W. Edwards Deming is known for stating that “95% of the performance of an organisation is attributable to the system (processes, technology, work design, regulations, etc) and 5% are attributable to the individual”. But Deming was just talking about the manufacturing industry right? In the creative industries that we work in does the system play such a key role? Surely we need creative individuals, rock star developers and the like to be successful. This tutorial will introduce the audience to systems and systems thinking while dipping into the mirky world of complex adaptive systems. We'll explore the difference between the complicated closed systems where Deming spent much of his time and the complex open systems that we in the creative industries work in. We'll also look at some of the techniques advocated by the lean and agile communities and see how they help us develop more effective systems.

1. @chrisvmcd - it’s systems all the way down!
it’s systems all the way down!

2. @chrisvmcd - it’s systems all the way down!
Chris McDermott
@chrisvmcd
Lean Agile Coach/Conference Organiser
http://leanagile.scot
@LeanAgileScot
5th, 6th & 7th of October 2016

3. @chrisvmcd - it’s systems all the way down!
A plan
• Why we work the way we work
• Appreciation of a system
• A shallow dive into complexity
• Thoughts on methods
• Guiding principles
• Examples of practices
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower

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What words or phrases spring to mind when
you hear the words…
Analysis
Discuss with someone sitting next to you
Synthesis

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United 173

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Crew Resource Management

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US Airways 1549

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Why we work the way we work

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Chunking

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Mechanism

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Adam Smith
“Division of labour” -
Wealth of Nations - 1776

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Fredrick Winslow Taylor
The Principles of Scientific
Management - 1911

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Alfred P Sloan
Decentralised operations
with coordinated control -
1920

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Karl Marx
[The worker then
becomes] "depressed
spiritually and
physically to the
condition of a
machine"

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Appreciation of a System

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What is a system?
“An interconnected set of
elements which is
coherently organised in a
way that achieves
something”
Donnella Meadows

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“Meaning exists in the
interaction between
things, not in the things
themselves"
Alicia Juarrero
Interaction

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Interdependence
“Each part of the system,
when it affects the system, is
dependent on its affect for
some other part
In other words the parts
are interdependent”
Russell Ackoff

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Defining Properties
“The essential or defining
properties of any system
are properties of the
whole that none of its
parts have.”
Russell Ackoff

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Feedback

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Balancing & Reinforcing

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Time

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Boundaries

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Holistic
“The systems
approach to
problems focuses
on systems taken
as a whole, not on
their parts taken
separately.”

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Operation Cat Drop

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Fundamental
Attribution Error
“We're blind to our
blindness.We have very little
idea of how little we know.
We're not designed to know
how little we know.”
Daniell Kahneman

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System v Individual
95% of the
performance of
an organisation is
attributable to
the system
(processes,
technology, work
design,
regulations, etc)
and 5% are
attributable to
the individual
W Edwards
Deming

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GM Freemont

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NUMMI

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Shallow dive into Complexity

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Complicated systems
“[Taylor] has probably
had a greater effect on
the private and public
lives of the men and
women of the
twentieth century
than any other single

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Complex systems
“Linearity is seductive"
Dave Snowden

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Volunteers

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Is software development complex?
“It's tough to make
predictions, especially
about the future.”
Yogi Berra

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Thoughts on methods

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Waterfall
• Analytic thinking
• Constrains self organisation - governing constraints
• Doesn’t appreciate the impact of time
• Highly constrained - rigid structure

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Purpose
“The whole problem with the world
is that fools and fanatics are always
so certain of themselves, and wiser
people so full of doubts.”
Bertrand Russell

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Agile
A way of working that accepts we
can’t know everything in advance and
things we do know about might
change.
We manage this by intervening in
social systems through the use of
processes that promote learning
which enable organisations to adapt
quickly when new information
emerges.

