If you have worked on Agile teams, I was wondering if I could get your help on a small project I am starting.

I am working with Jason Yip to better understand how people think about solving problems. Specifically we are interested in the differences between “experts” and less expert people in a methodology.

For this first step, we are looking to collect challenging Agile scenarios. These should be the hairiest, most difficult, most challenging Agile situations you’ve found yourself in. The preference is for scenarios that you have directly experienced yourself rather than hearsay or hypothetical scenarios. It’s not important whether you were successful in meeting the challenge; it might even be better if the scenario is one where you failed. We’ll then pose these scenarios to different people and see how they think about solving the problem.

We are doing this to try to improve everyones’s understanding of how mindsets change with experience and potentially to help people gain mastery faster in the future. Also, it could help with debugging mental models, which would be useful in other contexts (lean/agile adoption, lean startups, etc.)

Here are the three specific things that I am asking. I am hoping that it will take ten minutes or less. Thank you!

(Having problems seeing the form? Click here.)

The method to the madness can be seen here.