True perfection never rests
By no means am i planning to abandon this one and if i get ideas more suitable to be written here, I’ll put them here. Just that currently my thoughts are occupied much more by thoughts about coding and for that the other blog is a good medium.
So until i get an idea worth blogging here, welcome to my other blog http://expressive-code.blogspot.com/
Posted in Uncategorized.
– September 2, 2011
Some recent semi-serious discussions I’ve had with other Scan-Agile 2010 organizers led me to call this side of agile Esoteric Agile.
As the term smells quite badly of new age i think it warrants some attention. So let’s explore the meaning of the word esoteric:
…derives from the Greek ἐσωτερικός (esôterikos), a compound of ἔσω (esô): “within”, thus “pertaining to the more inward”, mystic…
...Esoteric knowledge, in the dictionary (non-scholarly) sense, is thus that which is available only to a narrow circle of “enlightened”, “initiated”, or specially educated people. Esoteric items may be known as esoterica …
-Wikipedia
So esoteric pertains to some inner and secret knowledge or people having it.
The antonym of esoteric, exoteric is used to describe things “pertaining to the more outward”. Thus …exoteric knowledge is knowledge that is well-known or public, or perceived as informally canonic in society at large…
So how is this relating to the agile community?
Thinking of software development i think this is very similar to the relation of agile world view to the traditional one.
It’s still easy to shrug this as new age mumbo jumbo, but let’s start by thinking what a CSM class is? For two days you take part in some common rituals like 30-minute scrum, the XP game etc. meant to make the participants see some problems with the canonic commonly known ways and how to do things differently. In the end of these two days you are recognized as a new member to a inner circle of people having some glimpse in another way of doing things.
As a proverb says Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he’ll eat forever. So to use esoteric terms, an agile coach needs to initiate the members of the organization. The secret knowledge needs to be transferred. If conscious effort to transfer the inner knowledge is not done there is a danger that the Agile community will remain a secretive mystic society with it’s own strange rituals.
We could also just concentrate on the esoteric side, but what would be the use if the exoteric side of common sense isn’t followed at the same time. Instead an agile transformation needs to bring these seamlessly together. Too often the inner side is forgotten and the end result is a hollow shell of a cargo cult mimicking the rituals of an agile organization.
Posted in Perfection.
– May 11, 2010
Some of these people distinctly remember that their trainer told them during the CSM course, that you should adapt your scrum to your company. Or that Scrum is just a framework you have to implement. So they start to plant trees around without thinking. End result will most probably be something else than a living forest.
Others concentrate so hard on getting scrum sold that they rush into the forest, grab the first metaphorical stump and try to sell it. Their client might be happily sitting on their stump for a short while. But sooner or later, not content with just one stump, the client will start to wonder that where is their forest. So the client might continue shopping for more trees and stumps, but anyhow sometime later their employees will start to slowly grumble about Scrum being a “boring forest” and that the trees are making their work harder. And sadly the word spreads.
All of these people see the framework as just a toolbox with a bunch of shiny and new tools. They fail to see a bigger picture.
Craig Larman and Bas Vodde have wrote an excellent primer on lean thinking apply named Lean primer. In it they have a whole topic called Management Tools Are Not a Pillar of Lean. So this problem seems to touch lean ideas as a whole.
So why is it so hard to see the whole?
In early 90′s Swieringa and Wierdsma described, in their book
“Becoming a Learning Organization“, an organization as a organism driven by principles, insights and rules. They envision organizational learning and development as three nested loops.
Smallest of these loops is the loop of rules. It is the loop of “How?”. On this level rigid strategies, policies and procedures are established, processes are improved and new tools picked. Also detecting and correcting deviations from these rules is done. The change on this level is only at the surface. Only trees are visible. Most organizations operate according to just single loop of learning.
The middle loop is the loop of insight. The question here is “Why?”. The desire is to increase knowledge and understanding rather than just trying to file last nanometers out of the process. On this level organizations reflect on whether the “rules†themselves should be changed. The whole structure of the system is in the scope. Most organizations get here very seldom.
The topmost loop is the loop of principles. Now the important questions start with “What?”. Whole identity of the organization is in the scope. As this loop touches the values and principles of the organization, it’s normally hard to influence directly. Rather trying to force the values on the people it is better to gradually build the structure of the organization so that it supports the aimed values. As without the support of the organizational structure the values easily remain as empty words.
Learning on all the three levels is important. But getting stuck to the first level could limit you to seeing just the trees.
Gary Hamel points to similar directions in his book “Leading the Revolution“. He states that the age of progress has come to it’s end in it’s constant effort to answer the question “How?” better and better. By his vision organizations making radical inventions will take the business from the ones thinking in an old fashioned way. The important question is “What?” instead of “How?”. So although he criticizes organizational learning it seems to be critique pointed to being stuck to the first level.
There are two other interesting bits about his thoughts on this matter. He points to kaizen being part of the old world of continuous improvement. He sees kaizen as a linear descendant of Taylor’s scientific management instead of being an application of Demings ideas. So one could argue that he’s too, in his own way, criticizing just grabbing the stumps instead of seeing the whole forest. Just adopting kaizen as a linear improvement tool is probably one of the most common ways to get stuck with the tools and not seeing the forest.
