Off-Topic: Literature for Agile Managers

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January 6, 2010 · 💬 Join the Discussion

Update: 01/06: The goal of the article when I started writing it was to be really assertive. It still frustrates me to research current material, blogs, articles, and not see any Agility-related topic going deeper into the principles. Besides that, I’m a little anxious with my own research, which still seems to have missing pieces, and since there’s almost no one to talk to about it, I get even more frustrated. That’s why right at the beginning of the article I was already out of patience and started abusing the first and third person, practically in a 1-to-1 dialogue. Since that doesn’t help the main objective of the article, I decided to trim the most aggressive parts. Let’s see if now it’s more “digestible” :-)

Last year I compiled a list of books that I read in my search for the essence of true management. The difference is that instead of going through the more trivial ones like Peter Drucker, I went after the principles of Agility.

There are a few categories of managers: those who are “agile” — in the broadest sense of the word — and the “traditional.” The second group — who tend to not want to change or learn anything — is sad, period. The first is on the right path, but there’s still a lot missing. The discussions I see today in agile communities, unfortunately, also still fall into the inertia of “good sense,” of “common sense,” and end up being superficial.

An agile manager should want to dedicate themselves much more. Scrum itself is an example of this. As I said in my article You Don’t Understand Anything About Scrum: Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber really researched the pertinent subjects long ago and give the tips, although few follow them.

If you really want to understand Scrum, this literature can help a lot. To start, there are the Scrum Papers, which give the introduction.

If you did that, then you’ve bumped into terms like “Emergence,” “Edge of Chaos,” “Complex Adaptive Systems,” “Self-Organization.” And if you’ve passed through those terms and just left it there, think again: what’s the advantage of reading without understanding?

I also don’t know everything yet, but I’m entirely dedicated to understanding this right. Without understanding the principles, all that’s left is to “follow a recipe,” and that’s very little. Whoever looks for rules or recipes is trying to remove their own responsibility, because if the method, the procedure, the process “fails” or doesn’t give results, you can always fall back on the excuses “but I followed the method to the letter, it’s not my fault.” And that completely misses the point: what result are you looking for — following rules or reaching results?

I say this with “aggressiveness” but some reluctance because I myself have already thought this way. Anyway, after spending some time reading more academic articles, right now I’m reading these books:

  • Systems Thinking, Second Edition: Managing Chaos and Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture — falling into the Complexity subject, we also leave reductionist and deterministic classical thinking and must necessarily understand Systems holistic thinking. Systems Thinking has itself gone through several paradigms. This one is highly recommended — it starts by perfectly describing the different management models and their evolution.

  • The Essence of Chaos — Complex Adaptive Systems falls into the broader subject known as “Complexity,” and this necessarily leads to the subject of “Chaos.” I’d rather read a book by Ilya Prigogine, but since I have a Kindle, I only found books like this one available, by no less than Edward Lorenz, one of the “fathers” of Chaos.

  • Surfing the Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business — Systems, Complexity, also require understanding the Edge of Chaos.

  • The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution — one of the clearest examples of Complex Adaptive Systems is nature around us. You need to understand what Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is. Most people “think” they understand this, but watch out — much is folklore, and many still doubt it. If you still have doubts about Evolution, don’t even start.

More than that? From experience, every time someone tells me words like “chaos,” “balance,” I realize they’re based on the casual and not technical definitions. First, many think that “chaos” is simply mess, something totally unwanted. Even worse: they believe that the “secret” is to reach balance and stay in it — they confuse the goal as being to seek balance. That’s not quite it.

According to the introduction of the book Surfing the Edge of Chaos, look:

Balance is the precursor of death. When a living system is in a state of equilibrium, it is less responsive to changes happening around it. This places it at maximum risk. When facing threats, or when motivated by an opportunity, living things move toward the Edge of Chaos. This condition evokes high levels of mutation and experimentation, and fresh, new solutions are more likely to be found.

When this excitement begins, the components of living systems self-organize and new forms and repertoires emerge from the disturbance.

Living systems cannot be driven along a linear path. Unintended consequences are inevitable. The challenge is to create disturbance in a way that gets close to the desired result.

This is a definition both of the biological evolution of living beings, but, if you’ve read at least the basics of Scrum and Agile, it’s also a way of describing the Agile process. Reread the Principles of the Agile Manifesto and you’ll find similar texts.

As for Complex Adaptive Systems:

A complex adaptive system is formally defined as a system of independent agents who can act in parallel, develop “models” of how things work in their environments and, most importantly, refine these models through learning and adaptation. The human immune system is a complex adaptive system. So is a tropical forest, an ant colony, and a business.

There’s vast literature. Search Amazon for terms like “Complexity,” “Edge of Chaos,” “Systems Thinking,” and you’ll see that for decades researchers from the most different areas and industries have been refining this body of knowledge. Techniques like the Toyota Production System/Lean, Six Sigma, Scrum, Theory of Constraints, and others are all derived from this school of thought.

From my previous list, I reinforce the need for readings like:

More concerning: techniques like Lean, TOC, Six Sigma, and derivatives like Kanban techniques, are all terms that many use the wrong way nowadays. They were all created and refined in Production Engineering. We’re always talking about “production line,” “manufacturing” of material consumer goods, “physical” things. Now, in Agile, we’re talking about “Software,” something abstract and without parallel in the physical world, and therefore without any of the same references.

It’s impossible to migrate any of the Production Engineering techniques literally. It doesn’t work that simply. A Scrum Sprint is a conscious adaptation by Sutherland and Schwaber, knowing this limitation and trying an approximation in the abstract world. But this isn’t obvious or trivial to understand — I myself haven’t fully understood it yet, and I believe most people in the agile world haven’t stopped to study this difference.

Be very careful: the subject “Management” is much more than mere “experience” or “good sense.” Just as a good programmer should read a lot and research a lot to improve their technique, so too should a manager. And here I’m saying this to myself.