Talk with slides and handouts.

The talk would be organized with the following modules:

Self Organization - Slime molds are a great example of self organization taking place at the most rudimentary level - the single celled organism. A slime mold is actually a colony of cooperating mold cells that work together for mutual benefit. They exhibit some intriguing complex behaviors with no central coordinating entity whatsoever (no brain, no nervous system, no project manager, nothing - yet they can be trained to find food in a maze). There are other classic examples in higher order organisms such as Ants and Bees (and many others). Implications: How do we form agile teams? Should they be chosen by management? Or can teams be formed around common interests and challenges on their own? Should teams be able to form spontaneously? What cues can we use to “seed” Agile teams?

Emergence - closely related to the self organizing behavior is the property of emergence - the complex behaviors that arise seemingly spontaneously from collections of rudimentary behaviors. Take the foraging behavior in Ants for example - the rules that individual ants use in seeking food are deceptively simple, yet when you look at the behavior of the colony as a whole, you find that the colony is optimizing the strategies that it uses for finding and taking advantage of food sources in remarkably complex ways. The foraging rules of the ants have actually been used for optimizing baggage transport for airlines - saving the airlines millions of dollars. Implications: We talk about emergent design and emergent solutions to complex problems, yet there is relatively little guidance to help teams understand what to expect or how to foster emergence. Are there simple rules that we can apply to teams that lead to complex and emergent behavior (some would say that is exactly what Scrum and XP are).

Decision Making - As it turns out, groups make a powerful decision making entity. How do we make decisions in a communal fashion without top down control? How does a swarm of bees decide where to locate a new hive? The queen doesn’t make the decision - it is a fascinating combination of information gathering and voting (metaphorically speaking) by the group that enables the bees to choose a new location for the hive. Implications: How do you make decisions on your team today? What can we do to foster the best possible decision making for our project (this reminds me of James Surowiecki’s keynote speech last year at Agile 2008).

Maturity - I was fascinated to learn that the behavior of a termite colony changes as the colony grows older. A young colony tends to get in a lot of different conflicts with other colonies. As the colonies age, they get in fewer and fewer conflicts. The colonies behavior matures and changes over time. This is even though the individual lifespan of a termite is quite short and the lifespan of a colony is around 15 years. Implications: Agile teams have different maturity levels too. Their behavior changes based on how long they have worked together, how much experience they have, etc. Is it possible to understand the development of an agile team in stages of maturity? If so, can we use the Animal model to suggest what behavior to expect at different levels? I also think of the Dreyfus model when thinking of team maturity.

This is based on research that I did for a presentation last year and my own undergraduate background in Ethology (animal behavior).