Visual Thinking in Agile: Chet Hendrickson & Ron Jefferies on Presentation Mastery
Visual Thinking in Agile: Chet Hendrickson & Ron Jefferies on Presentation Mastery
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
The Guest
Chet Hendrickson
Agile pioneer, co-author of Extreme Programming Installed
The Guest
Ron Jeffries
Agile pioneer, co-author of the Agile Manifesto
The Conversation
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
All right, great. So, one second. This is going to be a fun one. Hi, it's Mike with UGtastic. I'm at SCNA 2013, and I'm sitting down with Chet Hendrickson and Ron Jeffries. Did I say that in the right order?
Chet Hendrickson
Agile pioneer, co-author of Extreme Programming Installed
I don't know.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
Okay, so we'll find out in a second, but they give a talk about the nature of software development, and also were on the panel yesterday about software quality. So, thank you very much for taking the time to sit down with me. Would you pronounce your name and your company again, please?
Ron Jeffries
Agile pioneer, co-author of the Agile Manifesto
UGtastic.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
UGtastic. That's interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that.
Ron Jeffries
Agile pioneer, co-author of the Agile Manifesto
No, a lot of people just say UGtastic, which is fine, as long as you say it. I don't really care. I'm just happy that anybody's even thinking about it.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
But we do interviews with people who are doing interesting things in the software development community. I think you guys are known for one or two things that are interesting, and certainly your talk on software here at the end of SCNA—one of the things I had to say I kind of got a kick out of was the simplicity of your images.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
Everybody else tries to make these really super fancy typography slides, whereas to convey the information, it was simple drawings that could be clearly understood. It reminded me of Sarah Gray, who I just interviewed, when she talked about Harold and the Purple Crayon, that you can use simple imagery metaphors to convey a lot of information without getting bogged down in noise. Is this something that you've been using for a long time?
Chet Hendrickson
Agile pioneer, co-author of Extreme Programming Installed
It actually is. Ron bought a tablet PC, I don't know, eight or ten years ago, and we started doing talks with just him drawing. Mostly little graphs.
Ron Jeffries
Agile pioneer, co-author of the Agile Manifesto
Little graphs. If you do good, it'll go up, and if you do bad, it'll go down. That sort of thing.
Chet Hendrickson
Agile pioneer, co-author of Extreme Programming Installed
About that. And eventually I bought one and didn't use it as much as Ron, and it sort of evolved until now we do stuff on the iPad using a tool called Paper, which allows you to draw very simple things.
Chet Hendrickson
Agile pioneer, co-author of Extreme Programming Installed
So it's a very nice little product. I wish we'd got some kind of kickback when we mentioned their name. It would be cool. But it's a simple little drawing tool that works really well in this environment because there's not much to it. You pick a color, you draw, as opposed to all kinds of stuff that is standard drawing, which becomes confusing.
Ron Jeffries
Agile pioneer, co-author of the Agile Manifesto
Well, but we are—as you see with the pictures—you're still left with the fact that I can't draw very well, which is why the pictures are all so simple, really. But it's enough. I would really probably draw them simply even if I were able to draw something that looked real. Because the idea is to catch attention. Illuminate the idea, not have people stare at it the way they would stare at great art and not listen to us.
Ron Jeffries
Agile pioneer, co-author of the Agile Manifesto
Our main purpose in giving a talk is to entertain ourselves. It's up to the audience to entertain themselves. And so we enjoy having these funny little pictures and saying funny little things about them.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
And in the way you did your presentation, it was back and forth and back and forth. I don't think I've ever seen anybody ping pong a presentation quite like that.
Chet Hendrickson
Agile pioneer, co-author of Extreme Programming Installed
We've been giving presentations about this kind of subject—I have actually the poster for the first one we gave in 1998. So we've been doing this quite a lot. Not this talk, but giving presentations together for 15 years. And so we have developed a style which kind of works for us.
Ron Jeffries
Agile pioneer, co-author of the Agile Manifesto
And oddly enough, this is sort of how we work anyway. It turns out, for example, we were coming back from the Netherlands and they interview you on the way out of the country to see if you're a terrorist. They asked Chet if we were traveling together and he said yes.
