Pablo Pernot

So, to introduce myself, I'm Pablo, I've been working at Binex for not that long, and I'm really enjoying it. I do classic support and transformation work around agility. I’m giving you a session called 'intopology' because I think it’s fair play to try to do things that talk about intopology at an intopology conference.
Rightly or wrongly. Okay? And I add topology because... Well, no, it’s not that I’m adding topology. I have Géraldine, who did me the favor of not coming to the session, who told me, 'No, I’m not coming to your session, I don’t know what topology is.' " So, it’s crap. I don’t know what it means, I don’t know what it implies. So, we’ll start slowly like this. What am I going to tell you about topology? I’m not a scientist, so I’m terrible at topology, I’m terrible at topography. What I retained from the definition of topology and what I’m going to try to show you here—I like the definition of topology—it’s... If there are any scientists, you can correct me, no problem. It’s the properties of space or other things that are preserved despite deformations, continuous transformations. So, in this session, I’m trying to ask myself... What is fundamental, essential to LID? And what are the constant deformations applied to it, and how can we rethink it? Okay? So, basically, I’m going to do three parts, which is why I asked Dragoche to time me three times for 15 minutes each. I’ll do a first part that is...
What are the questions I have about Lean?
Yeah, it’s annoying, yes, it’s industrial, so that’s probably not what Lean is.
The second part is... We’re talking about properties that are preserved and constant deformations. What are they? What should we keep in mind? And the third part is now that we might have said... Well, I’ve told you what I believe about lin or what’s... Damn, I shouldn’t put my hands there. Lin or what’s around it, whatever.
that I tried to explain to you
The essence, the essence in the essential, fundamental sense, back to basics. I’m not speaking English anymore, everyone relax, it’s 5 o’clock.
So, the link, what is it? The essence, and then I project myself. Now, be careful, I’m going to project myself. I added a slide because this morning, there was something on Scotland, he quoted, I don’t remember who, by the way, Def Noden, who says it’s sometimes interesting to have a naive perspective.
So, that’s exactly what I’m going to do here. So, there might be some who will be disappointed because it’s not serious, a naive perspective, but that’s what I like. Sorry, I come from the humanities, I’m not an engineer, I come from the humanities side.
I did a master’s on montipitons and a DEA on nonsense and the absurd. So, I’m perfect for working with engineers.
And so, I try to give a different perspective, a different reading. Afterward, you take it or you don’t, we’ll discuss it.
Okay, that’s a bit of what I just announced to you.
So, what pisses me off about Lean is that people use it as an excuse to go back to the model they like, that is, the so-called industrial model. Okay? We have a problem: every time we say agile, then we say Lean, because Lean is serious, we can’t mess around. Lean is industry. Lean is the guarantee of a certain repeatability. With Lean, we can reproduce, we can have linearity. I don’t believe in any of that at all. It’s just a facade that allows messages to be passed in companies, and I don’t believe in it at all. Okay? The first thing is this. And when we start thinking about Lean from that time, it was already another era. It was completely different. And fundamentally, they were first questioned about continuous improvement, respect for people, etc. Normally, everyone knows a little bit about what Lean is vaguely. There are some who don’t know it at all, not at all. Well, very good.
That’s why I have blanks. When I’m not working, I have blanks. I have blanks pretty much all the time.
So, the first thing is that I’m quite annoyed by the posture we take from Tony Rollin, which is false in my opinion. And we try to reassure ourselves by recalling an old system that is an industrial system that no longer corresponds to today. Or a manufacturing system that no longer corresponds to today. Or the 'eliminate waste,' you know, eliminating waste, which in my opinion doesn’t make sense today. We’ll see what meaning... What meaning do I bring to this? So, think that every time people refer to the lines, we have a big problem with the era, meaning it was still the post-war period, with feet in the ashes, so to speak, and hands in the grease, and all that has changed a lot. So, we’ll see how it has changed.
Another thing about everything related to Lean, Scrum, etc. I have another reflection in progress. So, I have parallel reflections, don’t worry. And then we’ll see if you take something from it or not, whether you take something from it or not. Another reflection in progress is that I stop being interested in Kanban, in Scrum—well, I don’t stop being interested, I continue to do it all the time, etc. But ultimately... By asking myself this kind of question, when I tell you 'back to basics,' what is the essence of IN? Ultimately, the essence of IN is naturally not the method, it’s naturally not the way of applying it. And when I look at companies trying to do Scrum or Kanban or other things, they struggle over details, they struggle over small practices, they struggle over very high-level things. Ultimately, these are very sharp tools, Scrum and Kanban, and they forget essential things that I see a lot here. Here, what I see a lot is the... Well, it’s a photo, so it will be hard to see the cultural change, but indeed, what I see a lot is the physical change. So, I would also like to challenge you today on the importance of physical aspects. When I say 'back to basics,' what are the essential things? And among the essential things, I will very quickly get to very structural things, either what we are, our essence, how we function physically, here as fifth-generation hominids, and also structurally, where we place the desks, where we place people, before starting to tackle Scrum, Kanban, etc. Okay? I’ll try to talk about that.
