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Thor’s hammer had a name, so why can’t mine?

Mjölnir.

Thor’s hammer was called Mjölnir. Cool name for a problem-solving device.

Liza Wood commented on a recent post of mine in which I lamented the overuse of the word, "agile," and the ill effects of that overuse. She wrote, in part:

I completely understand why you have become disenchanted with word "Agile", but I am sticking with it for now. For the majority it’s still at least a starting point to have a pragmatic conversation about product development (not just software).

I wonder about that. Is the word really a starting point for pragmatic conversation? Different people have had different experiences with that. My experience has been that people already have some pretty firm ideas about the implications of the word, "agile." A recurring pattern is that a change agent goes into an organization and happily proclaims, "Oh, boy! We’re going Agile!" To his/her surprise, the people in the organization do not react to the proposition joyfully. The word "agile" connotes Happy Things to the change agent. What does it connote to other people? Why are they not happy to hear it?

Ron Jeffries’ classic article, We Tried Baseball and It Didn’t Work, suggests an answer.

Continue reading Thor’s hammer had a name, so why can’t mine?

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Value streams and value networks

Lean thinking is based on a model of delivery in which raw materials are progressively developed into a finished product that is consumed by a customer. This linear path is called a value stream. Many in the software community have criticized this model as too simplistic at best, and harmful at worst, as it risks ignoring key stakeholders by focusing on "the" customer.

In real life, a software product has many stakeholders. There may be multiple customers who have different needs and different usage patterns for the software. There may be people involved who are affected by the functionality or quality of the software product who are not, strictly speaking, customers. The process of building and delivering a software product is far more complicated than a simple, linear "stream" of activities. For those reasons and more, some people prefer the term value network to the term value stream. Continue reading Value streams and value networks

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The Vulcan choice

We tend to make decisions based on emotion, intuition, gut feel, and wishful thinking. At the same time, we assume these are the wrong tools for decision-making. In our culture, there is a belief that all decisions and all conclusions must be based purely on logic, reason, science, or statistical evidence. It seems that people feel there is something wrong with conclusions or decisions that are arrived at by any means other than cold, calculating logic. (Never mind, for the moment, people’s demonstrated ability to apply logic.) There is an apparent desire to rid ourselves of emotion, morality, and even personal preference when making choices, even though this seems to be contrary to our nature.

This assumption is so deeply ingrained in our culture that we have formally defined decision-making on any other basis as an error. We call it Base Rate Neglect (regarded as a cognitive bias) or Base Rate Fallacy (regarded as a logical fallacy). But which is the true fallacy: The use of non-logical decision-making methods, or the belief that such methods are to be eschewed categorically?
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Intuition and cognitive bias

In the past five months or so, I have been in on-again, off-again negotiations with a prospective client to participate in fairly large-scale organizational transformation initiative. The engagement would involve coaching, mentoring, training, consulting with management, travel to interesting cities, the chance to introduce effective methods to some 1,200 people, and the opportunity to work closely with some of the top people in the field. The agreed daily rate was just sufficient to cover expenses in the pricey home city of New York and still provide nominal income. Everyone involved was enthusiastic. We signed. I started to outlay cash to arrange for housing, and purchased the initial airline ticket.

With less than 24 hours remaining until flight time, a new manager took over at the client company. He abruptly terminated the entire organizational improvement initiative and all associated contracts.

This sort of thing happens from time to time. It isn’t the sudden reversal that caught my attention. Something else about the situation piqued my curiosity. It has nothing to do with the client, although one might justifiably question their handling of the matter. It has to do with the way I arrived at the decision to accept the engagement.
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Perception

A post on this blog received a very interesting comment from a reader with the nom de pixel Malapine:

"…my problem isn’t boredom but fear: the codebase sucks, we have no idea whether the features are what customers want, and if the product doesn’t sell, some of us may get laid off. If that’s ever me, I am screwed: my resume will show two decades with the same employer, the vast majority of it on Waterfall or ScrumBut projects."

"Off the job, I read books on Agile, go to monthly dojos, etc.; but on the job I can’t even do TDD properly — builds take 20 minutes just to compile, and nobody else seems to care."

I felt this called for more than a response in the comment thread. It seems to me it illustrates that perception can be more important than reality, and that is of interest to me presently.

