The Essence and Appearance of Agility: or Agility’s Eternal Return
How do you think about agility? Is it an ideal to which people aspire, getting closer, but never achieving perfect agility? Or is it an Idea which connects to other Ideas which enables agility in other ways?
There are many ways we can think about how agility fits into our conception of reality, or, as it’s called in metaphysical philosophy, an ontology, the study of what is real. In the West we largely approach the world using a two-and-a-half-thousand year old approach: Platonic essences.
Imagine you are in a cave, and due to a quirk in its geology, are stuck behind a rock barrier. On the other side is a flaming torch which is projecting light over the barrier onto the cave wall, and with it, projecting the shadows of whatever the people on the lit side of the wall are carrying. You have no way of seeing the original object, but you try to infer knowledge about it the object from the imperfect, flickering shadows, projected on to the rough cave wall.
Thus Plato introduces a metaphor which he uses to explain the difference between the eternal, perfect, abstract essence of a concept (in the illustration above, a bird) and the appearance of that concept projected into the real world, its position changing with every flicker of the torch, an imperfect, ever-changing representative copy of the ideal. For every concept, according to Plato, there is an essence, and we can only ever experience a representation, perhaps divining insights into the ideal that we can never truly reach.
Plato bases his entire ontology on the metaphor of the cave. An ontology is a philosophical consideration of what is considered real in the world, and in this case, it forms a hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy is the superior form of being (the ideal chair), the essence, abstract and ideal, perfect and static. Below that is some imperfect, dynamic simulacrum of it (a four-legged, gold-painted, red velvet upholstered throne), and below that, dynamic simulacra which are less and less conformant to the essence (a flattish rock that you can sit on). Since time takes us further and further away from the eternal essence, time, also, degrades the quality of the simulacra.
(This is why Plato bases his system of governance on ensuring nothing changes: the more things change, and the more time passes, the less perfect and the more corrupted the institutions and actors are. I’m sure you can think of social groups that are predicated on either inhibiting change or returning society to an imagined golden age, but this is not a political forum.)
Platonic essentialism (as modified by Aristotle) is readily apparent in some contexts in the modern world — the Linnaean taxonomy describing the tree of life, object-oriented class inheritance hierarchies, the Dewey decimal systems, social classes, organisational structures, the conservative moral hierarchy — but less obvious in others, such as the eternal complaint that the world is always less perfect today than it was some imagined yesteryear. There’s always the assumption that as time moves forward, the essence or concept being considered is less perfect.
Such concepts have two dimensions: the extension of the concept, which is the number of things to which it applies (external quantity), and the comprehension (or intension) of the concept, which is a catalogue of the necessary and sufficient properties which define the concept (internal qualities). So we could imagine the concept {agility} having x comprehensive properties which describe all of the necessary and sufficient characteristics of we consider agility to look like, and having y members, consisting of all of the instances of practices in the world and throughout time which meet the comprehensive criteria.
For example, perhaps one’s comprehension of {agility} might look something like this:
- the requirement that everyone has a particular “agile mindset”; and/or
- the organisation or team are focused on the values and principles outlined in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development; and/or
- that membership of teams is multi-disciplinary and diverse; and/or
- that the organisation can turn on a sixpence in response to contextual change; and/or
- that they do Scrum exactly according to The Scrum Guide; and/or
- that the focus is on throughput, flow, work item age, or WIP limit; and/or
- that the organisation has agile coaches (or similar) embedded to help teams improve; and/or
- that the organisation has an approach to enable strategic teams to manage with agility; and/or
- …
(You can, I’m sure, think of other properties which you are certain should be included or excluded, but this is not a forum to discuss that.)
It’s very likely that if you spoke to twenty agility practitioners, you could come up with thirty to forty different sets of comprehensive elements to describe the concept of {agility}; the problem appears to become arbitrating between which set of elements should be included in essential {agility}.
However, what’s not readily apparent with this approach is the necessarily inverse relationship between a concept’s extension and its comprehension. As the number of comprehensive elements increases, so, by necessity, the number of extensive elements must decrease. Likewise, as the number of extension members goes up, so the number comprehensive properties must go down and be more inclusive. As you can imagine, this will rapidly lead to one of two extremes: either an essential concept with so many comprehensive properties that it has very little extension, or an essential concept with such a wide extension that it’s difficult to identify it’s comprehension.
