So what is Agile ?

The Wall Street Journal provides an informative  article on Agile and its power . Thanks Curtis Carlson for the link.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-you-agile-enough-for-agile-management-11565607600

And thank you Stephen Denning from Forbes for the amazing insights on the power of Agile 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2019/08/13/understanding-the-agile-mindset/#854553d5c17f

Below is a succinct summary of what Agile is by giving 2 real life examples - Starmark and Campbell’s soup 

As Gary Hamel says, “Strategy gets set at the top. Power trickles down. Big leaders appoint little leaders. Individuals compete for promotion. Compensation correlates with rank. Tasks are assigned. Managers assess performance. Rules tightly circumscribe discretion.”

One method of implementing the strategy is Agile - so what is Agile 

Agile is a set of tools 🧰 based on core values and a leadership mindset of efficiency, empowerment and accountability - with doing things in small bursts and having the customer as a core member of the team .

It’s about using any resources available to the organisation - and a focussed effort of breaking down silos 

Below is a great summary of differences by Stephen Denning on the differences between an Agile and A beurocratic mindset . 

What they did at Starmark 

Accountability  happens by daily 20-minute check-in meetings. All employees describe in 60 to 90 seconds what they are working on, what they plan to deliver that day and what obstacles they face.. 

Jacqui Hartnett, Starmark’s president says about the accountability sessions . “You make and keep promises to yourself and others, and do what you said you were going to do.”

Clients get to review finished features or functions of their projects at two-week intervals, or sprints. “You fail faster, and that’s a huge relief,” 

Mr. Edenfield says. One team made a quick midcourse correction in a branding campaign recently by showing the client a prototype of a website, rather than the finished product. 

When the client objected to the color scheme, Starmark fixed the problem right away, saving the team a few days of makeup work.

That shift also reduces stress, says Brett Circe, Starmark’s chief digital officer. “There’s no late night or weekend work re-engineering the project at the end.”

One Starmark client, senior marketing executive Brandon Hensler, says meetings at the agency are brutally honest but often improve on his team’s ideas, aided by people from all Starmark’s departments working together. 

When Mr. Hensler asked Starmark to produce a two-minute branding video for the website of his employer, Nova Southeastern University, Starmark suggested three shorter videos instead that could be used for more purposes, including social media. “They took our concept and made it so much better,” he says.

Campbell soup case study 

Craig Slavtcheff, vice president and head of R&D Campbells soup 

The approach is helping trim the company’s average launch times for new products to nine to 12 months from 18 to 24 months.

He says the biggest hurdle for employees was ignoring old silos and reaching across departmental boundaries to access any resources they needed. Meeting discussions are terse and fast-paced,

“We have a rule: Go no faster than the slowest person,” Mr. Skeels of AgencyAgile says. “Before we move onto another point, we say, ‘Does everyone get that?’”

Meeting participants are often asked to call out blockers—colleagues or clients who are impeding their work. Talk about obstacles is supposed to be free of blame or punishment. “When a team meeting is done right, there are few things more inclusive and soothing,” Mr. Skeels says.

But critical or aggressive team members can wreak havoc by demeaning others. “If a manager runs the meeting like a dictator,” Mr. Skeels says, “it becomes the worst meeting of the day.”

About Agile in USA

Some 75% of North American employers are using agile practices at least sometimes, up from 71% last year, according to a survey of more than 3,130 project managers by the Project Management Institute.

Agile techniques can speed productivity by 20% to 50% and improve the quality of products and services, says Jack Skeels, chief executive of AgencyAgile in Los Angeles, who consulted with Starmark on its conversion. But the principles need to be tailored to fit particular teams, their mix of work and the company culture, he says.

A GUIDE TO AGILE JARGON

Agile: A tool kit of practices for turning complex projects over to self-managed teams that work closely with customers to deliver work in stages and respond quickly to change.

Backlog: A prioritized list of everything that needs to be done to complete a project.

