Evelyn Van Kelle
Trying to make sense of the socio-technical mashup that is called software design
Evelyn van Kelle is a strategic software delivery consultant, with experience in coaching, advising and guiding organisations and teams in designing socio-technical systems. Her Master’s degree in social sciences brings new and valuable perspectives when it comes to optimizing both delivery- and team processes.
Being a firm believer of context shaping meaning, she is focused on understanding company- and team culture before anything else. Finding the actual problem to solve and adding business value are starting points in her work. Evelyn is convinced that we need a shared sense of reality including shared values, goals and language in order to perform best as a team. She is curious, driven and pragmatic. “Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection” describes her line of reasoning.
Besides her daily work, she has a predilection for books and linguistics, and highly appreciates good food.
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Tackling socio-technical complexity in the heart of your team
As a software engineering team, we want to solve complex business problems in the most efficient way possible. We invest a lot in technology to improve our team flow and try to make our technology process sustainable. We’ve got quite compulsive about automation and autonomy in achieving this. However, we are still tribal creatures that require tribal safety. Which means that if we want to make our technology process sustainable, we must also invest in people. For that, we need to tackle socio-technical complexity in the heart of our team.
In this session, Evelyn and Kenny will introduce you to the concept of socio-technical systems. We will explain what socio-technical complexity we are facing when building software to improve our team flow. How you can get a sense of the type of complexity you’re dealing with by using the Cynefin framework. Cynefin can aid your decision-making process by helping you make less biased decisions on how to approach your software development flow with your team. Finally, we’ll show you how visual collaboration tools like EventStorming and many others that can help you visualise complexity. You will leave this session knowing how to start tackling socio-technical complexity in your team. Making sure you create a sustainable technology process for your team flow!
Less biased, more rational opinions: how to make better decisions
Teams spend an awful lot of time making decisions about their product, workflows, design, code, etc. Each of those decisions affect your day to day life, either directly or indirectly. Yet most decisions aren’t given the attention that they deserve: they are made in a biased way without the proper analysis that they need. Imagine what the world would be like if everyone practiced a little more rational decision making…
In this talk, Gien and Evelyn will discuss the art of decision making. They combined their knowledge of Decision Making Theory and Social Sciences to offer you a better way to make decisions with your team. They will walk you through multiple scenarios and show you how those scenarios are being perceived by different persona’s.
After this talk, you will know how to recognize influential biases and heuristics when making a decision and how you can make sure those decisions are optimized for a good outcome. You will understand the characteristics of (good) decisions, and some of the most dominant social dynamics that influence decision making processes in teams and organizations.
Facilitating visual collaborate modelling where no knowledge is lost
The power of collaborative modelling comes from having a diverse group of people who, together, have a lot of wisdom and knowledge. You would expect that all this knowledge will be put to use co-creating and to design a model. In reality, we don’t actually listen to all the available input and perspectives due to cognitive biases and ranking. Because not everything that needs to be said has been said, we will end up with a sub-optimal model. Even worse, people won’t feel part of the solution and won’t commit to it fully. There’s a risk they will start to react with sabotaging behaviour; from sarcastic jokes to verbal and nonverbal toxic behaviour or even ending up not willing to talk or even leave the session.
Join us in this hands-on, where you will get to observe a couple of visual collaborative modelling sessions. In small groups, you will explore the behaviour of people in these sessions. Together we discuss what patterns you see happening and how to facilitate these. We will let you leave with the knowledge on what patterns and cognitive bias and heuristics to look out for. How with the help of check-in/out, giving a weather report and spreading and amplifying knowledge you improve your facilitation skills.
Tackling socio-technical complexity in the heart of your team
As a software engineering team, we want to solve complex business problems in the most efficient way possible. We invest a lot in technology to improve our team flow and try to make our technology process sustainable. We’ve got quite compulsive about automation and autonomy in achieving this. However, we are still tribal creatures that require tribal safety. Which means that if we want to make our technology process sustainable, we must also invest in people. For that, we need to tackle socio-technical complexity in the heart of our team.
In this session, Evelyn and Kenny will introduce you to the concept of socio-technical systems. We will explain what socio-technical complexity we are facing when building software to improve our team flow. How you can get a sense of the type of complexity you’re dealing with by using the Cynefin framework. Cynefin can aid your decision-making process by helping you make less biased decisions on how to approach your software development flow with your team. Finally, we’ll show you how visual collaboration tools like EventStorming and many others that can help you visualise complexity. You will leave this session knowing how to start tackling socio-technical complexity in your team. Making sure you create a sustainable technology process for your team flow!
How to survive the cognitive bias party and improve your engineering culture
A great engineering culture results in getting things done (software delivered), done right (quality) and happy people and customers. It will also help you attract the right talent and maintain your competitive advantage. When not taken seriously, engineering culture is also an important reason why Conway’s law can flourish and lead to accidental complexity.
This accidental complexity is the result of socio-technical complexity. We try to optimise our IT architecture and organisational structure by creating autonomous teams, adopting the latest buzzword and literally breaking down office walls. All with the best of intentions, but somehow we are still waiting for that other team that still hasn’t delivered what they were supposed to deliver. Meanwhile, we cannot move quickly on new business opportunities because we’re stuck with many handovers between people and teams. Sounds familiar?
This technical complexity we’re so desperate to solve, is the result of social complexity. Subconscious decisions based on cognitive bias and heuristics that affect all other aspects of our socio-technical systems. Then, before you know it, you’re at a cognitive bias party where you don’t know any of the guests, didn’t get any form of context and you have to make your way through it.
In this talk, Evelyn will be your host at this cognitive bias party by introducing you to some of the most important guests. She will discuss the misconception, the truth and way of working of several cognitive biases and heuristics, and relate them to real life stories from down the trenches. After this talk, you’ll be able to recognise and reflect on socio-technical complexity and understand how tackling it can help improving your engineering culture.
Evelyn Van Kelle
Trying to make sense of the socio-technical mashup that is called software design
Links
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