Every comprehensive property added to one’s conception of {agility} excludes some practice or instance of practice from being considered members of the {agility}; indeed, some of the above named properties are mutually exclusive: you try to ensure that everyone has an agile mindset whilst also demanding that they are diverse and trained in different disciplines.
(You can, I’m sure, think of other social groups which define essential characteristics of particular social concepts, and thus gate-keep access to resources controlled by them, but this is not a forum to discuss that.)
Defining a concept using a Platonic essence results in missing out on the richness of variety in agility practices, and the infinite diversity in infinite combinations of how agility plays out in, between and across organisations around the world. We miss out on interesting executions, we miss out on complex contexts, and we miss out on practitioners who we do not conform closely enough to our comprehensive essence of agility.
And it also results in different experts asserting that they know the true comprehension of the concept, deciding who they’re including or excluding from their extension of the concept, and in the terms itself becoming equivocal. People who co-authored the Manifesto for Agile Software Development or Manufacturing in the Twenty-First Century seek to assert (unique) access to the comprehensive character of true {agility}. People who have new ideas they want to promote or sell claim their version is more comprehensive. Groups who seek to ensure their elite status claims a comprehension of {agility} that is superior to other groups’ comprehensions.
Thus we have people claiming that {agility} is dead. More accurately, their concept {agility} has such tightly-defined properties that it has a extent of approaching-zero members. Doesn’t this say more about how they comprehend agility than about its extent? Doesn’t their unwillingness to reflexively examine their own hierarchy of ideals say more about them than about the vitality of agility?
An alternative to Platonic essences is an ontology of univocity (single-voicedness), as proposed by Duns Scotus, a monk living from the mid thirteenth to the start of the fourteenth century, and refined by Spinoza (1632–1677) and Nietzsche (1844–1900). Without getting into his somewhat complicated argument for God (this isn’t a theology forum), Scotus proposed that everything exists, and is characterised not by the distinction between the attributes of essence and the properties of modes (eg. essence has an ideal set of attributes, and modes have modifications of attributes expressed by properties), but by the finite variations of intensity in modal attributes. Spinoza added some clarifying refinements (the ultimate ideal — which he labels “God” — has an infinite number of attributes, and everything else, as Scotus says, has ), but Nietzsche introduced the concept of the eternal return.
Modes — concepts, entities, creatures, all things that exist — are defined of active powers which are the variations in the intensity of their attributes, and the expression of those power produces difference, which affects the whole (the eternal return). And these powers are always positive (something is X, it’s never defined as being not-X). This changes our focus from thinking about being (this thing is X, this thing is not-X), and focussing on its becoming, its creation of difference and its ability to change itself.
In terms of agility, this means that a team expressing attributes of agility is in a state of flux, always creating and exploring differences, and those differences affect the entire way in which the team both thinks of themselves, and the ways others think of them. As a team expresses its attributes of agility, always becoming, the eternal return to itself also affects its wider organisation, its members, its peer teams, its stakeholders, its market niche, the wider society in which it sits… And as organisation changes, its own eternal return has ripple effects reaching across the network of relationships. And every expression of attributes of agility that touches us changes the Idea of agility that we hold; and change eternally returns us and changes our whole.
Instead of seeking a pure concept of {agility}, we should look at each team, organisation, individual, market, society or other social unit expressing attributes of agility. What attributes is it expressing? How is it generating difference? Are the qualities and quantities of the attributes static or dynamic? What is the that example becoming? How is it affecting the social units around it? What are they becoming? How does it affect our individual conceptions of agility? What is agility becoming? What are we becoming?
It strikes me that if we see a network of expressions of agility, all connected in different ways to each other, and all of which are constantly in flux and they generate change and affect the whole system, we will have a much richer view of the world. A richer view that allows us to appreciate the ways in which agility is revealed across a diversity of contexts and in a range of settings, supported by people with different interests, values and experiences. It strikes me we’d worry less about agility dying, and focus more on what it is becoming in the here-and-now and how it is its own eternal return, always creating and recreating itself, creating new connections, and ever expanding. Instead of asking, “why isn’t this agility conforming to our essence of agility?”, we instead think, “what will agility be in the future; what is it becoming?”
And that’s a much more interesting question than asking if it’s dead.
