Musing over Mutation 27
I read a mailing list entry in which one fellow (who? I can’t remember!) asked another “Do you want to get better at what you’re doing, or find a better way to get the results you want?”
I’m a sucker for a good one-liner. That one had me thinking, and as I’ve had other conversations about innovation, I keep coming back to that line.
In our Agile practices, we work really hard for a week or two, and then hold a retrospective. The purpose of the retrospective is to find ways to work more effectively for the next two weeks. As we develop better software, we also evolve a better team. We use “tricks” such as tracking our velocity and recording blockages on our ‘waste snake’ to provide data for our decisions, and we use gut feel to evaluate those things that feel like collateral effort to us.
If the practice works, we will see incremental improvement in the team. We will develop ways of avoiding special variations, and we will learn to accept our normal variations. It will make us better at the way we do things now.
XP didn’t come from a series of incremental improvements to the waterfall technology. I wasn’t there when it happened, but it seems that they took on an change in axioms. They didn’t strengthen the contracts between groups, but pulled all the decision-makers onto the same team. They didn’t find more careful ways to examine the code they were changing, but rather decided to lean radically on volumes of tests. They didn’t build practices to improve their anticipatory design, they decided instead not to anticipate at all and simplify their design to allow future change. At the time, this was radical stuff.
I’m sure there have been many other less-successful process mutations, but there is no evolution without mutation.
The man behind the iPod, iPhone, and MacBookPro has had some less-successful product ideas, too. Some exciting high-concept products didn’t make it in the wild. But then some new ideas become category killers.
How do we learn to make the axiomatic changes that lead us to radically better ways to get what we want?
I’d say that you start any discussion about how to improve with what you want. Not what you think you can get, or what would be easy to do, but what you really want. Then, try to work backwards from there and see how far you get.
I think it’s very easy to limit your thinking to “what improvements can I make with what I have?”, but really you need to be critically evaluating if you even know what you want to achieve. Most people don’t. It’s harder than you think.
Well, does it? You say you’re doing the practice, does it help?
When I saw your title about “mutation”, it reminded me of the Genetic Algorithms mutation operator, and the problem of Search in general.
In search, both hill-climbing (incremental improvement) and random search (mutation) have good results, and work best when used together!
@yachris2112: I’m working with a team new to agile. In my past consults, I have done it and it always helps if it’s conducted well. We’ve had large and small incremental improvements.
@everyone: XKCD illustrates the point on the very same day this blog hits the world: http://www.xkcd.com/399/ I have a scary degree of coincidence with XKCD.
To add to the others comments, you can ask yourself 3 questions:
1) what should I continue doing? 2) what should I stop doing? 3) what should I start doing?
Linda M. Lopeke http://www.smartstartcoach.com Success-to-go for people working@the speed of life!
Evolution in biology is based on 2 principles: mutation and cross-over. Mutation is the replacement (or adding/removing) of individual genes (or practices). But mutation can only get you to a local optimum.
Cross-over is the mixing of genes from two parents (or the mixing of best practices from two other projects/methods). It is essential for finding global optimums, so that the uphill-climbing doesn’t get you stuck on a local optimum.
In a changing environment you need to apply both.
The key is pain and pleasure. We learn and improve because of them. The desire to make pain disappear while at the same time increasing pleasure. What doesn’t work is painful so it will naturally evolve because we don’t like it.
I think that sometimes we make the mistake of tolerating pain because we fear change. So some people feel that the fear to something new, like XP, is more painful than the actual pain that waterfall brings.
Sooner or later they will be brave enough to change, pleasure is stronger.
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I’m sure there have been many other less-successful process mutations, but there is no evolution without mutation.
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If the practice works, we will see incremental improvement in the team. We will develop ways of avoiding special variations, and we will learn to accept our normal variations. It will make us better at the way we do things now.
I think it’s very easy to limit your thinking to “what improvements can I make with what I have?”, but really you need to be critically evaluating if you even know what you want to achieve.
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