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[music]
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Dan Lyons: This is now a corporate thing.
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Everybody takes the day off and you make things out of Legos
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and then you talk about the things you made out of Legos.
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It's basically like if you imagine those
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same people that you work with again.
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Imagine going to group therapy with those people, listening to their
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problems and having them listen to yours and then playing with toys.
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It turns out that this lego stuff is a huge industry in and of itself.
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There is this bogus ginned up brain
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science that explains how it works using
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the frontal cortex and the limbic system but none of it really is true.
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More than 100,000 people have participated in this
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nonsense at work without having a choice to opt out.
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Legos serious play, this is true, is so
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big that the field has had a schism.
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There are old believers and new believers who both
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hate each other and one side thinks the other
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guys are selling snake oil, we are the true guys,
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and the other ones say the same about the others.
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If you've seen the Life of Brian, it's like
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the Judean People's front and the peoples run to Judea.
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They really hate each other.
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This is a game called Six Thinking Hats where
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there are six different crazy colored hats
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and you all take turns wearing them
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and role-playing based on the color of your hat.
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The consultants all tell you how much people love this and how
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transformative it is but look at those people, they do not look happy.
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[laughter]
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Just look at them, they look miserable.
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There's another game where you pass
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tennis balls around in this fire brigade.
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There's this massively multiplayer thumb wrestling.
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All of this is part of a much larger religion
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which is called Agile, which you probably have
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heard of because this religion has swept
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the corporate world in the last five or 10 years.
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Agile really began as a one-page manifesto
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for how to write software faster.
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It was written by 17 software gurus who met for
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one weekend in Utah at Snowbird, the Ski area.
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They just banged out this little list of
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principles and it has morphed into everything.
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It's like the Blob.
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It worked for writing software and it still does.
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Then people thought, "Well, why don't we use it for everything?
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We could have Agile lawyers, Agile bloggers,
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Agile marketing, Agile sales." Then it
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morphed up another layer and became Agile can
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actually transform the organization itself.
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Nobody who created Agile ever envisioned that.
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There have now been 4,000 books written about Agile.
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Agile has a rival called the Lean Startup, which
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is you notice they both have the circle kind
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of thing because they both work in this thing
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where you chase your tail endlessly at work.
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The Lean Startup was created by a guy who
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wrote a book called the Lean Startup.
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His claim to fame was after college he
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and a few friends co-founded a startup.
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He left after a few years.
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The startup really never amounted to anything.
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This guy said, "I should teach other people how to do this."
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[laughter]
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That has morphed also into a way to transform entire organizations.
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The intellectual underpinning is the Toyota manufacturing process.
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You took a methodology used to build cars
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and now you use it as a way to rewire human beings.
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There are a couple of problems with Agile, one is that there is no Agile.
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There are a million Agiles, there are as many
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versions of Agile as there are practitioners.
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I tracked down one of the guys who wrote the original
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manifesto, the one-page thing, and I said, "What do you
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make of all of this stuff, all of this Agile stuff?"
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His answer was, "I'd say about 90% of it is bullshit."
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[laughter]
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The product problem with Agile is it doesn't work.
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Almost all Agile implementations fail,
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utterly fail, and then have to be mocked up.
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I found an Agile consultant who said this is
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destroying people's lives because it isn't
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just that you spend weeks or months learning
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this nonsense and then nothing changes,
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it's that people get fired or people quit
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because they can't stand the madness
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anymore and also because companies use agile
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as a way to get rid of older workers.
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They can't fire you for turning 50 but what they
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can do is invent this pile of nonsense and new
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way of working that you have to adapt to and then
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tell you, "I'm sorry, you're not Agile enough."
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IBM is putting 300,000 people through Agile training.
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GE is putting 300,000 people through Lean Startup training.
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The question then is why are they doing it?
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Partly to get rid of them.
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IBM is using it as a way to push workers
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out, but mostly because they're terrified.
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I have visited some big old companies
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including Ford, and they are scared to death.
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They feel like they're facing this existential threat from technology,
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from Silicon Valley, and that they have to avoid disruption.
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The only way to avoid disruption is to copy the disruptors
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and they feel, or they've been sold this idea that because
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the Internet exists, everything about how to run a company for
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the last 100 years no longer works; it no longer applies.
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I don't know if people felt this way when television came out
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or radio or the telephone, but they do about the Internet.
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There's this magical thinking that everything has
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changed so profoundly that work itself has to change.
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Then if you ask them, "Well, then what does work?" They don't know.
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We're in this age of experimentation where they try new things,
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see if it works and if it doesn't they'll try something else.
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Basically, we are participating in these massive experiments
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in behavioral psychology, organizational behavior.
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We are the lab rats and it's worse because
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it is inflicted on you by quacks.
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Even the originators of the ideology are quacks, and then it's implemented
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by people who are three generations,
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three steps if we move from the quacks.
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There are people who do things mix Agile and Lean.
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Agile has a concept called Scrums, where you work in little groups.
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In Lean, they call it a Kanban.
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In the hybrid model, they call it a Scrumban.
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Now, if you can image going to work and it keeps changing,
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eventually you're going to leave because it's nuts.
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This is one of my favorite quotes and it's from 60 years ago,
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that the risk of the future is that we may become robots.
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I fell a lot of people now are experiencing
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that day-to-day in their life,
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even when you're doing the Lego thing,
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you're being told, "Be a good robot.
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Play with the Legos, don't complain.
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You need to keep this job.
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You need to fit into the Agile machinery, so stay quiet and just do
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as you're told." It's also like there's a power dynamic there too.
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[music]