John’s presentation can be found here: I’ve Got a Fever and the Only Prescription is More Feedback . The Second City in Chicago, an improvisational comedy club that launched the careers of comedians from Chris Farley to Steve Carrell, has delivered a successful product to audiences nightly for almost 60 years. How do they do it? By recognizing the power of feedback. Brian Eno, a pioneer in the music industry who produced albums for U2 and Coldplay, relies on a feedback generation system to ensure the best performances of the bands he works with. Likewise, the work of Eric Ries (Lean Startup) and Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.) has uncovered a similar pattern of organizations that thrive on experimentation and learning. These companies recognize the value of feedback at all levels – from interpersonal communications to user behavior patterns – and structure their organizations to take advantage of that value. They systematically spread learning across all levels of the organization as a means to solve problems that other companies can’t. In this talk, John Krewson will describe what it means to be a feedback-based organization. He’ll demonstrate how to recognize and generate feedback at all layers of an organization using innovative techniques drawn from the entertainment industry, and he’ll walk through several practices for making that feedback actionable.
Founder and President of Sketch Development Services
John Krewson is the founder and President of Sketch Development Services, a software development studio that provides Agile coaching, consulting and training. Sketch delivers software for its customers using Agile principles and practices, and helps other organizations with their Agile transformations. John has been an active member of the Agile community since 2003 as a developer, ScrumMaster, development leader, product leader, and coach. He recently led the agile transformation for MasterCard Worldwide, scaling agility to 10,000 team members across 6 continents and multiple product lines. He was previously an agile coach with VersionOne, where he worked with dozens of companies from startups to the Fortune 50 to help them learn, adopt, and apply Agile, Scrum, and Lean/Kanban principles and practices. John is also a certified SAFe Program Consultant and an internationally recognized speaker at Agile and technology conferences.