Sprint: A work period of a fixed length, usually one to four weeks, that ends in a demonstration of work accomplished.

Promise: The work a team has committed to deliver during the current sprint.

Scrum: A popular framework for putting agile methods into practice.

Scrum master: A person who helps teams manage themselves, making sure they have the information and resources they need.

Stand-up (or huddle, scrum or check-in): A meeting held at the same time every day when team members report briefly on work completed, tasks planned for that day and obstacles that are getting in the way.

Kanban or scrum board: A display showing one sticky note for each task in progress, aligned in separate columns based on their status—to-do, doing or done.

Stories: Narratives defining features, functions and other work to be delivered, explaining for whom the task is being done, what the customer wants and why.

Timebox: A maximum period of time allotted to produce something of value for the customer.

Waterfall method: A traditional method of organizing projects, moving an entire body of work in steps from planning to designing, testing and launching.

Australia develops first AI created flu vaccine

Australian researchers just released the world's first AI-developed vaccine and it could prevent another horror flu season

Researchers at Flinders University have developed a new vaccine believed to be the first in the world to be designed by an AI program called SAM (Search Algorithm for Ligands). This was done by taking existing drugs that work,and drugs that don't work or have failed, and showed all of that to the AI program called Sam . Sam then took and tested, different formulas and came up with a winning vaccine 

Funded by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to the tune of $50m, the vaccine is currently being rolled out for 12-month trials in the US.

The rammifications could be huge, with the technology expected to be able to create better vaccines years ahead of humans and at a fraction of the cost.

Research Director of Australian biotechnology company Vaxine and Flinders University Professor Nikolai Petrovsky led this development with the help of USA NIH funding to the tune of $50m, after being rejected for funding by Australian institutions.

“The US system values ambitious, innovative and futuristic research whereas Australian funding bodies are highly conservative and only fund me-too incremental research where the outcome is largely already known,”

This was exceptional as Australia has a great record at publishing basic medical science and has a poor track record of developing new drugs or treatments. “ 

Click here to find out more 

Squirrel AI - a unicorn created from China’s obsession with education and AI - edtech at its finest ?

Karen Hau has written an amazing paper on how China is investing in edtech and AI - and compares 2 edtech’s in Shanghai - one of which is Squirrel - Shanghai’s edtech’s unicorn . Click here to read her article 

The exponential Growth of Squirrel 

Since it’s inception 5 years ago, Squirrel has opened 2,000 learning centers in 200 cities and registered over a million students—equal to New York City’s entire public school system. It plans to expand to 2,000 more centers domestically within a year. 

To date, the company has raised over $180 million in funding, and has gained  unicorn status, surpassing $1 billion in valuation. 

Squirrel has  recruited several Americans to serve on his executive team, with the intent of pushing into the US and Europe in the next two years. One of them is Tom Mitchell, the dean of computer science at Carnegie Mellon; another is Dan Bindman, who led the user experience and editorial teams at ALEKS.

They have heavily marketed their technical capabilities through academic publications, international collaborations, and awards, and have opened a joint research lab with Carnegie Mellon University this year to study personalized learning at scale, then export it globally.

It is no wonder why it is the darling of the Shanghai local government.

The Pain

China’s obsession into education is renowned worldwide, with immigrants in Australia topping institutions  and schools wherever they are. 

In China, academic competition is fierce, with Ten million students a year take the college entrance exam, the gaokao. Your score determines whether and where you can study for a degree, and it’s seen as the biggest determinant of success for the rest of your life. 

Parents are willingly paying for tutoring or anything else that helps their children get ahead. 

It so no wonder that China is investing and focussing its energy into edtech, with the government giving significant grants and tax incentives to companies investing in AI ventures that improve anything from student learning to teacher training to school management. For VCs, this means such ventures are good bets.

As a result, AI-enabled teaching and learning has exploded with tech giants and startups popping up like mushrooms! 

