Dave Snowden
“Everything needs a capitalist or a trigger point. I think COVID has triggered the shift from systems thinking to complexity thinking, and you can see that starting to work.”
– Dave Snowden
Transcript:
Miljan: Dave how has COVID 19 impacted you? In what ways, and have you changed what you do, how you see things, isn’t this what we needed as a society? Maybe?
Dave: That’s a very big question. I mean, personally, I’ve never been in one place for this long since I was really at university. I was traveling over 250 days a year in hotels, and now I haven’t traveled for over a year. So that’s different. From the point of view of what we work on, it’s almost like our time has come because we work on complexity and uncertainty and nobody’s really denied that that’s now important. So the big thing which happened a week ago, which is going to be formally launched in April, is the joint handbook or field guide on how to manage complexity in crisis, which we jointly published with the EU commission. So that’s big. And we’re currently building assessment processes and follow through processes around that with a series of partners. So I think from that point of view, everything needs a capitalist or a trigger point.
I think COVID has triggered the shift from systems thinking to complexity thinking and you can see that starting to work at least a non-casual uncertainty from a societal point of view. I think it’s a wakeup call. It’s not the worst plague we’ll see in my lifetime. And I’m about to be 67 and it’s not the worst thing which is going to happen. So I think if we can’t get it right around this, then we really are up Creek, as they say. And I think it’s also a challenge to some of the orthodoxies. So the whole rational basis of money within neo-liberalism has just been destroyed by COVID. So what comes out of that is going to be a really interesting
Miljan: I don’t know what your thoughts are so far on the response, but the response general across the world has been pretty bad. So maybe this is the learning experience, but what are your thoughts? How did we respond to this crisis as a society?
Dave: It’s been bad and good. First of all, I mean the shared number of things, which government or society should possibly plan for is beyond our capacity to handle. So it’s all very well with the benefit of hindsight to say, we should have done more on pandemic management, but to be quite honest, we couldn’t afford to do it. Not if you add in all the other things which might fit simultaneous, there’s just this one hit. Now I think there were governments who managed it very well, like New Zealand, for example. Partly because they did, this is a key part of the field guide it says, the role of a leader is actually not to make decisions in a crisis, it is to coordinate other people making decisions, except for the early decisions where you have to make some fairly drastic stuff to create options for the future, which is what the New Zealand prime minister did.
She actually broke the law, but she realized it was necessary. The people that really fail were the big properties, governments, like the UK and the US and Brazil, and they fail because the reality is that the condition didn’t match the myth they were spreading. So if you live a populist myth and the world, all three leaders would in varying degrees of narcissism, then they try to ignore it for a long time. I mean our minister went around shaking people’s hands to prove it wasn’t an issue. And we won’t talk about the US president or the Brazilian president who kind of wind up in the same category. So I think it was mixed. I think actually as a species we’ve muddled through a lot back to that could have been predicted. People accepted lockdowns without riots on the street far more than we thought.
And we managed to do a type of brick collage, you know, radical repurpose. And we managed to kind of like get through in some countries, without people dying outside hospitals, unable to be admitted. Now it hasn’t happened in others, but so it’s a mixed package. So I think there’s a lot of learning out of it. But I don’t think as a disaster, I think we actually get better than anybody could have predicted. The vaccine development, we got five working vaccines when you would normally expect, you’d be lucky to get one. I think it indicates the speed of development of science and the ability of science to provide solutions where you create connections. And if you want one really good thing, which came out of Kirby I think, is kind of like made people respect scientists a bit more. I mean the populist thing was denying the value of science and kind of like, that’s a lot more difficult to do at the moment, if we ignore anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers and all these people.
Miljan: Is that a paradigm shift? Maybe to just quote you, one of the things that I reached out to the stood out to me, you posted on Twitter a couple of maybe weeks ago, maybe a little bit longer, I’ll quote you here. And I want to hear your thoughts on this. You said “a problem for people who have invested their whole career in a particular discipline or paradigm, is that when the world turns they can accept things have changed.” Can you elaborate a little bit on that?
Dave: Yeah. I was hitting about five separate targets with that. Four of whom realized they were being attacked. So that was quite cool, really. One of them still hasn’t, so I was even more entertained. I think it goes back in with something, two really important bits of the sort of theory behind what we do. Naturalizing sense-making. One is people only observe 3 or 4% of what’s in front of them at any one time and they match it against previous patterns. So we do a first fit pattern match. So actually it’s very difficult to see novelty. You’re not expecting to see it. So you won’t, unless your attention is drawn to it and at a societal level, if we ignore the total nonsense of things like memes. What you actually have is what I call tropes or assemblages. So you have patterns of narrative that people live in that they find difficult to escape from. So I don’t find this particularly surprising. So we know that’s just 1 0 1 neuroscience or oncology neuroscience, so we should expect that to be the problem.
