Dan Lyons: This is now a corporate thing.

Everybody takes the day off and you make things out of Legos

and then you talk about the things you made out of Legos.

It's basically like if you imagine those

same people that you work with again.

Imagine going to group therapy with those people, listening to their

problems and having them listen to yours and then playing with toys.

It turns out that this lego stuff is a huge industry in and of itself.

There is this bogus ginned up brain

science that explains how it works using

the frontal cortex and the limbic system but none of it really is true.

More than 100,000 people have participated in this

nonsense at work without having a choice to opt out.

Legos serious play, this is true, is so

big that the field has had a schism.

There are old believers and new believers who both

hate each other and one side thinks the other

guys are selling snake oil, we are the true guys,

and the other ones say the same about the others.

If you've seen the Life of Brian, it's like

the Judean People's front and the peoples run to Judea.

They really hate each other.

This is a game called Six Thinking Hats where

there are six different crazy colored hats

and you all take turns wearing them

and role-playing based on the color of your hat.

The consultants all tell you how much people love this and how

transformative it is but look at those people, they do not look happy.

[laughter]

Just look at them, they look miserable.

There's another game where you pass

tennis balls around in this fire brigade.

There's this massively multiplayer thumb wrestling.

All of this is part of a much larger religion

which is called Agile, which you probably have

heard of because this religion has swept

the corporate world in the last five or 10 years.

Agile really began as a one-page manifesto

for how to write software faster.

It was written by 17 software gurus who met for

one weekend in Utah at Snowbird, the Ski area.

They just banged out this little list of

principles and it has morphed into everything.

It's like the Blob.

It worked for writing software and it still does.

Then people thought, "Well, why don't we use it for everything?

We could have Agile lawyers, Agile bloggers,

Agile marketing, Agile sales." Then it

morphed up another layer and became Agile can

actually transform the organization itself.

Nobody who created Agile ever envisioned that.

There have now been 4,000 books written about Agile.

Agile has a rival called the Lean Startup, which

is you notice they both have the circle kind

of thing because they both work in this thing

where you chase your tail endlessly at work.

The Lean Startup was created by a guy who

wrote a book called the Lean Startup.

His claim to fame was after college he

and a few friends co-founded a startup.

He left after a few years.

The startup really never amounted to anything.

This guy said, "I should teach other people how to do this."

[laughter]

That has morphed also into a way to transform entire organizations.

The intellectual underpinning is the Toyota manufacturing process.

You took a methodology used to build cars

and now you use it as a way to rewire human beings.

There are a couple of problems with Agile, one is that there is no Agile.

There are a million Agiles, there are as many

versions of Agile as there are practitioners.

I tracked down one of the guys who wrote the original

manifesto, the one-page thing, and I said, "What do you

make of all of this stuff, all of this Agile stuff?"

His answer was, "I'd say about 90% of it is bullshit."

[laughter]

The product problem with Agile is it doesn't work.

Almost all Agile implementations fail,

utterly fail, and then have to be mocked up.

I found an Agile consultant who said this is

destroying people's lives because it isn't

just that you spend weeks or months learning

this nonsense and then nothing changes,

it's that people get fired or people quit

because they can't stand the madness

anymore and also because companies use agile

as a way to get rid of older workers.

They can't fire you for turning 50 but what they

can do is invent this pile of nonsense and new

way of working that you have to adapt to and then

tell you, "I'm sorry, you're not Agile enough."

IBM is putting 300,000 people through Agile training.

GE is putting 300,000 people through Lean Startup training.

The question then is why are they doing it?

Partly to get rid of them.

IBM is using it as a way to push workers

out, but mostly because they're terrified.

I have visited some big old companies

including Ford, and they are scared to death.

They feel like they're facing this existential threat from technology,

from Silicon Valley, and that they have to avoid disruption.

The only way to avoid disruption is to copy the disruptors

and they feel, or they've been sold this idea that because

the Internet exists, everything about how to run a company for

the last 100 years no longer works; it no longer applies.

I don't know if people felt this way when television came out

or radio or the telephone, but they do about the Internet.

There's this magical thinking that everything has

changed so profoundly that work itself has to change.

Then if you ask them, "Well, then what does work?" They don't know.

We're in this age of experimentation where they try new things,

see if it works and if it doesn't they'll try something else.

Basically, we are participating in these massive experiments

in behavioral psychology, organizational behavior.

We are the lab rats and it's worse because

it is inflicted on you by quacks.

Even the originators of the ideology are quacks, and then it's implemented

by people who are three generations,

three steps if we move from the quacks.

There are people who do things mix Agile and Lean.

Agile has a concept called Scrums, where you work in little groups.

In Lean, they call it a Kanban.

In the hybrid model, they call it a Scrumban.

Now, if you can image going to work and it keeps changing,

eventually you're going to leave because it's nuts.

This is one of my favorite quotes and it's from 60 years ago,

that the risk of the future is that we may become robots.

I fell a lot of people now are experiencing

that day-to-day in their life,

even when you're doing the Lego thing,

you're being told, "Be a good robot.

Play with the Legos, don't complain.

You need to keep this job.

You need to fit into the Agile machinery, so stay quiet and just do

as you're told." It's also like there's a power dynamic there too.

[music]