BigVisible Blog

At times both the Agile and traditional Waterfall camps get hung up in an unproductive game where they start digging through the details of a problem domain, find a specific circumstance and say, “ah ha! A purely [Agile / Waterfall] approach can’t deal with this situation, therefore that approach is wrong”

Indeed, this binary obsession – that you must pick one specific approach and apply it to all dimensions of a project – is entirely unproductive. In fact, it is usually not the reality in an Agile or traditional project, but rather a limit of our own thought process. The challenge being that if we find merit in one approach, the mind can take an absolutist value. Agile is useful for dealing with product visions, therefore we should apply Agile principles to every aspect of our project.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)

Fitzgerald accurately describes the challenge facing us when organizing and executing projects; we must hold two opposing ideas within our head and continue to function. These two opposing ideas well well described by Kevin Kelly when he coined the terms clockware and swarmware as the two different approaches to managing work. They have since been embraced by many complexity theorists and I present them here as my own attempt to hold two opposing ideas and continue to function and show how one builds upon the other, and to argue that a project requires one or the other will inevitably lead to failure. [Read more...]