On this physical aspect, another precision: I quite regularly do what we call open adoption or open space agility, that is, asking companies, companies that would like to try to manage change by asking people—some of you know about it, in the room I saw some who have done it, we’ve crossed paths, And companies say, we’re starting a 3-month or 6-month cycle, and we ask people to make their proposal for a day, and they get started. It’s a very good tool for change, and I recommend you look into these questions of open space agility or open adoption. What I discovered by asking people what they wanted, by really giving people a hand, naturally it’s governed by constraints, by a container, what do we discover? They don’t ask us to improve planning poker, they don’t ask us to improve the way of making estimates, they don’t ask us to improve the way of managing WIP in the camp, they don’t care and they’re right. They ask us to change the desk location of a certain person. He’s asking us to set up a WhatsApp to arrange a time to eat together.
And my daily practice of Lean agility leads me more and more to this, to these basics, which ultimately are the soil, the foundations of... Afterwards! When there is a degree of maturity, we can ask questions about Lean, about Kanban, about Scrum, etc. So my first reflection is basic: we rethink Lean, and we also rethink what we are, and what are the basic things we need to work on before going too far.
I’m following my little notebook so I don’t...
If I try to project myself into... So I’m telling you it’s another era, and I’m telling you, Toyota is post-war, so they had things, they had good reasons to ask these questions, they had good reasons to bring such answers, but naturally we’re not going to try to apply answers that are 50 years old; we’re going to apply the mindset, but not the answers. The problem is that people are trying to make us apply the answers from that era. I’m trying to project myself: what is alive? In what situation could we have our hands in the mud, our feet in the shit, to ask these questions again? So, it’s the slums. So at one point, I dug into the slums, and it was really funny because when you read the reports on slums, you come across things that are... It feels like an agile handbook. They tell us: you need people who aren’t too far apart, small teams, participation is needed, you have to let them decide, you have to take it step by step, start with small pieces, then you have to make life... Wait, but they don’t give a damn about... What are we looking for? It sounds like an agile manual; it’s very interesting.
Okay? When I looked a bit more into these slums, what is striking?
Again, we come back to the essential physical aspects of the beginning. What is the size of a space for it to be acceptable for people in the slum? How far do they need to work? Afterwards, we’ll see about that cream cake later; don’t bother me with it now. Okay? The basics.
How far along am I, Dragoche?
One minute left.
Sorry?
It’s the last minute.
Thank you. So it’s fine, it doesn’t matter if I move on a bit now. So I’m moving on to a second part. So you’ve understood, my first part is to challenge Lean. Why am I going to challenge Lean, the image we have of it? I told you I don’t believe in it. Secondly, I’m going to bring things back to the physical aspects. Thirdly, we’re in a completely different environment. Don’t read this slide; it’s a bit ahead of time. We’re in a completely different environment. What is our new environment? I tend to describe it to you in three words. The first word, everyone has it in mind: complexity. They’ve talked about it a lot, Claudio Perron; he’s talked about it a lot. He said things are moving too fast; we can no longer keep up with the pace; we need to take options. Complexity is intertwining, mixing.
The unexpected will happen; we’ve entered the world of complexity. We could say we entered the world of complexity in Japan with the atomic bomb, if we want to philosophize a bit. From now on, we no longer really know what will happen since we’ve seen that we’re capable of anything.
In any case, the first thing is complexity. We all agree on this acceleration of communications, acceleration of technologies. How do we respond to it? I’ll try to make a projection later on leadership, on the response to bring. The second thing is frugality.
There will be a slide that says this later; I’m telling you now. Lean insists a lot on 'eliminate waste,' eliminating waste. Now, I’m going to tell you, we could almost say it’s 'save the planet' now. Save the planet, frugal. It’s no longer about the density of value generation; it’s about saving energy, limiting energy as much as possible. It’s a different posture, okay? Frugality.
The third thing I’m currently questioning and on which I’ll try to make my prospective part at the end is intangibility. That is, we clearly see that when we talk about WhatsApp, I keep contradicting myself, but I keep telling you that the distance of offices is important, that the physical aspect is important, and we’ll get to that, but here I’m telling you, watch out, intangibility is going to shake all that up. So in the prospective, we’ll ask questions about intangibility.
