Summary
Peter Merel says agility doesn’t come from a manifesto, a framework, or a mindset. That it comes by connecting people for their mutual benefit. To empower them to trust each other to collaborate on improving throughput across their organization.
Peter is translator of the oldest, deepest, and shortest book on agility in existence, the agile way, a language of simple interlocking patterns that prove just as essential to organizations coping with today’s intelligence revolution as they were for those of the agricultural revolution where it began.
Peter first spoke on this book at XP-2000, the world’s first agile conference, and that talk went on to become the first chapter in XP Examined (2001). Some years later, Peter’s translation morphed into “The Dude De Ching”, the bible of Big Lebowski fandom. But his new translation of Lao Tzu in its ultimate form is timeless.
If you think you have a good grasp of agility as a way of life, this book will challenge you hard. If you’re in a leadership role, there’s no better way to get deep in leadership agility quickly. In this talk Peter will cover the book’s six themes – connection, change, adaptation, leadership, simplicity and flow – explain how and why the book came to be, and explore its implications for aligning AI and Agile forms for organizations struggling with the extreme pace of change.
Who Is Peter Merel
Peter was credited in the first XP book and as one of Ward Cunnigham’s c2 stewards he helped spark the agile and wiki movements in the 90s. He created the first agile training games and ran them as an interactive keynote at the first Agile conference, XP2K. He has coached whole-enterprise transformations at GMAC and Websense in the US, and IAG, CBA and Ray White in Australia.
In 2015 Peter created XSCALE, a descaling AI & Agile alignment toolkit. Gartner recognized XSCALE in its Enterprise Agility Market Guide 2015-2021, and XSCALE Alliance coaches in a dozen world capitals have applied it to banks, insurers, health corps, and telcos.
Peter has served as architect, manager, and director for multi-billion dollar products over more than four decades. He’s authored patents in scheduling, e-currency, pattern recognition and social networks, led multiple startups, and pioneered open source projects including the original Wikipedia wiki engine.