Arty Starr

Reinventing Organizational Architecture

Since the dawn of software development, we've struggled with a huge disconnect between the management world and the engineering world – the clash of top-down control, money, and economics, versus art, freedom, working with our friends, and bringing awesome creations to life.

Overcoming these challenges in our industry requires a huge paradigm shift – rather than building organizations as money-making machines with top-down control, our organizations need to become thinking, feeling, interconnected social organisms, where our humanity isn't boiled down to a few numbers.

How do we shift the paradigm of the organization, to bridge these two worlds together? The short answer – with the help of software.

Stop Getting Crushed By Business Pressure

This is my story of lessons learned on how to stop the crushing effects of business pressure… I was team lead with full control of our green-field project. After a year, we had continuous delivery, a beautiful clean code base, and worked directly with our customers to design the features. Then our company split in two, we were moved under different management, and I watched my project get crushed.

As a consultant, I saw the same pattern of relentless business pressure everywhere, driving one project after another into the ground. I made it my mission to help the development teams solve this problem. This is my story of lessons learned on how to transform an organization from the bottom up. I'll show you how to lead the way.

How to Build a Learning Organization

Twenty-five years ago, Peter Senge wrote “The Fifth Discipline”, considered the seminal text for how to build a learning organization. With obvious benefits, and the recipe needed for success, why don't we see more learning organizations? That was twenty-five years ago!

As Ash Maurya pointed out in his new book, Scaling Lean, “The goal isn't learning, the goal is traction.” Without a process that helps us turn learning into momentum, a culture of learning gets us nowhere. Without a strategy to overcome the challenges of distributed decision-making, we still make most decisions in ignorance.

Let's dust off these old ideas in light of all the discoveries we've made over the last decade in Lean Startup, Agile, and Continuous Delivery.

Top 5 Reasons Why Improvement Efforts Fail

This is my story of lessons learned on why improvement efforts fail… I had a great team. We were disciplined about best practices and spent tons of time on improvements. Then I watched my team slam into a brick wall. We brought down production three times in a row, then couldn’t ship again for a year.

Despite our best efforts with CI, unit testing, design reviews, and code reviews, we lost our ability to understand the system. We thought our problems were caused by technical debt building up in the code base, but we were wrong. We failed to improve, because we didn’t solve the right problems. Eventually, we turned our project around, but with a lot of tough lessons along the way.

How to Run an Open Mastery Circle - Live Demo

“Open Mastery” is the discipline of learning out loud. In Open Mastery Circles, we put the pain on center stage, dig into the causes of pain as a group, then codify lessons learned into patterns and principles. With a simple 5-step problem-solving protocol that's easy to apply on your team, you can drastically increase the rate of learning.

Have you ever wondered whether your retrospective format was actually effective at fueling learning and improvement? Are you ready to try something different?