Agility and Consciousness - Call for feedback

One of the things that kept me busy lately was a proposal I put together for XPDay '06. The talk would have been titled, "Agility and consciousness: Lessons from cognitive science". It got positive reviews, but not all that many votes, so I thought I'd post the proposal here in hopes of getting some feedback. Here's the proposal I submitted:

Description

We know Agile methods work, but we're still learning why and how. The better our understanding of these methods, the better we can make them. Agility and consciousness serve a similar purpose: to provide continuous feedback to their respective systems and thus, a means to infer causality. We should explore whether we can apply some of what cognitive science has uncovered about consciousness to Agile methods.

Consciousness plays no distinct role in our ability to move, think or react to the world. Indeed, for much of the twentieth century and the prevelance of behaviorism and later, cognitive psychology, it was almost banned from the field of psychology. Yet, in the 90s, it's study exploded. The reason its study has gained popularity is simple: consciousness is useful. Through it, we infer causality. In other words, it reinforces and guides a feedback loop that allows a person to learn, predict and react. "In the process of understanding actions performed by oneself or others, the person will appreciate information about intentions, beliefs, desires and plans, and will use this information about intentions, beliefs, desires, and plans, and will use this information in discerning just what the agent is doing." -- Daniel Wegner. Consciousness provides occasional feedback when everything is working, and plenty more when things are failing.

Agile software development is essentially about feedback: making it easier to get feedback by breaking down the barriers between customers, developers, testers and management. It's about reducing the time necessary to gain the feedback to increase its relevance and efficacy.

What participants will learn

In this session, the goal is to highlight the similarities between agility and consciousness. Some practices, especially those of metaphor, testing, retrospectives and refactoring have very close analogues to consciouness. Those similarities will be highlighted and discussed. Most importantly, the session will focus on how we can benefit from the research in cognitive science on how consciousness operates, and the pathologic states under which it fails.

Participants will learn how consciousness is analogous to their own agile teams. Furthermore, they'll get a new perspective from which to examine how their teams are functioning and to recognize signs that may indicate trouble ahead.

Do you hate it? Would you attend something like this? Do you think there's anything to this?