From Snake Cube to Humble Plans
- The Snake genre began with the 1976 arcade video game Blockade developed and published by Gremlin.
- Snake — The first published by Nokia, for monochrome phones. It was programmed in 1997 by Taneli Armanto of Nokia and introduced on the Nokia 6110.
- Snake II — Included on monochrome phones such as the Nokia 3310 from 2000.
Let’s go back to your world : Why are you trying to remember the history and game play behind the Snake game?
There is one critical learning around planning in complex environment one can get from recollecting the nuances of the Snake game.
Reality around the Snake Game:
The “head” of the snake continually moves forward, unable to stop, growing ever longer.
It must be steered left, right, up, and down to avoid hitting walls and the body of either Snake. The player who survives the longest wins.
In short, it is much easier to play when the Snake is small, but gets more clumsy and out of control as the Snake grows bigger and bigger.
Lesson to be learnt from this metaphor:
A Scrum team is a group of people working towards a common goal. When you don’t have a common goal, then you don’t have a Scrum team.
Let me add further, when you do have multiple goals acted upon the same time or a goal remains as one summary of all that you pulled in — still you dont function as one Scrum team.
The reason being — too many goals creates an artificial rush to focus on everything, in turn focusing on nothing.
When your Scrum team needs to focus on multiple goals (at the same time) or act with a sense of urgency to accomplish everything that got pulled (unfortunately, when that is your goal), the following patterns are guaranteed:
- Increase in WIP might show higher utilization, but lacks clarity on progress and ability to get done sooner.
- Increase in batch size (too many goals at play) brings down the Scrum Teams’ ability to maneuver and adapt at ease with changing customer expectations and emergent insights.
- With time spent at the beginning demonstrating higher utilization, the latter half of the narrative ensures a hurry to get something into the hands of the customer with little regard for the compromise on quality.
In short, try getting hold of the Snake game in a dumb phone (Basic phone) after the Snake grew big enough and start to move much faster than you could imagine.
Now the player doesnt control the Snake; instead, the Snake does everything it can to hit the wall much quicker.
Take-away:
When planning is filled with humility, the rest of the turbulence is taken care of.
Question : Having said that, what are the symptoms of humble plans?
Answer : Any planning activity that accepts the below underlying principles qualify to generate Humble Plans:
- You don’t know as much as you think you do upfront.
- You can’t predict everything upfront when you know the least about it.
- What you don’t know will come as a surprise and matter far more than you’d expect
- You will be wrong in ways you couldn’t imagine.
- The best mitigation strategy is to set and focus on one goal at a time and
- Stay grounded and curious to pivot with learnings.