If I want to bring in a bit of my reflection, I start by saying, before projecting ourselves, let’s think about what we are. Essential basics before doing Kanban or Scrum: when we talk, do we at least hear each other? Aren’t we too many to discuss?
Okay? So, very physical, basic things that ultimately... Change much more than some applications of practice. Among them, there is distance. So there’s Alistair, you have to say Cockburn, but I love saying Cockburn, who says there’s no more than a bus’s distance. Okay, there’s another thing from IBM called the Allen Curve. We realize that it collapses after 15 meters. So before you start talking to me about practice, first get everyone within a maximum of 15 meters. Okay, before telling each other what you’re going to say, get within 15 meters.
Companies don’t do that; it bothers me.
Everything I say that seems obvious, I say a lot of obvious things. The more obvious it is, the less people do it. That’s exhausting. But I love this job.
That’s something that comes from the mythical man-month. You all know it; it’s the book where it says, 'You can’t make a baby with nine women in one month.' Even if it’s fun to try.
There’s something else; it’s just combinatorics; it’s easy. Beyond 8... It becomes very complicated to lead a group in a constructive discussion that brings reflection, that brings something we build. Try it; you’ll see, when you put nine people together, generally very quickly, the group splits in two. It’s very stupid, but around 7-8, we are... We’re a bit at the limit. Before asking a lot of questions about my daily scrums, my daily burn-downs, etc., let’s bring it back to the basics. So that’s our base before the prospective.
Another thing: visual management. We know it works very well; we know that memorization works much better. I say it sounds very pedantic, but I almost prefer to say cognitive management. Because it’s visual, auditory, and tactile, kinesthetic. Think about it; it’s very important when you make your boards. That you say out loud what was marked during the sessions, because the auditory must also work, so it’s not just visual. But anyway, we know very well that this improves things a lot in what we are. There’s memorization that works much better. And then, we saw that in the slums,
We saw that in the slums, they tell us you need such a distance, you need to be close to the job, and when you build renovated buildings, when you want to update,
When you want to update the buildings, you realize they need to be at least 50 square meters to be viable.
An alternative in the line that I like, which is very basic, on which I can rely, is this visual management and these obeyas. The auditory must also work, so it's not just visual. But after all, we know very well that this greatly improves things in what we are. There is memorization that works much better. And then, we saw that in the slums,
We saw that in the slums, they tell us that we need such a distance, that we need to be close to the job, and that when we build renovated buildings, when we want to update,
When we want to update the buildings, we realize they must be at least 50 square meters to be viable.
An alternative in the line that I like, which is very basic, on which I can rely, is this visual management and these Obeya rooms. You know, Obeya, it's... Oh, that's great, sorry. In my job, every time we suggest a Japanese word, we gain in TGM. So I will try to give as many as possible. That way, I boost my TGV. So say Obeya. Obeya, that's very good. It's the project room, the war room, the playroom, call it what you want.
Cool, several of you are giving me the sign. I prefer your sign to the one on the left.
Thanks, keep going.
Good, I also passed the second part, that's great. So, at BIA, a room where we also memorize better. You know, I think this comes from Brain Rules, by Medina. It's a book. If you have a child, they need to learn French, English, and Spanish. The best is to have them learn English in one room and Spanish in another, because in their brain, they will create a sort of mirror localization. Okay? So a room of 8. We said we were 8. In a room that's not too small, not too big, where we can memorize things and we can do harm. There you go, that's... When I say we return to basics, we do this.
Interrupt me if you want.
This is a bit on the go, a bit different. We realize that when we do storytelling, we remember things 22 times more. Okay, well, I'm going a bit fast.
This is another interesting study.
I think I saw this, I didn't have time to put the references, but I think I saw it in an article by Marie Popendick called 'When there was no management' or something like that. I'll add it when I put the references on SlideShare.
We realize that we enjoy belonging to a group, to a certain number. When there are 12 people, that's around 12 or 15, more or less, At the bottom, it's the number of people. At the top, it's the level of satisfaction of belonging to a group. When we realize that at 12, we don't feel good in this group. At 7, we feel good. At 50 too. Then you know, there's Dunbar's number. Dunbar, it's 150, 220, sociology. So then, I have a big company. I divide it into 150, into 50, and into 7. And it turns out that 7 is the number that fits well with 7, 8, the maximum size of a group to be constructive in the end. It's removed. And then we say that at 4... That's where it starts to become a team at 3-4. Before that, it's a dynamic of individuals. That's what I'm trying to recall in the basics before projecting.
All this could be strongly associated with what we call the Gemba. Who's going up?
