Lean development #3

The end of the chapter on amplifying learning in a software project is brilliant. Mary Poppendieck talked about increasing feedback as a response to trouble, rather than increasing discipline, reverting to a waterfall model. She continues to talk about disruptive technologies – a term coined by Clayton Christensen in his The Innovators Dilemma and that is defined by Business 2.0 as “any technology that overturns a traditional business model”. It has to do with emerging markets, and Poppendieck writes about how established companies fail to enter emerging markets because of the nature of disruptive technology.

I’m not sure I fully understand disruptive technology and how it relates to punctuated equilibrium, but I do understand Poppendieck’s point. She talks about how established companies fail because of their having a rational approach to decision making, when circumstances call for an intuitive approach, due to the complexity and fluidity of the situation. Here, she talks about firefighters as intuitive decision makers, something I have been thinking about. Something that was new to me was that a firefighter, at times when his experience is inadequate, resorts to rational decision making. This must be the same “mechanisms” that lies behind the tendency to seek a more disciplined process when meeting challenges in a project.

Rational decision making removes context, she writes. It suffers from tunnel vision. When I read this I came to think (again) of Alan Watts talk about the floodlight and the spotlight (see here).

Then she writes about U.S. Marines, citing a book called Corps Business by David H. Freedman, and this I find very interesting. Marines are trained to deal with complexity, with paradoxical and contradictory circumstances. Their training aims to expose them to more challenging situations than they will ever experience in reality, using situational training to build intuitive decision making skills.

For marines, mistakes are considered necessary. First they make plans to understand the essence of a situation. Then the organizational structure is collapsed, leaving the decisions to the men at the front line, which are less likely to make mistakes than the remote officers, since they are where the action is. The principle with the training is to expose them to situations where they are given a goal, but also the freedom to decide the details in fulfilling that goal. The focus is on small teams at the lowest levels, rather than way up the hierarchy.

I think the essence of this has to do with three things: communicating a clear statement of intent to the team, give them a common vision or goal; the freedom to find the best way to fulfill the goal; and that this is done using a set of simple rules or guidelines.

Poppendieck introduces the simple rules by talking about social insects, swarm intelligence, and restates the seven lean principles as these simple rules: Eliminate Waste (do only what adds value to the end product); Amplify Learning (when in trouble, increase feedback); Decide as Late as Possible (keep your options open); Deliver as Fast as Possible (in order to get feedback soon); Empower the Team (freedom, not orders from above); Build Integrity In (integrity must be paid attention to from the start); Avoid Sub-Optimization (worry only about the performance of the whole). I’m excited, because these take a different approach than the twelve practices of Extreme Programming. I can’t explain why, but I have strange feelings about the latter two rules; we’ll see if I discover what that’s about.