On December 3, I will give a talk on Reflective Thinking at the Scrum Breakfast Zurich.

The abstract goes as follows:

Have you noticed how adopting an Agile process sometimes works and sometimes not? Have you noticed how sometimes nothing changes even though everyone seems to "Inspect and Adapt"?

In this talk we try to answer why it so, but laying out a little theory of what we call "reflective thinking". For almost half a century the software engineering community has been working on a theory of reflection, which is defined as "the ability of a system to inspect and adapt itself". We draw parallels with that field and learn several lessons:

• Reflection must be built deep into the organization.
• Reflection always incurs an apparent cost.
• Inspection is easier than adaptation.
• We can only reflect on what is explicit.
• Reflection is a design tool that enables unanticipated evolution.

Reflection is an inherent human ability. Only, it requires explicit training to develop into a capability.