The Gemba of Lean which is 'I go to see what's happening to learn, to get the answer on the spot.' So that's what bothers me. In Lean, they tell us 'Oh no, we must eliminate net waste, repeatability, linearity, guarantee.' But no, what is essentially said, well, what today has value for us in Lean, is much more things like that. You have to go see on the spot to get the answer on the spot because the world has become... Our job means it has become far too complex to find the answer elsewhere. And then we know that it works on the spot with local solutions. This is the Valve handbook. There are several, there are several versions. But it's really great. When I posted this recently on Twitter, Yves Hanoul told me 'Pablo, this is just for extroverts, implying like us.' But I don't believe that actually. I don't agree with Yves. There was the camera. Yves, I don't agree with you.
Introverts benefit from it, even if it's an extrovert who comes to talk, we come to talk about things. We come to see on the spot. Which of the bosses who tell you Lean is about repeatability, immunity, come to see people on the spot, move around the offices, spend 40-60% of their time discussing with people, which is essential. That's the missing essence.
Well done Stéphane, that's good. No, but it counts, that's the... The difference is made there. So, I told you about BeNext. Anyone, you come, if you want to visit. The discussion we had, everyone right now is into holacracy, blah blah blah, I love that.
Is Alexandre Gérard in the room here? No? Don't go see him.
No, I'm joking, I'll go see him tomorrow. But ultimately, the question of Gemba is not to go listen to the boss. Go on the spot, ask people how it's going. We all do marketing. So don't go see the... Go see on the spot, don't listen to me here. Don't go listen to Alexandre Gérard tomorrow, go see on the spot. That's what Gemba says. This is essential, and today it corresponds to our complex world, our frugal world, to the problem of intangibility, we will try to answer it.
I'm checking if I forgot anything.
Okay.
So, I told you that.
So, I'm at a point where I might do a session called 'Agility in vows of powerlessness.'
In fact, I'm wondering if...
If we're not in the process of... Anyway, it's so complex that we no longer know what to do. They say we want no estimates because we no longer know how to estimate. They say we want no management because we no longer know how to manage. They say we want no budget because we no longer know how to budget. Because we're in deep trouble. It's too much of a hassle, it's too complicated, everything changes too quickly, we no longer know how to do it.
Okay? So what do we do? What is the big movement currently? We turn to something that works in this type of environment. And what has worked for millennia in this type of environment? It's everything that is organic, everything that is natural. That's what I'm putting here.
So, to set the stage a bit for what I'm going to project as my new new lean company, when I say new new, I'm referring to an old article that launched Scrum.
So there are many things I talk about and believe in that are linked to the organic. It's not me, it's what everyone is saying now. Well, a lot of people are saying it. Okay? Now, I've moved on to describing the context, the environment.
We continue with a bit of philosophy, but I admit it.
Spinoza says there are three essential things: the cause for which we... That pulls us, what we are at the essence level,
and the cause of reactivity, in other words, the cause-and-effect reactivity with the environment. So I tried to describe the essential things about people, now I'm trying to describe a bit what's happening around us in my view. What's happening around us in my view is this complexity. This complexity, I think we have a certain admission of powerlessness in the face of it, and we should turn to things, we are turning to organic, natural things, because we've seen them work for... That works, we know it works, otherwise we wouldn't be here. So we turn to that. It's very interesting. But no industrialization, no repeatability. When we talk...
When we talk about nature, when we talk about organic, or when we talk about managing a complex world, a complex adaptive system, etc. We no longer think in terms of processes at all, we no longer think in terms of targets, we think in terms of containers and direction. That's essential as a mindset: I define my box, Here's where we're going, and I let what emerges inside happen or not. Important to grasp in the essence of the modern world. We don't have to tell you what to do. We have to describe the box in which you can emancipate yourselves. And that's why people currently associate performance a lot with empowerment. Not only is there a very different commitment, but in addition, we take up a lot of space. And this space, we didn't take it before when we were led by the nose, with micro-tasks.
If we take this organic reference of nature, related to nature or whatever you want, the whole organic story, I don't know what scientific technical term to use, we can also relate this to the second point that defines the world we're in: frugality. Nature is always lazy.
The river takes the easiest path for it to find its way. The crystal,
The crystal's way of being lazy is to always repeat the same pattern. That's what defines a crystal: the repetition of the pattern. So as a result, its communication is easy since it always falls on the same pattern. Now, be careful, you might say to me, 'Ah yeah, Pablo, but now we're falling back into a repetition thing.' 'Ah yeah, but the difference will be here.' We're not going to repeat the process or the result, we're going to repeat the framework that we unfold. I'll come back to this later, but I think there's a shift to be made here. Yes, I'll hear a lot about repeatability, the un-agile, whatever you want, but within the framework. So we don't have the same results, we're not going to repeat the same result, maybe. Maybe, that's complexity, it's the word maybe. Complexity is... The difference between mayonnaise and a Ferrari. We'll know how to build the Ferrari if we have the right people. The mayonnaise will probably take. That's complexity. For it to work, we'll repeat the framework. For there to be a framework that takes us somewhere, we'll define the direction. So the crystal...