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Give me a lever, and…

An opportunity for improvement came up recently on a coaching engagement that reminded me of the book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath. The authors found that in a wide range of circumstances, people had approached very challenging changes in a similar way; basically, by finding the bits that were working well and using them as the basis for further improvement.

Sometimes the bits that are working well don’t look all that great at first glance. One of the stories the authors of Switch share is that of Jerry Sternin, who was charged with improving the nutrition of children in Vietnam. Rather than approaching the problem as a large-scale infrastructure problem, as had been done up to that point with poor results, Sternin went to a single village to learn how children were fed.

He noticed that some children were well nourished. Setting aside those who had Party connections, and therefore access to better food, he investigated how the well-nourished children were fed. He found their mothers mixed additional sources of nutrients into their rice, including wild plants, small shrimp and insects that could be found without cost. To a Westerner like me, mixing insects into my rice sounds rather nasty; but sometimes opportunities don’t come at you waving their arms and shouting, "Hey! I’m an opportunity!"

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Fish gotta fly

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how’s the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness—awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."

(David Foster Wallace, commencement speech at Kenyon College, Ohio).

Yeah, so if you care to Google it, you’ll find lots of articles pondering the reasons why the majority of Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, Kaizen, TQM, and name-your-poison adoptions "fail." People you and I know from conferences and books and such tell the same stories over and over again of the one big success they had with organizational transformation. Everyone was stoked about their branded re-packaging of old ideas made new again through the magic of buzzwords. They achieved improvements of 4x, 10x, 50x, or more X’s than you’d care to count. One or two years after the consultants left the building, those organizations were back where they started. I’ve seen it happen myself. The organizations snapped back to their old equilibrium state. Maybe they always do. The buzzwords haunt the place like fading poltergeists, and the stories live on, but the substance is long gone.

If you’ve done much Value Stream Mapping in information-shuffling organizations (as opposed to thing-making organizations), then you’ve probably done a double-take a few times, unable to believe process cycle efficiency could really be as low as that, and the company doesn’t sink through the earth’s crust like the superdense slug it is. It seems they’re happy as can be to spend 3 or 4 million dollars and burn up a year of 75 people’s precious time to build a routine, web-based CRUD app, fundamentally no different from a million others, that could have been delivered by a team of 4 in 6 weeks for the price of a few pizzas. Nor do they seem terribly worried about the opportunity cost of having all those people duct-taped to their desks for all those months, busily waiting for each other to "review" or "approve" things.

I’ve been wondering, lately, why none of those people wants to shoot himself in the head.

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Paranoiac-critical project tracking

A recent tweet of mine in which I whined about the waste of tracking work hours garnered quite a few responses. The reaction surprised me, as I was only venting and didn’t expect any replies. Apparently, I’m not the only one who is frustrated by this. Not only is it useless to track individuals’ hours by task or by project, it is particularly annoying to use poorly-designed time tracking tools. I was complaining because I presently have to enter time in three different tracking systems. I wrote that the first seems to have been designed by a roomful of monkeys; the second, by a roomful of monkeys on crack; and the third, by a roomful of monkeys on heroin laced with rat poison.

The ensuing Twitter thread reminded me of the futility and waste of tracking individuals’ time at all. People shared their own experiences with the problem and how they had dealt with it. Later, I recalled having written a blog post on a related topic. I visited the Wayback Machine and located it. Here’s the post, dating from December 29, 2007. It lacks only the image of the Dalí painting Suburbs of the Paranoiac-Critical City; Afternoon on the Outskirts of European History, which I hesitate to reproduce in view of recent…er, paranoia about intellectual property rights.

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With the benefit (and bias) of hindsight

This post could be subtitled, "A self-indulgent look at past writings."

In April of 2012, Paul Bowler (@spbowler) found some articles from my old site on the Wayback Machine and tweeted about it. I replied to him, "Thanks for finding that! Some of the articles make me smile; learned a thing or 2 since then. Others I’m glad to have recovered." That prompted him to ask, "Which articles should I avoid?" That’s not a question to be answered in 140 charcters.

The short answer is that people should read whatever they think will be interesting, and then use their own brains to arrive at independent conclusions. I’m not one of those people who insists that others provide published references to support everything they say or write. If anything, I’d rather people did their own thinking, and used published references as references rather than as a substitute for their own brains. I’m not so sure published references are all that special, anyway.

Now for the long answer.

Continue reading With the benefit (and bias) of hindsight