No rugby jokes, please

I was lucky enough to attend a presentation on Scrum by Joseph Pelrine in Sydney last night. More importantly, I was lucky enough to have dinner and beers with Joseph and some other people from OOSIG afterwards. A big thanks to Alex for organising this!

I found some interesting similarities between Joseph's presentation of Scrum and my ManageWithoutThem philosophy. This being my only real experience with Scrum I don't have any idea if I was connecting with the Scrum process itself or something more that Joseph bought to the presentation. He certainly did bring much more so I suspect the latter.

Specific comparisons with the MWT model include

• Joseph introduced Scrum with a brief discussion about the differences between Empirical processes and Directive processes. Of course, every time I try to explain MWT I start with observation that economics recognises that there are two different types of economies, planned economies and market economies. If you understand the differences in both cases I believe you'll agree they are different in the same ways.
• Joseph used but never never really defined this concept of 'simple design'. I presume this is because I was already supposed to know what this was about from eXtreme Programming. I suspect it is similar to the MWT concept of Organisational Usability. I don't really like the word 'simple' because it implies that simplicity is something you decide and then do – rather than the result of a process (understood or otherwise) that you must constantly evaluate the output of to determine if it is simple. To many times I have seen too many IT managers hide behind 'I just want a simple solution' when what they are really saying is 'I have nothing to contribute'. I like the organisational usability analogy better because it begins to give a criteria for simplicity.
• A general discussion Uncertainty and Agreement and there relationship to complexity. I'd like to hear more about Joseph's views of slide xx of his presentation. When I saw the slide I immediately thought that each activity would have a real position on the graph and a position dependent on how accurately the real position was perceived. If activities were managed as though there was less uncertainty and/or more agreement than there actual was then this would push that activities position on the graph in the direction of chaos. Joseph went many steps further and described 'a whole factual' of positions. It appears he had much more to teach about the dynamics within the 'complex' part of the graph than the big empty yellow mass implied. Excellent! Give me more!
• Joseph defended specialisation. I've often defended specialisation (I have a chapter heading, if nothing else, called 'In Defence of Specialisation') and consider it a sorry state for the science of management if it has to resort to 'I wish everybody was a generalist' when the whole point of management is the coordination of different specialists!
  
• I need the slides to continue this comparison. I'll post an updated entry when somebody posts the slides.

I felt three connected responses to Joseph's presentation. Firstly, when I recognised some of the ideas he was presenting as similar to my own I was a little disappointed that I wasn't quite as original as I thought. I sometimes feel like the John Nash depicted in A Beautiful Mind – driving himself mad in the search for a truly original idea (I also like a quote that my memory attributes to David Weinberger when he describes himself as 'an idiot savant without the savant part'). As I get back into writing the MWT book I really don't want to be held up by this kind of thinking.

Secondly, I felt vindicated. It was actually nice to know that I was right about a number of things. I've been struggling lately to continue to live under the delusion that there is value in the hideous and tedious processes that large IT consulting companies use to develop software. I actually already knew that these processes were not the optimal way to create software. However, I was willing to allow the process to keep occurring all around me. What's more, I was allowing it to exist. Often I would find myself preparing the immense plans, misguided and ambiguous functional specifications, wasting developer's time even, to produce a set of documents that 'fit the process'. All the time knowing that this wasn't how the software was going to be built.

I was, at least, honest enough to realise that a whole underground process was going to need to be developed for each project I was on. The process that would actually get the software developed. Often, some of my highly paid colleagues wouldn't admit to this. They thought the functional specifications were actually getting the software written. They thought that if only the plans were perfect next time then the software would be better. Be denying that the process was broken they were effectively allowing huge amounts of project effort to go unmanaged. They were never going to take control of the system in any confident and effective way because they were ignoring what was actually occurring in the system.

Thirdly, and lastly, I realised that there was a kind of zen-truth to all of these ideas. When Joseph started talking about the 5-6 things you can do to try and change a complex systems – something that intrigued me but went a little over my head at the time (he could probably see this in my eyes but was polite enough not to notice) – I was instantly reminded of Christopher Alexander's 15 properties, generative sequences, and structure preserving transformations.

This last realisation brought it all together for me. When you are heading towards a truth perhaps you shouldn't expect it to turn out to be a truly original idea. The truth should ultimately be familiar to us and connected to everything we do. This is partially the reason that certain people can come to the same universal conclusions through the mastery of different things. Joseph doesn't think of himself as a Smalltalk developer any more. He says he is exploring organisational complexity – or complexity in general. The fact that people can still 'mistake' him for a guru-status Smalltalk developer is a testament to the intellectual place he finds himself and the universal truths he has uncovered and is learning to incorporate into his behaviours and life.

Of course, I only spoke to Joseph for a couple of hours so I'm not even really talking about him. But isn't that the whole point...?