The Pain Killer 

Squirrel focuses on helping students score better on annual standardized tests, which taps straight into national gaokao anxiety; more than 80% of its students return year after year.

Dr Wei Cui, partner at Squirrel AI Learning says  “We can help every student  with high quality education. Their family doesn’t need to pay to go to the high quality school, don’t need to pay for the one-to-one tutoring, the experienced teachers. The system we can replicate is anywhere, any time – it is unlimited.”

Squirrel has been designed to capture ever more data from the beginning, which has made possible all kinds of personalization and prediction experiments. It has over 400,000 video courses and 10 million questions - which is growing daily .

AI in education is becoming ubiquitous with tens of millions of students now use some form of AI to learn, and in his 2018 book Rewiring Education, John Couch, Apple’s vice president of education, lauded Squirrel AI. (A Chinese version of the book is coauthored by Squirrel’s founder, Derek Li.) 

Squirrel’s innovation and how it creates its courses 

AI and adaptive learning is not new - Squirrels innovation and genius is through its granularity and scale. 

For every course it offers, its engineering team works with a group of master teachers to subdivide the subject into the smallest possible conceptual pieces. 

Middle school math, for example, is broken into over 10,000 atomic elements, or “knowledge points,” such as rational numbers, the properties of a triangle, and the Pythagorean theorem. The goal is to diagnose a student’s gaps in understanding as precisely as possible. By comparison, a textbook might divide the same subject into 3,000 points; ALEKS, an adaptive learning platform developed by US-based McGraw-Hill, which inspired Squirrel’s, divides it into roughly 1,000.

Once the knowledge points are set, they are paired with video lectures, notes, worked examples, and practice problems. Their relationships—how they build on each other and overlap—are encoded in a “knowledge graph,” also based on the master teachers’ experience.

One of many students benefitting  from Squirrel AI

Zhou Yi was terrible at math. He risked never getting into college. Then a company called Squirrel AI came to his middle school in Hangzhou, China, promising personalized tutoring. He had tried tutoring services before, but this one was different: instead of a human teacher, an AI algorithm would curate his lessons. The 13-year-old decided to give it a try. By the end of the semester, his test scores had risen from 50% to 62.5%. Two years later, he scored an 85% on his final middle school exam.

“I used to think math was terrifying,” he says. “But through tutoring, I realized it really isn’t that hard. It helped me take the first step down a different path.”

The new classroom

In the classroom , there are no whiteboards, projectors, or other equipment—just one table per room, meant for six to eight people - with each student having a laptop. 

Students work out practice problems on pieces of paper before submitting their answers online. In each room, a teacher monitors the students through a real-time dashboard.

At different points, both teachers notice something on their screen that prompts them to walk over and kneel by a student’s chair. 

They speak in hushed tones, presumably to answer a question the tutoring system can’t resolve.

“It’s so quiet,” I whisper to the small gang of school and company staff assembled for my tour. The Hangzhou regional director smiles with what I interpret as a hint of pride: “There are no sounds of teachers lecturing.”

The fallout 

AI can help teachers foster their students’ interests and strengths - but could it entrench a global trend toward standardized learning and testing, leaving the next generation ill prepared to adapt in a rapidly changing world of work?

• Collaboration , group discussion and communication - is no longer a main form of upskilling - is this a good thing?
• Is standardized learning and testing a good thing? 
• Is this technology taking  China to a point of education that any progressive pedagogue or education system is moving away from? 

(Ik comment :- It’s not either or - You can still teach collaboration and discussion - why link learning stem to collaboration? )

How is this learning shaping the nature of work?

As machines become better at rote tasks, humans will need to focus on the skills that remain unique to them: creativity, collaboration, communication, and problem-solving. They will also need to adapt quickly as more and more skills fall prey to automation. 

This means the 21st-century classroom should bring out the strengths and interests of each person, rather than impart a canonical set of knowledge more suited for the industrial age.

