Granvik, "Shock Therapy: A Bootstrap for a Hyper-Productive Scrum" in Agile 2009, Chicago, 2009.
http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2012/01/scrum-shock-therapy-how-to-change-teams.html
A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making: David J. Snowden, Mary E. Boone, Harvard Business Review
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin
Novice to Expert: the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, Stan Lester
A FIVE-STAGE MODEL OF THE MENTAL ACTIVITIES INVOLVED IN DIRECTED SKILL ACQUISITION, Stuart E. Dreyfus and Hubert L.
Dreyfus