Was Adam Smith an Agilist?

You mean the father of economics and capitalism? That’s him. Perhaps you answer the question with “nope, he was an economist”. Or maybe “don’t be silly, he’s been dead for literally hundreds of years”.

So how much can we really learn from a 300 year old economist? Let’s analyse those answers in more detail.

“Nope he was an economist”

Strictly speaking he was a moral philosopher. More to the point, this assumes that the knowledge and practice of each and every discipline is mutually exclusive. I beg to differ.

Software development owes its existence to knowledge from other disciplines. Many of the founding fathers of computing were mathematicians – Alan Turing and John von Neumann for example. Or Claude Shannon, founder of information theory and the binary digit or bit. Punch cards, the original source code of computer programming came from textile weaving.

We also benefit from a richness of metaphors from other disciplines. Software architecture is a building metaphor. Containers is a shipping metaphor. Technical debt is a financial metaphor. Swarming in Scrum is a natural science metaphor. Crossing disciplinary boundaries is an important source of insight and innovation.

“He’s been dead for literally hundreds of years”

That presupposes that everything Agile represents started with the Agile Manifesto. It’s important to differentiate between creation and discovery. Newton only discovered gravity, he didn’t create it as it had always been there. In a similar manner, those who drafted the Agile manifesto documented a bunch of helpful things in the context of software development at the start of the 21st century. But is it possible that some of these things had been discovered before in totally different contexts? Surely not as far back as Adam Smith’s time though in the 18th century? Well ask a business strategist who reads Sun Tzu.

So why the commonalities? I remember many years ago reading the Mythical Man Month and being struck by how much it resonated despite it describing the ways of software development back in the mid 1960s. Then it struck me why – the tech may have been wildly different but the people were not. They were acting with the same emotions and the same behavioural limitations as we do today.

We are but one of many common denominators that transcend boundaries of discipline and time; and there are many more from the ways of the natural world.

Take one of the common factors between Lean manufacturing and Agile — that of flow. The basic principles of flow apply wherever we have a stock of materials or information that has to pass through a system which applies constraints on the processing/movement of these items. Consequently the tools have diverse origin and wide application.

The toolbox of flow includes queue theory from telecommunication; variation from statistics; kanban and pull from Lean manufacturing (although kanban was in turn inspired by Taiichi Ohno’s observation of supermarkets); and optimal batch size, as popularised by Don Reinertsen, from economics (economic order quantity).

These can be applied and the features of flow such as buffers, queues, lead times, etc can be observed in all sorts of fields from road to data traffic, retail to manufacturing, software or hardware development.

So even though Adam Smith would not understand the term Agile, he may understand some of the behaviours Agile is trying to promote. Let’s look and see.

Addressing the Elephant

Firstly let’s address the elephant in the room. Was this not the guy who espoused division of labour which fanned the flames of the industrial era and the mechanistic way of thinking? There lies experts, single points of failure, silos, even waterfall. Surely that is not Agile?

Well division of labour is still an important part of Agile. You don’t achieve technical excellence with skills such as TDD or SOLID principles without deep expertise and continual practice.

The issue is more excessive division of labour and no generalism.

How might Adam Smith respond to this criticism? More specifically we might describe to him that in software development excessive division of labour leads to developers behaving like code monkeys who constantly need spoon fed by micro managers and technical debt accrues and no team improvements occur. Well to be fair he did give us this disclaimer about division of labour:

“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion”

There you have it – a 250 year old warning on the tin that we have largely ignored ever since.

Okay and what of the lack of resilience it creates? In his defence he did live in a simpler time. Context matters as we know. The example he gave of division of labour in a production process was in a pin factory. This was a fairly simple set of processes and a completely homogeneous output. Where lack of resilience becomes more of an issue is when there is more complexity of operation combined with variety of demand. Variety on a car production line for example where each customer requires different models, extras, colours, finishing, etc. Or even more so with the infinite variety of software development where every feature is novel. He did recognise the need for resilience when discussing a more complex system of his time, that of British colonial trading:

“By suiting, besides, to one particular market only, so great a part of the industry and commerce of Great Britain, it has rendered the whole state of that industry and commerce more precarious and less secure, than if their produce had been accommodated to a greater variety of markets.”

Adam Smith as Agilist

So let’s see what he said that might resonate in the Agile world.

Pull from the customer rather than feature factory:

“Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident, that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it. But in the mercantile system, the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.”

Less work in process, smaller batches to increase ROI:

“If a poor workman was obliged to purchase a month’s or six months’ provisions at a time, a great part of the stock which he employs as a capital in the instruments of his trade, or in the furniture of his shop, and which yields him a revenue, he would be forced to place in that part of his stock which is reserved for immediate consumption, and which yields him no revenue. Nothing can be more convenient for such a person than to be able to purchase his subsistence from day to day, or even from hour to hour, as he wants it. He is thereby enabled to employ almost his whole stock as a capital. He is thus enabled to furnish work to a greater value”

Complex v mechanistic thinking:

(the man of system) seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.”

Local over system optimisation:

“To promote the little interest of one little order of men in one country, it hurts the interest of all other orders of men in that country, and of all the men in all other countries.”

Sustainable pace/Muri

“I believe, in every sort of trade, that the man who works so moderately, as to be able to work constantly, not only preserves his health the longest, but, in the course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of work.”

Autonomy required for mastery:

“all the most important improvements, either in machinery, or in the arrangement and distribution of work, which facilitate and abridge labour have been the discoveries of freemen.”

Knowledge sharing and open source:

“But nothing seems more likely to establish this equality of force, than that mutual communication of knowledge, and of all sorts of improvements, which an extensive commerce from all countries to all countries naturally, or rather necessarily, carries along with it”

Cynefin, descent into chaos:

“Those mutual restraints have put an end to almost all fair commerce between the two nations; and smugglers are now the principal importers, either of British goods into France, or of French goods into Great Britain.”

Summary

So when you are considering your next book in the world of software development and Agile, consider casting your net further than the latest tech book on Kubernetes or Kafka, or your favourite framework such as Scrum or Kanban. Maybe try a different field entirely or even delve into the depths of history. Learning is everywhere.

References

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith