Creation myth

It is Sunday morning as I write.

I like to read different bibles, from different cultures. It is my intuition that while they are all different, they are also all trying to give us pointers towards the truth. Sometimes the pointers are a bit rusty and bent, but if we use a bit of imagination (thank you Mr. Blake), then we can find our way a bit better. Even with the bent and rusty ones.

In the Hebrew bible, there are several creation myths. How the world was created, and maybe why, and maybe a hint or two about 'what is it all about, anyway?'

And the Christian bible has a creation myth too. "In the beginning was the Word." And a few lines later: "In him was life, and the life was the Light of men". And then a few lines later: "And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not." All Agile advocates can understand that phrase. [Minor note: In these few lines one might discern both the ecstasy and the agony of writing a blog. This is of course ridiculously minor compared to the meaning the above quoted words wish to convey.]

Now, for those to whom the past is not prologue...

In the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has another creation myth he wishes to describe. It has to do with Xerox PARC, Steve Jobs, and the creation of the Personal Computer. And of modern warfare. He is really talking about creation, invention, innovation, creativity. Which is what our Agile teams do. So, I think, a very important topic. (Although perhaps not as important as God, if you believe he, she or it exists. Or, maybe, perhaps not as important as the meaning of the universe, if you believe it exists.)

Read it here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell
Or at least an abstract. And decide whether to read more.

Here's what I think he says or implies, over-simplified into 2 points. (Which is usually one more point than I can remember for more than a day.)

1. We can win more and faster as a team. Meaning: If we pick the right diverse mind-sets (individual people), and put them in a team and let them fight about the product in multiple dimensions, we can get better innovation faster.

2. We win by being like the tree in my front yard. Meaning: We throw out many many seeds, most of which will die. Most will be "failures". But those failures are good because they mean more possibilities will be considered, and we will discover those few possibilities where the new tree can truly flourish.

It feels risky, it feels wasteful. Yet, it is the way to win. And to have fun. But it does make me sneeze. (Literally: I have allergies now, as I am older. Symbolically: Probably still true.)

No, no: It is the way to make people's lives better. Maybe even yours.

Malcolm Gladwell is, I think, a wonderful writer, and you may take different conclusions from his story. Please do.

Complex Adaptive Systems

Self-organization, which we just wrote about, is only one of the ideas that we know contribute to the success of complex adaptive systems.

While we are not convinced that CAS (complex adaptive systems) have been fully figured out, we think it has a lot to add. (In fact, our hypothesis is that that E=MC(2) is only a working hypothesis (as are all the so-called scientific laws) soon to be revised...and soon might be 1,000 years). But we think anyone working with creative teams must be studying CAS. Well, and thus, self-organization.

Another key related idea is Knowledge Creation. We cannot talk about this too much.

In our businesses of new product development, the key thing is the amount of good new knowledge created and per unit of time. And good, in overly simple terms, means high business value (along with lots of other constraints).

We think self-organization is key to high levels of knowledge creation. As anyone who has done brainstorming knows, you cannot command-and-control creativity. Or, if you do, you should expect very low creativity, creativity smothered in a prison jump suit.

We think CAS and knowledge creation are key to better Scrum teams.

This leads me to this thought, said earlier a different way: Our biggest impediment is refactoring our wetware.

Now, one of my missions in life is to reduce and reverse de-humanization. (Sounds quite high-minded and daunting, but it is not; it is just a daily struggle, like brushing one's teeth. Or mostly it is.) De-humanization is where people are not treated as being fully human, with all the good and bad and other stuff that implies. Where, for example, they are treated as a thing, maybe a computer. So, I am not in love, as a lover of words, with words like 'wetware' that take a computer model to explain the human CNS or mind. But, if it makes you happy...(as the song says).

PS. Takeuchi and Nonaka, the godfathers of Scrum, have spent much of their later careers studying knowledge creation. Seek and ye shall find.

JIT Knowledge Creation

This is our business. Just-in-time knowledge creation. (It is not just-in-time knowledge management.)

Why? And why is it so important?

Well, ultimately the answer is because people are important. Or maybe it is better to say we respect the customer. And the firm's shareholders.

What do I mean, you say?

Let's start from the beginning. A long time ago the Lean people discovered that any Work-In-Process waste (WIP) or inventory, is muda. No, they weren't being silly. All Lean firms still have some WIP and inventory, but they have been relentlessly reducing the ratio of WIP and inventory to sales for 50 years now. And now it is a very small fraction of what it used to be. And they are still not satisfied. It must be reduced more.

And why did they do that? Well, in the auto industry they realized that an unsold car in inventory is trouble. It can only get worse, it cannot get better. The sun can spoil the paint job. Rain can cause rust. Hail can damage the exterior. Time can make it go out of the current model year. In other words, they noticed that the car can decay. (There are other reasons too.)

In software development, our business is knowledge. In the form of working code.

How fast can our knowledge decay compared to a car?

And here we mean not only the final knowledge (the working code), but also all the other tacit and explicit knowledge needed in the course of building the working product.

My opinion, and I usually demonstrate this easily in each Scrum class, is that our knowledge decays exponentially faster than a car. And a car's value will only go down a bit at a time. But our knowledge can lose its value as much as 100% in one day.

So, although no one told you, we in the software industry need to be relentlessly reducing our all our work-in-process and inventory. So, WIP is any work we have done that has not resulted in finished inventory. Finished inventory is fully finished software, that is all but deployed and in use by the 'customer'.

Now, we don't mean you should be foolish. For example, there is a minimum marketable feature set concept that does apply. Although we think that the size of the MMFS is much smaller than we almost always want to believe.

Again, a key goal of how we organize things should be to minimize WIP and inventory. And because there are many reasons for that, we can also organize things to minimize the negative impact of the WIP and inventory we 'must' have. (We will talk later about some of the other negative impacts of WIP and inventory.)

We must have a greater percentage reduction in WIP and inventory than the auto industry. We have lots of work to do to make that happen. Lots of impediments to remove. It was hard for the auto industry, and it will be hard for us. And now we have made the first step -- someone has told you that is absolutely key to your job.

Now, you know what your job really is. To know and not to do, is not to know.

BTW, Takeuchi and Nonaka have written many many pages about knowledge creation. They are the godfathers of Scrum. (A hint, for those who want a hint.)