I was telling you, nature is lazy.
Because it needs to save energy to survive. And we're in that kind of world now, frugal.
Beyond thoughts for the planet, which will come back to bite us, that's for sure, but beyond that.
Another way to be frugal, to save energy in the end?
I like to say now, it's no longer the flow of value, nature is the flow of energy. How do we manage this flow? And then it's save the planet, it's not eliminate waste. Okay, that has nothing to do with it. When we eliminate waste, we're trying to maximize the density of value. Here, we're trying to minimize effort. The guy couldn't do his session which was...
Maximize the outcome, what comes out as the result, by minimizing effort. Frugality, our world, is minimizing effort. It's no longer about eliminating waste and densifying the result, it's about minimizing what we have to do. How does it minimize its thing? Termites are funny; termite mounds are the most elaborate constructions in the animal world. And now, well, 30 minutes, thank you, now, well, so I'll speed up, now, well, we're starting to replicate termite mounds to have... Go ahead, tell me.
5 before 30, he's crazy. He wants to trap me.
We're replicating what termites have done to save energy in... buildings without using energy ourselves. Termite mounds, what's funny is that they throw stuff around a bit everywhere, and then at some point, when two are confronted, oh well, there, they're two close ones, we could put... If we have a third one in the middle, that... So we'll come back to that. Termite mounds are used to store energy outside their bodies. It's as if it were an external function of their body, it's interesting. We could start thinking about that for companies too. Where do we store our energy outside the company, etc.
Okay, I'm getting a bit off track with frugality. So, there is... This slide is unreadable. We didn't necessarily read it, there are too many words.
I'm just saying, when I talk to you about termite mounds, about putting piles at random, when I talk to you about crystals, about repeating patterns, these are very different things.
What I'm currently able to organize in my head, let's say that,
We have a cursor that keeps moving between reinforcing this constraint, reinforcing this container, or opening it. I told you, now, in complexity, we're going to need a container, a block, a... A container, with a direction and letting things emancipate. How much the container should be reinforced, how much it should not be reinforced. When it is too reinforced, when too many things are applied, it kills everything, there is too much distance. When it is opened too much, I fall into boxes where the wheel is constantly reinvented. Where newcomers are not explained anything, they land in the middle of something holacratic, very new, very emergent, which explains nothing to anyone, they are completely lost. We do the same things four times in one corner. So at some point, maximum communication is needed. This is the end of my framework. I was somewhat finishing my framework on the questions I ask myself in bed. And then, I wonder about basic things like what we are, what rules govern us physically, when I project, when we talk about complexity, what we should keep in mind, frugality. We will keep in mind complexity, so the container, the direction. We observe a bit what happens in nature with the crystal that repeats these things to save this frugality. We see that the termite is the opposite; it leaves things completely open and optimizes the fact that when someone places two piles, it will start building its thing. So, where do I set the cursor? And there is no answer, naturally, since we are dealing with complexity. Since we are dealing with complexity, this cursor will move.
So starting from...
Based on this foundation, what do I try to tell myself when I do foresight? Doing foresight is when I project myself, or not so much, projecting. There are things that are very real that I will show you here, there are things that are purely fantastical.
What do I project when I try to talk about the new new lean? I check if I have forgotten anything.
No, it's good.
So that strikes me.
I return a bit to my basic debate. Here, I try to project myself. I will put some images. In the next fifteen minutes or so, I will show you some images.
Here, I think it's stupid because all companies try to be like on the right, but the only thing that works is the thing on the left, in real life.
Do you agree with that or not?
No? This is...
Organized Images on Twitter.
I also like that. All companies try to be like on the left. This looks like an organizational chart of our companies. And on the right, it's what happens in real life.
I tell you that this is a naive perspective.
In a speech, I won't say talk, that's English, I will say speech.
In a speech by Simon Sinek, here, there is a quite interesting moment. It's the thing on the left in real life.
Do you agree with that or not?
No? This, it's...
Organized Images on Twitter.
I like this one too. All companies try to be like on the left. This looks like an organizational chart of our companies. And on the right, it's what happens in real life.
I'm telling you it's a naive perspective.
In a speech, I won't say talk, that's English, I'll say speech.
In a speech by Simon Sinek, he mentions something quite interesting at one point.
He says, what we didn't measure when Galileo succeeded in... Well, Galileo didn't necessarily succeed, but when people really became aware that the Earth was round, in fact, what it triggered was a lot of voyages.
