program selection system

There’s no shortage of sessions at this conference to show us how to do various agile practices right. What is sorely lacking is the opportunity to learn how to do the practices wrong. After all, in most environments that is the way work is usually done. Many organizations have carefully crafted software development standards based on that principle. How can we be expected to bring agile into an organization successfully without mastery of that key skill?

Cognitive scientists say we are more productive and happier when our behavior matches our hardwiring. That is, when what we do and why we do it matches the way we have evolved to survive over tens of thousands of years. One disturbing behavior we are hardwired to perform is to decide instantly who we trust. It is a particularly interesting characteristic of this behavior that we aren’t aware of what we are doing or why we are doing it. This hardwired evaluation often prevents us from working well with others.