AI, in theory, could make this easier. It could take over certain rote tasks in the classroom, freeing teachers up to pay more attention to each student. Hypotheses differ about what that might look like. 

Perhaps AI will teach certain kinds of knowledge while humans teach others; perhaps it will help teachers keep track of student performance or give students more control over how they learn. 

Regardless, the ultimate goal is deeply personalized teaching.

Squirrel’s approach may yield great results on traditional education, but it doesn’t prepare students to be flexible in a changing world.

The students journey at Squirrel 

A student begins a course of study with a short diagnostic test to assess how well she understands key concepts. 

If she correctly answers an early question, the system will assume she knows related concepts and skip ahead. Within 10 questions, the system has a rough sketch of what she needs to work on, and uses it to build a curriculum. 

As she studies, the system updates its model of her understanding and adjusts the curriculum accordingly. As more students use the system, it spots previously unrealized connections between concepts. 

The machine-learning algorithms then update the relationships in the knowledge graph to take these new connections into account. 

Squirrel has offered some validation of its system. In October 2017, for example, a self-funded four-day study with 78 middle school students found that the system was better on average at lifting math test scores than experienced teachers teaching a dozen or so kids in a traditional classroom.

The students Karen spoke to at the learning center had high praise for the tutoring program as well. All were finishing middle school and had been coming to the center for more than a year. 

One girl, Fu Weiyi, tells Karen she’s improved far faster than when she got individual tutoring from a human teacher. “Here, I have a teacher both on and offline,” she says. “Plus, the instruction is very targeted; the system can directly identify the gaps in my understanding.” Another student echoes the sentiment: “With the system, you don’t have to do tons of exercises, but it’s still effective. It really saves time.”

“I wish I had more interaction with real human teachers”

Squirrel’s founder Derek Li

Squirrel’s founder Li, is keen to integrate his curriculum directly into the main classroom. and is already in discussion with several schools in China to make its system the primary method of instruction.

Teaching Emotional Intelligence 

Much of Squirrel’s philosophy stems from Li’s own experiences as a child. When he was young, he didn’t have very good emotional intelligence, he says, and reading books on the subject didn’t help. So he spent half a year dividing the skill into 27 different components and trained himself on each one. 

He trained himself to be more observant, for example, and to be an interesting conversationalist (“I spent a lot of time finding 100 topics, so I have a lot of material to talk with others,” he says). 

He even trained himself to keep smiling when others criticized him. (“After that, in my life, I do not have any enemies.”) The method gave him the results he wanted—along with the firm belief that anything can be taught this way.

Teachers will be like pilots 

Li uses an analogy to lay out his ultimate vision. “When AI education prevails,” he says, “human teachers will be like a pilot.” They will monitor the readouts while the algorithm flies the plane, and for the most part they will play a passive role. But every so often, when there’s an alert and a passenger panics (say, a student gets bullied), they can step in to calm things down. “Human teachers will focus on emotional communication,” he says.

Li thinks this is the only way humanity will be able to elevate its collective intelligence. Entrusting teachers with anything else could risk “damaging geniuses.” He’s playing out this philosophy on his own kids, using Squirrel’s system as much as possible to train them. He boasts that his eight-year-old twin boys, in the second grade, are now learning eighth-grade physics, a testament that his method is working. “Only adaptive systems could make such miracles,” he says.

So, what is a successful career in the 21st century?

Thanks Heather McGowan and Thomas Oppong !!Thanks Tanya , Jed and Maya 

I have just spent an amazing week with Tanya (an accountant and my daughter  , Jed (an architect and her life partner ) and Maya (their baby and my grandchild) - and we have been talking about the future of work, plans, how AI and machine learning will disrupt - and the importance for them to work in an environment that is in line with their values , belief system and the future  that they envision for themselves. 