So what I'm trying to show you here is that the Earth is round, and everyone thinks it's all flat, like organizations, and if we tried to tell ourselves that after all the Earth was round, well in fact it could trigger a lot of voyages. And some have already made these voyages and are already on their way. So I'm just trying to present images we could bounce off of.
A real living thing, a real company, is here, not there. And yet, that's what we try to... Often, unfortunately, people try to climb the corporate ladder in companies.
Where is the innovation? Innovation is in the mess too. Likewise, you know, I'm stating the obvious, but that's okay. Okay, we keep being told, the IN is industrial, the IN is serious. We don't care about all that. It's false, we don't care. It shouldn't be industrial. It shouldn't be serious, otherwise we kill innovation. It shouldn't be industrial. It doesn't work in a complex world. It's too costly, it's not interesting. We need to project ourselves onto things much more like this. In my opinion, I have a big flaw, I say it must be. Every time I say it must be, I wish...
I continue with images. I love it. It's always in the Valve handbook. Valve is the video game company. You've all played Half-Life. Well, those who are my age.
So this is how the people at Valve see their... It's funny, it looks a lot like... You can tell this is the team of 8. I don't know how many they are. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
I'm not saying 8 is the right number. I'm saying beyond 8, it's not 8 that I'm aiming for. Beyond 8, it breaks group communication. It can be 7, it can be 6, there's no problem. And 7 is a good number for a sense of belonging to a team. Then, they describe it like this. You can see it's the United States. Then, they describe it as a mess like this, and a completely flat hierarchy. That's how I like to project company structures.
So in the reflections I have right now, which I and many others have, this organic thing is absolutely not... First of all, it's not new. Many French people talked about this in the 70s.
And probably many Anglo-Saxons too. It happens that it's now gaining significance and depth. So it's resurfacing now. And many people are saying, since we're talking about organic, since we're talking about frugality, what kind of system organization exists in nature? There's a system called stigmergy. Who has already heard of stigmergy?
Alexandre, do you want to explain it?
No, but it's good to change course from time to time. 30 seconds, won't you? No. Alright.
So, very briefly, stigmergy is a story of very localized action-reaction between one bird and another bird, between an ant and... A thing it found between a termite and a pile it just discovered, which generates another action, which itself will generate another action, which itself generates another action, potentially leading to very complex systems, with only very limited small actions, without a boss, without management, since the action is triggered by the environment.
Okay? But be careful, there can be side effects, it's not magic, there can be a total lack of vision of the global target. So it's not stigmergy for the sake of stigmergy for free.
And so many people are testing this now. Right now, there's a software called Blockchain. Well, it's not software, it's the system of... It's the trust system of Bitcoin. Okay? I'm starting to be recognized as a good payer on Bitcoin if there are such, such, and such people who have said yes. Then, if there's such a person who says no, it triggers this. There's such a person who says no. It's just a small assembly of short interactions.
that all together trigger large complex structures that work well dynamically. You can think of Open Source, for example. You can think of Wikipedia; these aren't necessarily very striking examples, but Wikipedia is a set of small actions that make up a large complex whole. Open Source too. So we can start questioning this, since we're saying, okay then, a container, a vision, that's a lot, I don't remember who said it, but it's a lot about the clarity of the vision, etc. This container and this vision, this direction. Now, how do we organize in the middle if we say we're really in this frugal and complex world, we organize by doing stigmergy, small actions. What form can stigmergy take? I don't know, I could say a kanban can be very stigmergic, since it's a small action that has a small action, that has a small action. You can see how the kanban, in addition to being visual, will lead to small bounces, small bounces, small bounces, small bounces. We need to ask questions about stigmergy, these are just ideas that are emerging, because afterward it can be very blinding, but these are things that build complex systems without management. So it's with a lot of self-organization, it looks a lot like, when we talk about stigmergy, it looks a lot like the lexical field of agility and... And lean. Okay? To explore.
I think I have another one on the slide.
Here, I'm doing a little... It's just to drop a Japanese word that boosts my TGM. It's not really Kaizen I'm talking about, it's more about change. You see that stigmergy... in the idea that we bring about great things through small, localized changes. So, many people have already said that. And when you live it and are convinced of it, change will come through small things that will lead to other small things. I’ll say it again, I don’t care, I can say it 38,000 times, it’s always worth saying. And to increase my TGM, there’s something called Kaikaku.
That’s Kaizen, but through very big change. And it doesn’t work.
We’ve been saying it, we’ve been observing it for a long time.
Okay, by the way, there’s something called Visual Sedimentation, which is done by INRA or I don’t know where. It’s, I build all my graphs from natural elements. Right now, there’s only one, but I encourage you to go check out visualsedimentation.org. And it makes layers, or it makes rain, or it makes... In the end, when Trello had fun making the little things that move, it was like leaves. That’s also a way to introduce... Okay, we’re saying we think organically, we’re saying we think stigmergy, we’re saying we think differently about this company line, or this company. You remove the word 'line,' Dragoche?
