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How combined Lean- and Agile practices will change the world as we know it

01 Jul, 2014
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You might have attended this month at our presentation about eXtreme Manufacturing and the keynote of Nalden last week on XebiCon 2014. There are a few epic takeaways and additions I would like to share with you in this blogpost.
Epic TakeAway #1: The Learn, Unlearn and Relearn Cycle Like Nalden expressed in his inspiring keynote, one of the major things for him to be successful is being able to Learn, Unlearn and Relearn every time again. In my opinion, this will be the key ability for every successful company in the near future.  In fact, this is how nature evolutes: in the end, only the species who are able to adapt to changing circumstances will survive and evolute. This mechanism makes for example, most of the startups fail, but those who will survive, can be extremely disruptive for non-agile organizations.  Best example for this is of course Whatsapp.  Beating up the Telco Industry by almost destroying their whole businessmodel in only a few months. Learn more about disruptive innovation from one of my personal heroes, Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen.

Epic TakeAway #2: Unlearning Waterfall, Relearning Lean & Agile Globally, Waterfall is still the dominant method in companies and universities.  Waterfall has its origins more than 40 years ago. Times have changed. A lot. A new, successful and disruptive product could be there in only a matter of days instead of (many) years. Finally, things are changing. For example, the US Department of Defence has recently embraced Lean and Agile as mandatory practices, especially Scrum. Schools and universities are also more and more adopting the Agile way of working. Later more in this blogpost.
Epic TakeAway #3: Combined Lean- and Agile practices =  XM Lean practices arose in Japan in the 1980’s , mainly in the manufacturing industry, Toyota being the frontrunner here.  Agile practices like Scrum, were first introduced in the 1990’s by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, these practices were mainly applied in the IT-industry. Until now, the manufacturing and IT world didn’t really joined forces combining Lean and Agile practices.  Until recently.  The WikiSpeed initiative of Joe Justice proved combining these practices result in a hyper-productive environment, where a 100 Mile/Gallon road legal sportscar could be developed in less than 3 months.  Out of this success eXtreme Manufacturing (XM) arose. Finally, a powerful combination of best practices from the manufacturing- and IT-world came together.
Epic TakeAway #4: Agile Mindset & Education fotoLike Sir Ken Robinson and Dan Pink already described in their famous TED-talks, the way most people are educated and rewarded, is not suitable anymore for modern times and even conflicts with the way we are born.  We learn by "failing", not by preventing it.  Failing in it’s essence should stimulate creativity to do things better next time, not be punished.  On the long run, failing (read: learning!) has more added value than short-term succes, for example by chasing milestones blindly. EduScrum in the Netherlands stimulates schools and universities to apply Scrum in their daily classes in order to stimulate creativity, happiness, self-reliantness and talent. The results of the schools joining these initiative are spectacular: happy students, less dropouts an significantly higher grades. For a prestigious project for the Delft University, Forze, the development of a hydrogen race car, the students are currently being trained and coached to apply Agile and Lean practices.  Also these results are more than promising. The Forze team is happier, more productive and more able to learn faster and better from setbacks.  Actually, they are taking the first steps of being anti-fragile.  Due too an intercession of the Forze team members themselves,  the current support of agile (Xebia) coaches is now planned being extended to the flagship of the Delft University:  the NUON solar team.
The Final Epic TakeAway In my opinion, we reached a tipping point in the way goals should be achieved.  Organizations are massively abandoning Waterfall and embracing Agile practices, like Scrum.  Adding Lean practices like Joe Justice did in his WikiSpeed project, makes Agile and Lean extremely powerful.  Yes, this will even make this world a much better place.  We cannot prevent nature disasters with this, but we can be anti-fragile.  We cannot prevent every epidemic, but we can respond in an XM-fashion on this by developing a vaccin in only days instead of years.  This brings me finally to the missing statement of the current Agile Manifesto:   We should Unlearn and Relearn before we Judge.  Dare to Dream like a little kid again. Unlearn your skepticism.  Companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin and John Deere already did. Adopting XM speeded up their velocity in some cases with more than 7 times.

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