Off-Topic: Literature for Agile Managers
Update: 01/06: When I started writing, the goal was to be really assertive. It still frustrates me to research current material, blogs, and articles, and not see any Agility topic going deeper into the principles.
On top of that, I’m anxious about my own research, which always seems to have pieces missing. Since there’s almost no one to talk to about it, the frustration grows. So, at the start of the article, I was already out of patience and began abusing the first and third person, in a near 1-to-1 dialogue. That wasn’t helping the main point, so I decided to trim the most aggressive parts. Let’s see if it’s more “digestible” now :-)
Last year I put together a list of books I read in my search for the essence of true management. Instead of going through the more trivial authors, like Peter Drucker, I went after the principles of Agility.
There are a few categories of managers: the “agile” ones, in the broadest sense of the word, and the “traditional” ones. The second group, prone to not wanting to change or learn anything, is sad, period. The first is on the right path, but there’s still a long way to go. The discussions I see today in agile communities also fall into the inertia of “good sense” and “common sense,” and end up shallow.
An agile manager should want to dedicate a lot more. Scrum itself is an example. As I said in the article You Don’t Understand Anything About Scrum: Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber researched the relevant subjects long ago and gave the tips, though few follow them.
If you really want to understand Scrum, this literature helps a lot. To start, there are the Scrum Papers, which give you the introduction.
If you read them, you’ve already bumped into terms like “Emergence,” “Edge of Chaos,” “Complex Adaptive Systems,” and “Self-Organization.” And if you passed through those terms and left it at that, think again: what’s the point of reading without understanding?
I don’t know everything yet either, but I’m committed to understanding this properly. Without 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 shed their own responsibility. If the method, the procedure, or the process “fails” or doesn’t deliver, you can always hide behind “but I followed it to the letter, it’s not my fault.” That misses the point. What result are you after: following rules or reaching results?
I say this with “aggressiveness,” but some reluctance, because I used to think this way myself. Anyway, after some time reading academic articles, right now I’m working through these books:
Systems Thinking, Second Edition: Managing Chaos and Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture. Once you fall into Complexity, you leave classical, reductionist, deterministic thinking behind and start needing the holistic thinking of Systems, which has itself gone through several paradigms. Highly recommended: it opens by describing the different management models and their evolution with precision.
The Essence of Chaos. Complex Adaptive Systems fall under the broader subject of “Complexity,” and that leads straight to “Chaos.” I’d rather read something by Ilya Prigogine, but since I’m on a Kindle, the only things I found available were titles like this one, by none other 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 and 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 the nature around us. You need to understand Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Most people “think” they understand it, but watch out: much of it is folklore, and plenty of people still doubt it. If you have doubts about Evolution, don’t even start.
More than that? From experience, every time someone uses words like “chaos” or “balance,” I notice they’re working from the casual definition, not the technical one. Many think “chaos” is just mess, something completely unwanted.
Worse still: they believe the “secret” is to reach balance and stay there, and they confuse the goal with seeking balance. That’s not quite it.
Here’s what the introduction of Surfing the Edge of Chaos says:
Equilibrium is a precursor to death. When a living system is in a state of equilibrium, it is less responsive to changes occurring around it. This places it at maximum risk. In the face of threat, or when galvanized by a compelling opportunity, living things move toward the edge of chaos. This condition evokes higher levels of mutation and experimentation, and fresh new solutions are more likely to be found.
When this excitation takes place, the components of living systems self-organize and new forms and repertoires emerge from the turmoil.
Living systems cannot be directed along a linear path. Unforeseen consequences are inevitable. The challenge is to disturb them in a way that approximates the desired outcome.
This is a definition 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 to describe 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 that can act in parallel, develop “models” as to how things work in their environment, and, most importantly, refine those models through learning and adaptation. The human immune system is a complex adaptive system. So is a rain forest, an ant colony, and a business.
There’s vast literature. Search Amazon for terms like “Complexity,” “Edge of Chaos,” and “Systems Thinking,” and you’ll see that for decades researchers from the most varied fields and industries have been refining this body of knowledge. Techniques like the Toyota Production System/Lean, Six Sigma, Scrum, and Theory of Constraints all derive from this school of thought.
From my previous list, I reinforce the need for readings like:
The Machine that Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production. Understand how the Lean process came about at Toyota.
The Goal. Process engineering and cost control. Without understanding TOC, it’s futile.
The End of Management, and the Rise of Organizational Democracy. A summary of all these subjects and, maybe, a provocative introduction to the rest.
More concerning: techniques like Lean, TOC, Six Sigma, and derivatives like Kanban are terms plenty of people use the wrong way nowadays. They were all born and refined in Production Engineering, always talking about the “production line” and the “manufacturing” of material goods, “physical” things.
In Agile, we’re talking about “Software,” something abstract and without parallel in the physical world, and therefore without the same references.
It’s impossible to migrate any Production Engineering technique verbatim. It doesn’t work that simply. A Scrum Sprint is a conscious adaptation by Sutherland and Schwaber, who knew this limitation and attempted an approximation in the abstract world.
But this isn’t obvious or trivial to grasp. I haven’t fully grasped it myself yet, and I believe most people in the agile world never stopped to study this difference.
Be very careful: “Management” is much more than “experience” or “good sense.” Just as a good programmer needs to read and research a lot to sharpen their technique, a manager needs to as well. And I’m saying this to myself.