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Scrum

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Sub-optimisation

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Lean
“All we are doing is looking
at the time line, from the
moment the customer gives
us an order to the point
when we collect the cash.
And we are reducing the
time line by reducing the
non-value adding wastes.
Taiichi Ohno

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Kanban on Systems

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Kanban on Emergence
• Start with what you do now
• understanding current processes, as actually practiced
• Agree to pursue improvement through
evolutionary change
• Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally

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Kanban on Interactions
“Kanban provides a linear
view of your social
network” - Jabe Bloom

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Kanban on Time
• Knowledge work is
perishable
• Establish flow

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Kanban on Resilience
• Defer commitment
• Create Slack

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Holistic Kanban
• Who asks us to do the work?
(boundaries)
• What do we do with the work?
(interactions, feedback)
• Where does it go when we are done?
(boundaries)

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Kanban’s Constraints
• Limit work in progress
• Make policies explicit
• Cadences

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Continuous Delivery
"potentially shippable"... seriously, "do
or do not, there's not bloody
potentially shippable software"
- Torbjörn Gyllebring

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Devops

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“There is nothing quite so
useless, as doing with great
efficiency, something that
should not be done at all.”
Peter Drucker

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Lean UX

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Exploration Exploitation
Complex Complicated
LeanUX
LeanStartup
Kanban
BDD
Continuous Delivery
Scrum
Prince 2 (?)
Six Sigma (?)

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Principles for managing complex
organisations

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Situational Awareness

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Shared Understanding

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Common Purpose

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Decentralised Decision Making

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Experimentation

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Trust
“Trust is the metric for the quality of social
connection”
Marc Burgauer

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Examples of practices

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Teamverløtung

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Cross functional autonomous teams

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Collision space

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Community of Practice

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Pareto Team Stability

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Organisational Split

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Anything else you can think of?
• Visualisation
• …
Discuss with someone sitting next to you

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Thinking in Systems
• Think:
• Interactions
• Interdependence
• Feedback
• Temporally
• Holistically
• Resilience
• Emergence
• Purpose

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Thank you!

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References

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Sources
“What is the value of Social Capital” - Jabe Bloom : https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=7n4a1VOW7H8
“Culture is theTrue North - Scaling at Jimdo" - Arne Roock : http://www.infoq.com/articles/
scaling-at-jimdo
“Nilan Peiris and the culture of growth atTransferWise” - Boss Level Podcast : http://
www.bosslevelpodcast.com/15
Anything from Russell Ackoff
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=russell+ackoff
Jabe Bloom on SystemsThinking
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/jabe-bloom-systems-thinking-lean-ux14
John Seddon Keynote Rethinking IT
https://vimeo.com/19122939

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Images
http://a1.files.biography.com/image/upload/c_fit,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,h_1200,q_80,w_1200/MTMxMTc0MTUyNTc1OTIwNzcx.jpg
http://bridgeforcefinancial.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/BIF-BIF7DanPink976.jpg
http://valao.de/images/cms/jimdo/jimdo-logo.png
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Angell-Yogi-Berra1-1200-630-23191047.jpg
https://www.flickr.com/photos/27764576@N06/17241876888/in/photostream/
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/7e/f9/1b/7ef91b6d360d4a6fd2e338bccde68078.jpg
http://wisedecisions.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Fotolia_8284502_M.jpg
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1295422/images/o-SCOTLAND-FANS-WEMBLEY-facebook.jpg

75. @chrisvmcd - it’s systems all the way down!
More Images
https://pixabay.com/en/clock-mechanism-hour-s-watch-works-544426/
http://ackoffcenter.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8345244ea69e20111688f4568970c-pi
http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/53a4944aecad042a40e04921/daniel-kahneman-investors-need-to-stop-believing-they-can-know-the-future.jpg
http://content9.flixster.com/question/53/76/67/5376679_std.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Fugle,_%C3%B8rns%C3%B8_073.jpg
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/192pmyvahzkfsjpg/original.jpg
http://5cience.net/userdata/images//275/b3e2b00a.jpg
https://sherhaps.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/16959-helmet_cat.jpg
http://gloriumtech.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/coolv-moss-mh-round-2500x1443.jpg
https://www.flickr.com/photos/27764576@N06/16831729184/in/album-72157651963367835/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/27764576@N06/14074504295/
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/actiontrumpseverything/files/2012/05/47311_Papel-de-Parede-Planeta-Terra_1600x12001.jpg
https://nothinginbiology.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/doc.jpgP[