As always - Heather McGowan’s posts come in  a timely and opportune way - and again reminds us of the importance of learning how to learn 

“A career is a portfolio of projects that teach you new skills, gain you new expertise, develop new capabilities, grow your colleague set, and constantly reinvent you as a brand.”  Tom Peters - In Search of Excellence  #futureofwork 

The Skill and Qualification That Got You The Job is Not What You Need to Build Career Longevity - says Thomas Oppong  https://medium.com/swlh/the-hard-skill-that-got-you-the-job-is-not-what-you-need-to-extend-your-career-longevity-7637be727c52

Things change at a rapid pace, and if you do not keep up to date with the changes that occur - your qualification and skill will very quickly become redundant.

One thing you can be sure of ..... there will be massive change happening in your field of expertise .... and your world of work today won’t be the same tomorrow. 

So how do you stay relevant? 

Your performance, skill, and ability will decline with time unless you deliberately take control of your personal development, and undertake a regime of continual learning (or vocational education). 

Your qualifications and technical skills - will need to be kept up to date and you will need to know how to harness the AI and machine learning that will make your job that much easier and efficient- so that you become better, smarter, faster .

More and more relevant will be your soft skills — a combination of people skills, communication abilities, personal habits, emotional intelligence, time management, and leadership skills.

Continual personal and technical development. 

If you want to continue to be an expert in your field - you will need to keep up to date - however it might be wise to re-skill  , gain new expertise, and reinvent yourself to keep going.

As Heather McGowan shared with us - the average millennial in Australia will have 17 different jobs in a variety of jobs and industries - and that’s by the time they are 40!!!

So what’s the answer?

How can we get ourselves and our children ready for the 4th industrial revolution?

We need to teach them to “learn how to learn”

We need to instil in our work environment an environment of continuous learning .

A law of nature comes into play - If you don’t continue to grow - you will stagnate and whither away. 

Continuous learning is the only way to survive in the ever-changing world of work. Self-education and a student like mindset - needs to be ingrained into our psyche as a daily habit. 

You need to continue to hone your current skills and develop new ones while enriching your mind. 

Then, when the time to adapt arrives, the transitions  will just flow.

So what does learning entail? 

Continual investment in your professional growth 

• Connection, collaboration, continual learning, 
• Finding mentors that you want to emulate 
• Attending conferences, forums, workshops, 
• reading 
• Doing online courses 
• Creating an unconscious competence 
• hearing from experts 
• mentoring others, 
• Sharing your knowledge, 
• Being part of a cross-functional project 
• Continual review and feedback of your performance continual Professional Development 

So these are some of the tips that Thomas Oppong writes in “The Hard Skill That Got You The Job is Not What You Need to Build Career Longevity What a “successful career” means in the 21st century!

(Ik comment ..... I cant help myself....... go to www.bbg.business  and join a forum!!! ) 

Use networking opportunities to engage with others higher up the corporate ladder. Use your contacts, such as a previous manager, colleague or mentor to ask for introductions if necessary. If there is an opportunity to speak at a company event, seize it.

If team management skills are increasingly becoming important in your field of work, perhaps you could ask and shadow your manager or asked to be coached by someone you admire in that position.

Say you’re a programmer. Why not study project management? Or let’s say you’re a graphic designer. Why not study team management?

“You should get better and faster at whatever your craft is over the course of your career, whether that’s coding, designing, researching, or something else. But if that’s the only area you improve in, you may find advancement more elusive than you’d expected, explains Ximena Vengoechea.

The rise of online resources and access to professionals anywhere means it’s easier than ever to improve yourself from your office desk or at home.

Equally important is the message personal learning sends out if you are employed; it shows you are investing in yourself and that your career is still in ascendance.

If you’re looking to climb the career ladder, develop people management skills. Leading teams and practical training programs are particularly effective because you can apply those skills easily. It’s important that you engage, discuss, and experiment with the knowledge you obtain.

To get started and take your career to the next level, assess how the skills you want fits with your overall career goals. It pays to know your readiness for a new level of responsibility. No matter where you are in your present career, take a minute to find out exactly where you are today.