That’s interesting. Start thinking about that. What form could it take? I’ll go through this quickly because it can get very boring. There’s a theory by a very well-known Frenchman from the late 1960s who was very famous, the 70s, and who was heavily criticized but very well-known at the time called catastrophe theory. Basically, it’s the theory of all the particular events that change things. So he was heavily criticized and very appreciated because in the end he started using images like shower curtains, mushrooms, sewing, unsewing. And then he set up algorithms that allow you to see when the dog... You can kind of see everything with it, it was a bit magical. So of course it was criticized. And then it’s never measurable, never verifiable, so of course it was heavily criticized. But what’s interesting is... to approach a company instead of saying I create a subsidiary, I say I emit, there’s a fault, we resew, is this in English? We shake, we cross, we read. So I recommend you check out, just out of curiosity, René Thom’s catastrophe theory. It’s interesting, we see new dynamics instead of saying... It tears at some point. There’s too much communication, not enough, it tears. It sews back together. It folds. And then he has associated curves, etc. I’m trying to project this onto organizations.
Since we’re in a stigmergic thing with close contacts and we’re in an organic thing, I could start looking at how... Okay, that’s very classic. Claudio Perron talked about viruses. Okay, let’s take things about virus transmission to start visually projecting what change could look like. When we change things, we could have this kind of thing that allows us to visualize.
And then, when I started looking at what kind of graph I could have, I took graphs of sexually transmitted diseases.
Because in every article, it said it’s important because there’s a very strong ego. We feel that ego plays a strong part in how the disease spreads. So I thought it would be even more precise in relation to what an account observation could have. It’s the same here.
So there are a lot of things like that in sexually transmitted diseases because there are partners who at some point don’t overlap, they don’t want to, it’s not socially acceptable. So I’m just saying, it’s interesting to look at these things. Earlier, I was talking to you, not about the repeatability of results or processes, but the repeatability of the framework and letting things emerge within that framework as long as the direction is the same or not. So it’s more that kind of repeatability. We’re going to look for this kind of representation. We’re going to look for that kind of representation. Okay, classic. So that could be very... Fractal.
Fractal, it’s a natural pattern that fits very well with something that can expand, contract, stigmergic, organic. Okay. How much time do I have left, Dragoche?
How much?
4 minutes, okay.
So I just took this because I don’t remember who tweeted that Conway’s law is essential in this talk. So I added that. Indeed, there you go. Now, we’re starting to have microservices. Microservices, what are they? If it’s nothing more than having cells that work in stigmergy, etc.
So, more real things, because all this seems very agreeable, but...
Agreeable, but he’s dreaming, or tomorrow, or how do I do it on Monday, etc.
It’s just a mental problem. It’s just a mental block. Who hasn’t heard of Wikispeed? Hasn’t heard of Wikispeed. Have you all heard of Wikispeed? No, let’s start over. Who hasn’t heard of Wikispeed? Okay. So Wikispeed is people who said, we’re going to make a car in Scrum mode.
I talk to people, they tell me, we want to be agile, because it’s the keyword that sells, we want to be agile in industry, so we plan the entire assembly line, and in the end, we change the shape of the headlights. Because it’s key for sales anyway.
Bullshit.
So Wikispeed is an alternative. Wikispeed, they dared. They had no mental barriers. They said, hey, we’re going to build a car. In Scrum mode with people scattered around the world, and every two weeks we release something, and we forget everything that existed before. And I come back to physics. to the physical, to the material. The key to change, the key to possibility, is to come back and question, to challenge yourself, even if that word is strange,
to dare to step out of your comfort zone, to dare to think differently, to try things on the material you work with, before thinking about the method, before thinking about all that. And there, they dared to change all the material. They had very, very good results, since after three months or six months, I don’t remember, they already had a car ranked among the ten most interesting prototypes to come. Then after, they had the lightest chassis elected 5 stars in the crash test. And it works, and it’s all the material that changed. If Wikispeed didn’t exist, you’d talk to someone who makes cars and they’d say, 'Yeah, no, but your thing, no.'
Dare.
3D printer, it's going to change everything. We're no longer going to have... All the equipment is going to change. That's what's going to revolutionize things. When I say a new Lean Company, it's that we're going to manage... I imagine we'll manage ourselves in a very organic way with stigmergy, with organizations designed very differently, but the equipment is necessarily different. Everyone talks about Spotify. Okay, so I'll give you 30 seconds on Spotify.