To conclude and bring thought cycle back to it’s beginning, it is interesting to note that Hamel also criticizes the old thinking on being stuck with linear innovations. To break from this he thinks we need cyclical ones.
Posted in Perfection.
– February 3, 2010
Already on the course someone continued the joke by mentioning, “So what happens if two pigs wrestle” and the answer was the obvious “well probably they both like it“. Amusingly this reminded me of real life situation with a colleague of mine.
By nature I tend to like verbal conflict. To me it has always seemed to be an effective way of working on an idea and finding loopholes. It’s also very important to me to understand an idea very throughout before accepting it so I very well understand the need of some people to question ideas. Sometimes I meet people who think the same and the results can seem to outsiders like two pigs wrestling. This was the case with the colleague this joke reminded me of.
I began to think that it wouldn’t it be funny if I could use this metaphor somewhere. Instinctively it felt that this did provide some benefit.
Many people are unlike me and tend to avoid conflicts. Somehow stable status quo is better for them . To me this represents stagnation. Stability implies stop of movement and this is contrary to constant reaching for perfection.
Conflict avoidance within teams is so common that it has been addressed in team literature. Patrick Lencioni addressed this problem in his bestseller Five Dysfunctions of a Team. He named the second dysfunction as Fear of Conflict. He states that it is caused by artificial harmony. Kind of keeping up the appearances. As people try to sweep the conflict under the rug tension begins to rise.
I’ve seen how this kind of false harmony could lead to a situation where the basis of teamwork, trust, is shattered by grumbling and backstabbing. To me it seems very strange, people are grumbling constantly, but for some reason they accept the status quo.
As this problem is a large one there are numerous possible ways to break the false harmony. Five Dysfunctions identifies different kinds of tools to fix and avoid this within a team. One of them is conflict mining. This means that one individual tries uncover hidden conflicts in the group. The book also suggest using real-time permission to let the team know it is ok and important to have conflicts and personal analysis tools to help people on the team understand the need.
Organizational pattern Wise Fool, from the book Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development by Harrison and Coplien, resembles the conflict mining somewhat. It is a person that organization has permitted to step outside of the norms and raise uncomfortable truths to the surface.
Also people who are keen to find harmony are probably going to be better diplomats than conflict miners and they might feel extremely uncomfortable in being one. So what you really need seems to be the Wise Fool. Still an additional problem lies in the fact that people keen on avoiding conflict might be temped to ignore the Wise Fool or downplay the problem represented by conflict miner. And if the Wise Fool stands alone the consensus of the diplomats might end up in a undesirable situation where the need for false harmony triumphs.
So to me it seems that encouraging two persons that thrive on conflict and argument be in constant communication could be a good idea. So this lead me to think of this as a pattern.
Posted in Patterns.
– January 27, 2010
What makes a forest a forest?
At the first glance one could say it’s the trees. All forests have them. Granted they can be very different but you tend to have them nevertheless. Yet parks also tend to have trees, even the same trees as nearby forests and still they clearly aren’t forests.
Forests tend to skirt dense habitation, but so do parks. And besides, moving from fact to fiction, a forest containing an elven city, like Lothlórien, is still a forest.
Some forests are huge, like most of my homeland which is basically one huge needle leaf forest. But some are very small, smaller than some parks. So it isn’t the size either.
Forests tend to have wild animals. But, although the species tend to differ, so do parks. And at least to me it feels that a forest would still be a forest even if all animals would avoid entering it.
So could it be just naming? Granted many forests are called woods, but still is this a clear division from a park. But no, even naming doesn’t define it as there are forests that are named parks, like the Central park of Helsinki, or national parks in some countries. Most probably a park that is called a forest exists somewhere in the world.
Anyhow Nuuksio, Hundred acre woods, Sherwood forest and the central park of Helsinki are all clearly forests. Something just clearly defines them as forests. And they are distinctly different from parks. Most of the parks feel like living.
In his book The Timeless Way of Building Christopher Alexander states that the defining thing is the relationships instead of objects. He calls a set of relationships a pattern. Patterns are defined by relationships of other patterns within them. So in a sense a forest is a pattern of space defined by relationship of other patterns within it. So is a park.
He further states that a pattern of quality has to be living and self sustaining, devoid of inner conflicts. To be living, patterns within the pattern must be living too. Death starts to creep from smaller patterns, slowly but surely killing it.
Similarly one could argue that Scrum is a pattern defined by relationships of other patterns. If this pattern is broken or dead it ceases to be Scrum. Even if the pattern is a different one although living it something else but Scrum.
Scrum is a living forest. Like real living forests one Scrum can be very different from another, but the essence of relationships between living patterns has to remain. ScrumBut is a dead forest or a park. Granted parks can be living too, but if you aim to build a forest while really building a park, you’ll easily end up with a dead park.
Further reading: Scrum as Organizational Patterns
Posted in Patterns.
– January 26, 2010