Can you work both independently and collaboratively? Can you negotiate and still keep your relationship intact? Are you a team member or leader? Do you have a good relationship with your colleagues or managers?

The further you want to go in your career, the more decisive these traits will become — if the corporate ladder means a lot to you.

Wherever your next challenge lies, with a future-focused plan, you will prepare yourself for the future.

www.bbg.business

So - “do you celebrate the misfits” or focus on a strong “team” ?

An interesting article about the culture of “Atlassian” - which sort of resonates with me ......

However, so does Steve Jobs” Apple philosophy on celebrating the misfits.

Atlassian 

frank.chung@news.com.au wrote an interesting article on the cultural shift at Atlassian after interviewing Atlassian head of talent Bek Chee. https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/atlassian-ditches-brilliant-jerks-in-performance-review-overhaul/news-story/82a5e2abba1939f51d68ae81db8f05bd

Atlassian want to more fairly measure people on how they bring their whole self to work, and they want to reward the right behaviours. 

The $47 billion Australian software company, Atlassian is completely overhauling how they conduct performance reviews, by de-biasing the performance system and taking into account an employee’s entire contribution to the company’s culture.

They says it will no longer tolerate “brilliant jerks” who deliver results for the company but make life hell for their co-workers.

The performance review will now have very little  to do with job skills. That is just a given and an opening hand to be at the table!

Two-thirds of every review will be given to how each of its 3000 employees impacts others on their team, and to how they live the company values. 

The Values of Team and Collaboration lead to high performance and this will be encouraged !!

3 Grading Levels in the performance review 

A crowdsourced idea from its employees, performance is  graded on one of three levels based on “growth mindset language” 

• rather than a score, they either get an “exceptional year”, 
• a “great year” or 
• an “off year”.

Atlassian also encourages peer feedback. 

Does the person sap energy or create energy?

“Your teammate can say, ‘This person really did support the work I was trying to do or went above and beyond to help me’,”

“Or on the flip side you may have a colleague where (you think), ‘My gosh just working with them takes time away from me to make up for their work.’”

Social conscious is important to the millennial and gen Y and Z crowd  and is integral to their value system. The corporate culture needs to align with this. 

The company needs to walk the talk - no bullshit and all talk 

“Our top performers we know nail it in terms of living values and being part of the team and delivering in their role,” Bek said.

It’s interesting to how different the above approach is to the values of Apple -

The Apple Manifesto

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

— Steve Jobs, 1997”

A culture of team and encouraging misfits, genius and brilliant jerks .....

Is their a place for both? 

Government places Innovation squarely on the Agenda

The Minister for Industry, Science and Technology Karen Andrews has identified the need to build on Australian’s strength in the Technology and Innovation space and has opened up dialogue with industry.

She is hosting two technology industry roundtables over the next week to boost collaboration and tackle the global challenges and opportunities of Technology and how Government can help.

Below are statements from the Minister 

“Strengthening the technology sector is key to Australia’s economic growth and securing jobs for the future.”

“From new start-ups to large multinational firms, the tech industry underpins Australia’s ability to create and harness technological advances and remain competitive in a global economy,” 

“Digital innovation presents a $315 billion opportunity over the period to 2028 to enhance our technology capabilities.”

“Artificial intelligence and big data create new opportunities to grow the economy. Taking advantage of these opportunities will be crucial in reaching our Government’s target of 1.25 million new jobs over the next five years. “

“I want to hear from industry leaders firsthand about issues and challenges facing the tech sector like access to skilled workers and the need for balanced regulation.”

It’s ok to fail - the dark sides of innovation

With the pursuit of any new invention comes the markings of failures and even unintended consequences. 

Daniel Snel has created this interesting video clip 

Unintended Consequences -  such as data leaks and excessive waste – the ‘dark side of innovation’ that is often not considered when designing the solution and kept as a taboo... 

However - those who do not take risks and innovate - and embrace change and look to disrupt - get disrupted. 

Case in point - Kodak and Nokia