When we meet the Spotify guys, at some point they explain to us that they created teams of 8, as I told you, organic. They ask me, 'But how did you handle the code?' Because in the end, it's the equipment that holds us back. And in this case, it's the code. Okay, Kevin Goldsmith tells me, 'Oh no, for 6 months we completely overhauled everything.' " Well yes, no choice. Otherwise, it's the equipment you're dragging along.
Okay, we need to rethink the entire equipment aspect. And what's happening with Wikispeed, what's going to happen with 3D printers, will allow that.
It's hard, I struggle to open my mind.
Last point, intangibility. I keep telling you that my three points are complexity, frugality, intangibility. And I keep talking to you about equipment, about the impact of fundamental physical aspects,
Okay. To rethink things a bit differently. In the middle comes this... In the middle comes to plant itself intangibility because we won't do things differently. We understand well that teleworking is still the future, well, it seems to me. Teleworking doesn't mean you're off all the time. It means we work a bit everywhere and we meet up from time to time. So we need to start observing that. What I observe, likewise, I'm going to dive into open source, what I observe in open source is that they hold summits. Did I write it down here?
It's the next slide.
So sorry, it's the next slide, I'll come back to it. Today, we're equipped like the 3D printer. I have 10 minutes.
Today, we're equipped thanks to this to also rethink things very differently. Democracy OS, Slack, Google Drive, Bitcoin, WhatsApp, and dozens and dozens of others. Wikispeed explains well that if they were able to do that, it's because they had Google Drive that allowed sharing, because they had WhatsApp.
It's a bit like the new Game Bar. We need... Okay, I was against tablets and I was against all that, but I'm changing. I love tablets now and I think, after all, it's possible to have this remote team dynamic. We'll have to see how it emerges, but it's possible.
So it's the same, it's a matter of equipment that makes things possible. Look, open your eyes, see what's possible. The key is there. The key isn't knowing how long your daily scrum lasts.
So don't read, I'll read it out loud to you, maybe. Intangibility, there's open source that teaches us a lot, that's where I was.
They hold summits, when I say intangible, it's not everyone remote. People meet just to have conversations, as I showed you in the Valve guide. We just have a day where we're there, there's especially no agenda. We meet to cross paths. I didn't emphasize the Gemba thing. We all agree that the most important machine in your company is the coffee machine. We all agree that the application of Lean that caused so many problems in the 90s was 'stop doing Facebook, stop going to the coffee machine, you're wasting our time, it's waste, it's a loss.' Whereas it's the opposite. All the culture, it's the same, everyone says it, it's not new. All the culture, all the transmission, all the communication that is necessary. For the proper functioning of a container and a direction that responds to the complex mode, it goes through this kind of thing. So to this myth, often in open source software, it's without motive. We're there to meet because we never meet. So if you have teams that work remotely, it becomes possible with the tools, but you have to have regular physical meetings. And that's where we fall back into the stupidity of many companies that don't measure the importance of this physical meeting because this importance doesn't fit into an Excel spreadsheet. And there, we're dead. We should be able to measure the importance of the coffee machine in the Excel spreadsheet, that would change everything. We should be able to measure the importance of conversation. In the Excel spreadsheet, that would change everything. So afterward, we only come across people of good will or good maturity or who want to go in the same direction as you, because maybe it's not us who are more mature than others, I don't know.
Be careful with dispersed teams, distributed teams, it's a detail, but don't tell yourself, be careful, don't tell yourself, okay, it's not a big deal, Jean-Baptiste and René, they're in Bordeaux and all of us, we're in Paris, that's dead, there's an imbalance that makes it dispersed, it doesn't work. On the other hand, if you have a balance in the distribution of people across remote sites, then that works. Why? Because the level of trust is roughly the same. So be careful, I'm just telling you what I've observed.
There's a blog engine called Ghost, I like it. Where do we work? Our headquarters are the internet, if you have a wifi connection and an office, that's fine, we don't care anymore about the time you spend, we care about the value you generate.
You can live wherever you want, you can work from wherever you want, as long as you're online and you work and you interact with us, we realize that this dynamic is sufficient.
So, to finish, I'll try to summarize in three sentences. Be organic and not mechanical. Think that you need to set a container and a direction. And return to physical things. What equipment do we use to have small autonomous elements that make sense, that can be finished, that allow progress in an agile cycle, or small autonomous elements that make sense, that allow progress on a Kanban board, to limit work on things that make sense when delivered to get real feedback, all that is the story of...
We need to be able to work on small pieces. To be able to work on small pieces, we need to work on small physical pieces that are doable. So the code needs to be in line. If we work in the car, it needs to be in line. If we work... 3D printers will bring many things, etc. I'm not just staying in IT, here, etc. And our essence, our nature, how much, around, what distance, etc.
There you go. Thank you. Time? One minute?

Transcript (Translated)