Wed, 03 Aug 2005
Prelude to an explanation of a fear
In my Agile2005 co-keynote, I talked about why I think Agile
is akin to cybernetics, at least the British cybernetics of the
late 40's and on. They share
an emphasis on these things:
-
Performance over representation
-
Rosh Ashby wrote in 1948 that "...to the biologist the brain is not
a thinking machine, it is an acting machine; it gets
information and then it does something about it." What we usually
think of as thinking - building a model in the brain of the world
outside it - is secondary; a tool that can be used when useful,
ignored when not.
Similarly, an Agile team doesn't depend on a requirements
document - a model of a solution - for success. The team is gets a
demand for more features and does something about it: it uses
whatever tools and internal resources generate the features and
keep the paychecks
flowing. A good model of the end product turns out not to be
such an important tool.
-
Adaptation
-
In an as-yet-unpublished manuscript, Andrew Pickering writes
that, to these cyberneticians, "... the brain's special role [is]
to be an organ of adaptation. The brain is what helps us
to get along in situations and environments we have never
encountered before."
Similarly, the Agile team's job is to produce a steady stream
of working software. Whenever the environment changes and
upsets that steadiness, the team adapts until it reaches
equilibrium (steady productivity or consistent growth in
productivity).
-
Surprise
-
The cyberneticians were fond of building complex things,
working with them, and opportunistically taking advantage of
their unplanned capabilities. I gave the example of Gordon Pask's
ear: a device that was trained like a neural net. It
took in electrical inputs, sent out electrical outputs, and the
outside world's judgments on the outputs trained it to get better
and better at producing favored outputs. One way it differed from
neural nets is that it didn't start with artificial neurons and
connections. It grew them from an undifferentiated soup.
This device had one sense designed in: the ability to detect
electrical inputs. In what seems to me a later bout of whimsy,
the experimenters attached a microphone to it. By vibrating the
whole assembly, the experimenters provoked it to grow a sense of
hearing - a wholely unplanned and unexpected sense good enough
for it to distinguish 50 cycle from 100 cycle sounds.
In agile programming, it's considered unsurprising if the
coding takes you in an unexpected direction and even causes the
team to develop new concepts. (See Ward Cunningham's story of
Advancers.)
And then I said that's not what I wanted to talk about.
What I wanted to talk about is the fact that cybernetics
fizzled. If we share its approaches, might we also share its fatal
flaws?
More tomorrow.
## Posted at 16:34 in category /conferences
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