Ron Jeffries
Agile pioneer, co-author of the Agile Manifesto
The guy would ask us a question and one of us would start the answer and the other would finish the sentence. He said, 'Well, what are you?' I said, 'Well, we're business partners.' He said, 'What kind of partners are you?' We kept doing this ping pong back and forth. At the end of the thing he said, 'I think I know what kind of partners you are.' Apparently we're too good at it.
Chet Hendrickson
Agile pioneer, co-author of Extreme Programming Installed
So the next time we went to the Netherlands we took our wives. In hopes of saying, 'Look, we have beards.' We tend to finish each other's sentences. It works for us and we hope it works for the audience.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
Yeah, and it seemed to definitely be well received. Just continuing on with the images, I just wonder if with some of the talks I've observed, people obsessing over typography and creating these very what they think are professional looking communications. Do you see other presentations where they have very elaborate fonts and colors?
Chet Hendrickson
Agile pioneer, co-author of Extreme Programming Installed
Here's an example of our typography if you can see that.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
This title is intentionally left blank?
Chet Hendrickson
Agile pioneer, co-author of Extreme Programming Installed
Yeah. You can run it in my hand right now. We intentionally don't do that. I suppose you probably think we're not very good at doing those things. But if we spend a little bit of time, I'm sure we could do as well as everyone else does.
Ron Jeffries
Agile pioneer, co-author of the Agile Manifesto
We tried various tools. We did some stuff in Prezi years ago to discover that, you know, when you do that, everyone throws up sometime during your presentation. Not because of what we were saying, because of the tool. The tool that spins around.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
Oh, the one that spins around. Yeah, it's really cool.
Ron Jeffries
Agile pioneer, co-author of the Agile Manifesto
People are talking about the slide. They're talking about the slide instead of the idea. So those are like your reference, more like your notes? Because people like to have something they can walk away with. Mostly we say stuff that's in them, but we do it live because it's that that we think generates the knowledge.
Ron Jeffries
Agile pioneer, co-author of the Agile Manifesto
If you're just standing there talking about the slide, the people check out. But if you're there talking to them and you're using some tool to help you then visualize what it is you're saying, that works better. The more that's done in the moment, the better it is.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
As far as the landscape of conferences and big technical get-togethers, do you have anything that you've seen that's changed in particular, for better or worse?
Ron Jeffries
Agile pioneer, co-author of the Agile Manifesto
Yeah. The big conferences we're finding more and more boring. Not because of the beginners, but because they have become so commercialized and so many of the ideas are canned. You know, 'you must do this and follow this rule and use this tool.' We find that the content is mostly not interesting to us.
Ron Jeffries
Agile pioneer, co-author of the Agile Manifesto
And we think almost harmful to many of the people who show up. There's a huge number of people who are there from a big enterprise because they want to have a flag that says they're agile and they have no intention or ability to do it. So we're trying to come to smaller conferences like this one because there you can talk to people and they're interesting and excited about doing stuff.
Chet Hendrickson
Agile pioneer, co-author of Extreme Programming Installed
Now, I don't know whether I believe this or not, but I have a feeling that those conferences are going to be mostly developer conferences, that it's going to be difficult to find a conference that isn't heavy in the developers that we find exciting.
Critical Insights
durable
"Visual simplicity in presentations (like hand-drawn sketches) reduces cognitive load and keeps the audience focused on the speaker's ideas rather than the tool's aesthetics."
durable
"Chet and Ron's 'ping-pong' presentation style mirrors their long-term collaborative relationship and business partnership."
durable
"Large technical conferences often drift toward commercialization and 'canned' ideas, leading seasoned practitioners to prefer smaller, developer-focused events."
time bound
"The use of 'hand-drawn' digital tools (like Paper on iPad) in 2013 was a deliberate reaction against the over-produced typography of the era."
durable
"Enterprise 'Agile' adoption often focuses on badges and flags rather than the actual ability or intention to implement the practice."