Sneaking agility back into Agile
Tom Kerwin at UX Brighton 2023
About this talk
Agile. It’s everywhere. And it’s become the dominant orthodoxy under which many designers are struggling.
Why is that? Why do Agile and design often seem to mix like tuna and custard? And why does a methodology that’s supposed to speed up innovation actually slow it down?
Directly attacking Agile doesn’t help. Tom will share some ways he’s made this very mistake. But there is hope! He’ll also share some tried and tested Trojan Horses that you can use right away to sneak agility back into Agile, opening the gates to innovation and creativity.
About Tom
Tom has 25 years of experience as a leader in design, research and product. He’s co-founded two successful startups and worked both agency-side and in-house, coaching cross-functional teams to innovate.
Since running his first usability test in 1999, Tom has been obsessed with adaptive sense-making: how do we continuously make sense of the world so we can act more effectively in it?
He is the author of Innovation Tactics, the deck of cards from Pip Decks that’s packed with pragmatic methods for making things people want. He’s also the creator of Pivot Triggers, a simple but powerful idea that’s helped hundreds of teams become more adaptive by doing discovery and delivery at the same time.
Related reading
Books, research, ideas and people referenced in this talk.
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Projects and resources
- The Agile Manifesto00:19The talk is about restoring agility to Agile work and uses Agile practice as the context for its methods.
- Back to the Future11:25The talk uses a scene from Back to the Future II as an analogy for travelling forward and backward through possible futures.
Papers and articles
- Performing a Project Premortem14:11The talk describes its future-failure exercise as a twist on the premortem approach discussed in Harvard Business Review.
Concepts
- Pivot triggers14:50The talk presents pivot triggers as explicit future conditions that tell a team when to adapt its plan.
Books
- Sources of Power21:37The talk quotes Gary Klein while explaining how an unexpected shift can produce an insight.
