Exploring Uncertainty with Kent Beck
Unlearn
Unlearning and Creating a Safe Work Environment
In this chapter, the speaker discusses the concept of unlearning and shares a story about a consulting project where they realized the importance of creating a safe and comfortable work environment. They challenge the assumption that becoming a better programmer leads to better project outcomes and highlight the impact of rearranging furniture to create a collaborative workspace.
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Speaker 1
It's definitely
Speaker 2
a crazy world we're living in. And in your work, the book and reflecting on your experiences over your career, I'm wondering if you can talk to some of the most interesting or innovative or unexpected ways that you've seen business leaders and technical founders using data to be able to drive their vision.
Speaker 1
Well, I think that what I found was that, you know, what I, to me, the biggest thing was what does it mean to become a data driven organization? And how do you change the culture of people? I guess the thing I would tell you is the thing I learned through that process is the most difficult problem is the cultural transition for people and making organizations data driven organizations, which is one of the reasons why I focus so hard on values throughout the book. You know, I found values to be an important part of running teams and leading organizations. And a crucial tool, frankly, in managing people and managing people and making the right things happen. And when you, with data, you know, you change the way you think about things because the first question you ask, I mean, literally, I get to the point where you've been a meeting at Snowflake and, you know, a couple of years in, we had our data in our centralized data warehouse and we had everything together. And you know, you're in a meeting and people are talking about things and say, what does the data say? And literally, somebody could run a query in that meeting and two minutes later you'd have an information and you'd put a chart up on the screen and everybody would talk about it. Now everybody converges. I do think data can help people reach agreement something. And the thing about it is, you know, I talk about data and knowledge and data is raw information. Knowledge is data that has been analyzed and a conclusion has been reached. And you know, the goal is always to get to knowledge and to have data translated into knowledge that allows you to make better business decisions and do things. Maybe, you know, that's always been a human thing in the past. You know, now that is becoming a machine thing where that knowledge can, and the intelligence can actually aid, that knowledge can actually do the analysis, the intelligence, artificial intelligence can help to do the analysis and create knowledge, but it can also apply the knowledge and take action based on knowledge. So it's becoming all the more important and values are integrated into all of these things. I mean, to answer your question, I think the thing that's been most, you know, to me it's always the people element that is the most challenging aspect of any of these things. But I have found that data is a tool that can facilitate agreements amongst people. If you believe the data, you've got to believe the data. And that's where the modern data stack is really helped because before three different people could be in a meeting and they could all have data and they could all have three different answers. And that really sucks. That really sucks. It's hard to get agreement. When three people are quite convinced that they have data and it's all different. And that's the way life used to be. And the modern data stack has really helped to correct that.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Kent Beck is a third-generation geek. His grandfather was a radio geek, his father, an electrical engineer, moved to Silicon Valley in the 60s, and Kent and his father built their first personal computer together. He’s the creator of Extreme Programming, alphabetically the first signer of the Agile Manifesto and most recently helped Facebook scale their engineering organization from 700 to 5,000 people. Helping geeks feel safe in the world. This is one of Kent’s creeds, and as a third-generation geek, he’s looking to help the fourth generation.
As a mentor, he encourages younger programmers not to worry so much about finding their purpose from the beginning; instead, they need to get out there and try things, investing in new experiences, then connect the dots later. And feeling scared has two sides: some situations feel scarier than they need to feel, and others should feel scary. Knowing the difference – and how to handle each – is key. Kent shares the story of how, on a consulting gig, he realized that one small tweak—rearranging furniture—was more important than sharing his virtuoso programming skills. The corner office executives were literally sitting in the wrong place. This lesson, Kent recalls, was the beginning of the course change that led to Extreme Programming.
Extreme Programming. Kent started by considering a conventional belief: programmers couldn’t be trusted to test their own code. So he began experimenting with ways to challenge that belief with automated testing. But there was a deeper disruption Kent had in mind: programmers being responsible for their own mistakes and for fixing them in real time. He and Barry dive deeper into what that really means, and how it resulted in the Extreme Programming framework and more. The truth about courage and innovation Despite what people say to and about him, Kent doesn’t believe he’s courageous or innovative. Instead, he feels that he’s just doing what he senses needs to be done. Instead of over-analyzing and worrying if he’s got a perfectly formed idea, he starts trying it out. This is what Barry calls a ‘bias of action,’ and they dive into Kent’s way of behaving that makes him stand out. He has several habits to help him learn, and unlearn—fast; the first of those is to reverse and test any sentence that starts with ‘obviously.’ The second is to ask, “Can we try this?” Kent shares some practical applications of how he works and a few more habits and systems you can use in your own work.
Cycling through ideas. Cycling through ideas as quickly as possible is another strategy Kent uses to innovate, and he shares how he tends to make small changes quickly to see how effective they’ll be. And more importantly, how easy they will be to roll back if they don’t work. He explains his latest concept of, Test & Commit || Revert. And Barry and Kent talk about how this principle applies not just to programming but can be used to launch new products, improve systems of work and entire organizations. What’s next for Kent? The impossible: he’s setting out to discover how to scale software collaboration beyond what people believe is sensible. Specifically, how to have software application with 100,000 engineerings, each deploying over a 1,000 deployments times a day.
Resources for Kent Beck: Website | LinkedIn | Twitter | Books on Amazon | Agile Manifesto | Test && Committ || Revert
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