Ben Sauer – Slow Down to Speed up: How Efficiency is Killing True Innovation

Organisations have become obsessed with speed in software production. Methods like Lean and Agile have been adopted dogmatically: efficiency is the rule, and business leaders are lapping it up. By pushing teams to release early and measure things, we’ve become over-reliant on shallow evidence for progress. Got a number to show off? You’re all set. Good reasoning has taken a back-seat to scientism.
What we may have forgotten, is that many of the innovations we rely on every single day weren’t created this way. In this talk, Ben will examine the problems of the modern production process, recap how some of our most important innovations really happened, and propose a way forward.