Agile is a vessel to navigate the chaos of creativity
The world exists somewhere on the spectrum between order and chaos. In order, things are under control, predictable, safe. In chaos things are uncertain, unpredictable, scary. In business and life, most people like the safety of order. Order makes sure we know what to do, what to expect, what is expected of us. Order is created with rules, conventions, laws. If we follow the rules of order, order gives us safety, predictability, and peace of mind. But we also lose something in this trade. We lose creativity, intuition, and free thinking. We lose things that make us human. With the chaos of being human comes creativity. When I read the Agile Manifesto, I see an attempt to move further away from order and move closer to the chaos of creativity. When I see how frameworks like Scrum, I see an tool to venture into the chaos of creativity.
Two banks of the river
You could see order and chaos as two banks of a river. There are people that like to stay close to the order bank and some that like to venture a little more to the chaos bank. Jordan Peterson characterizes the people who love to venture into chaos as being open. Open people observe, closed people think. If you think, you are always following the patterns of order, you move along known paths. If you observe, you are open to what reality lies beyond the reason of order, you are open to new paths. Open people are unreasonable to closed people because they venture beyond reason, beyond order. If you are open, things become fluid. You have to be brave. You flip things upside down. We need that creativity but it is dangerous, unpredictable, uncertain. The need for predictability is what pushes people towards the order bank of the river for good reason. But if you can manage openness, it’s a great trait.
Managing the chaos of creativity
People and interactions are chaos, a dance of energies, thunder and lightning. Still this is how the Agile Manifesto starts: “We value individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” Processes and tools create order but something is lost. Processes and tools help but they also limit people, limit their creativity. The Agile Manifesto is a deeply humanistic manifesto. The Agile Manifesto values order, but values chaos a little more. It argues to work together instead of trying to limit ourselves with contracts: “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”. It urges us to deal with the uncertainty instead of sticking to a plan if we have progressive insights: “Responding to change over following a plan”. The Agile Manifesto is a manifesto for more chaos. I believe the people who wrote it felt they were limited by all the order that is created in the world.
“The Agile Manifesto is a manifesto for more chaos.”
If we manage to manage chaos, we will have access to the creativity that lives in the chaos without the disruptive effects chaos brings. We will have the best of both worlds. But how do we go about that? We need a vessel to safely venture into chaos. This is where Agile Scrum comes in.
Trust
If you value individuals and their interactions, so humans being creative and co-creating, you only use processes and tools if they empower people and not if the limit them. Processes are rigid. Tools have biases and only work for limited tasks. You have to acknowledge that in order to see when processes and tools help and when they limit creativity and power. You have to learn to see the system that tools and processes create and how they empower some things and limit other things. Everything is a tool. Language is a tool. It gives power and limits. Scrum only has a very lightweight process of check-ins, planning, refining, demo’s and retro’s. And in the retro, everything is up for debate, also the processes and tools and if they do not empower the team, you change them. You have to trust people, give them authority, trust the interactions between people. If you trust people, you can give them freedom. If they have trust, they can venture into the chaos of creativity without fear.
Response to change
If you venture into chaos, you can run into surprises: new insights, unkown unknows, nuggets of wisdom, things that don’t work like you expected, things that work far better than you could have ever dreamt. Uncertainty is only a problem if you want to stick to the plan, to the expectations. If you are able to pivot, uncertainty is not a problem. This is why Agile Scrum has only shorts periods of planning and work. This allows you to change course if you uncover new insights. If you only want to stick to your plan because that makes you feel safe, you don’t like surprises, even if they are good. If you learn to respond to change, you become free. Responding to change will require changing your mind from time to time. This will allow you to see what is in front of you instead of seeing what you want to see or you think you see. This was one of the first things I learned in art school: if you draw a still life, most people draw what they think they see instead of what is actually in front of them.
Stay in the middle
Skills like systems thinking, seeing, creating safety, holding space, learning about different viewpoints, will help to manage chaos. People can become more open. The Agile mindset is a mindset that embraces the chaos of human interaction, the chaos of the world, and is okay with the uncertainty of chaos because it knows that creativity lives in the uncertainty of chaos. The goal of the tools and processes of Agile is to create the Agile mindset in people so they become more open.
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