Miljan: What are your thoughts? I know in the past, you’ve commented on this, but just on cognitive development psychology and specifically on spiral dynamics or any of those popular cognitive development frameworks, or maybe just share your thoughts on what you think is going on in the context of cognitive development and paradigms?
Dave: You lumped in an awful lot of stuff together there, so let’s just run through it at a high level.
Miljan: My question is really about what is your take on adult cognitive development or development stages?
Dave: I think most of these things can be useful at an individual level, but they don’t apply to organizations. And I think there are major issues on trying to bring psychotherapeutic techniques sideways into organizational design, because anything you bring sideways from therapy assumes that somebody needs therapy and privileges a therapist. So for example, if you take Kegan’s models of adult maturity, I would use that in leadership, but not as a linear progression, but as a series of separate modulators. And you could also oscillate between them, it’s not a linear process, it’s a non-linear influence. And there, you can find Caitlin stuff quite useful. At the other end of the extreme, you’ve got things which establish pseudoscience like Myers-Briggs, Which has no basis whatsoever in any science, she’s established as a pseudoscience and then you get things like spiral the dynamics nonsense.
Now, if you go back to the original research, then that would be great. I mean, that’s been invalidated because he only researched his own students without proper controls. So it doesn’t count and you can’t take a culturally specific and very culturally determined framework and apply it to the rest of the world. And you certainly can’t take it and apply it to new age mysticism and cultism, which is what Beck did with Wilbert. And you can see how absurd it is because they decided they had to add turquoise to it, so they had a heightened state of alignment, and now somebody else has added Jade because they want an, even another heightened state of alignment. I mean, this stuff just farcical nonsense, and it made anybody takes it seriously.
Miljan: You mentioned Myers-Briggs and those are huge moneymakers. A lot of companies [09:47 inaudible] use it. You have your thoughts on McKenzie. I’ve seen another consultant companies that when it comes to organizational consulting and that type of things. How much have these big companies deluded or sprayed leaders?
Dave: I think substantially. And if you look at the origins of Myers Briggs, it was two people who were well intentioned, trying to create a general framework. They thought it was based on Jungian, but the argument is Jungian actually denied it when he sought validity. But I wouldn’t go with Jungian or Freudianism anyway. I mean, it was a cute idea in the 19th century; we’ve grown out of it. But what then happened is hay came along and generalized it, and they decided to go along with the compromise. Now you won’t find a psychology department in the universe who takes it seriously, because it’s got no research base. It operates the same way that astrology works. It says things in such a way that you self-identify and give it to authority. And that’s a known problem. Now we can give it perception.
So I think, yeah, there are other ones which were better. I sometimes work with say the original seven characteristic, belgian one, because it doesn’t make the mistake of saying that people are predetermined. It says dependent on the context, you’ll shift between roles, which is much more accurate. And I think you have to look at when Myers Briggs came in and it came in just when we were switching over to an engineering paradigm, things like business process re-engineering and HR departments wanted to treat their employees as widgets on the shelf. So they wanted to categorize them and Myers Briggs came along and it did that.
Miljan: So it’s essentially what we’re looking for. And you recently also said canaven is not about creating recipes, but about facilitating chefs. How much, I mean, like, we have such a desire for recipes. I talked recently about how scrum is a recipe as well. And a lot of these are things, these companies that deliver what we want. There is a demand for it. So what are your thoughts, in general how much we’re seeing?
Dave: There’s nothing wrong with the recipe? I mean, when I learned to cook at university, I had recipe books. I followed the recipe, but then I acquired skill and I didn’t need to follow it anymore. And I had higher adoption, so this is not a right or wrong thing, but the problem is, I can talk about something we’re doing in a second on this. So the problem is that each context has a high degree of uniqueness about it. So the minute you have a linear process and a linear recipe, you’re automatically gonna miss weak signals. So one of the things we’re doing at the moment for example, is to create not only our methods and tools, but other people’s methods and tools as the sort of facilitation kit, which allows people to produce different things in different combinations in context, it’s much more what the chef does.
So the chef says, well, I haven’t got sugar. So I’ll use honey. Is that ability to substitute and move things around. So you can take scrum for example, which is one of the most powerful software development methods sets I’ve seen. It’s not a framework, it’s a set of methods for making complex things complicated. And that’s this huge power, but there’s no reason why I shouldn’t break it down a bit and say, well, let’s take out the sprint and replace it with a three-month time box. And that’s the sort of way we’re working at the moment, is to look at what’s the lowest level of optimal granularity of our methods and other people’s methods. And then look at how you can combine and recombine those to give contextually appropriate solutions.
So that’s kind of like a halfway house between the gifted chef and the gifted recipe user, uses artifacts to create some structure. And to my mind, that’s key because, and it’s what we’re doing around the field guide. So we’re creating an assessment process, which starts off by recognizing that you probably did a lot of things, right. Rather than here’s a process you now have to follow. It says, let’s work out what you did right. And what won’t scale and what you did wrong. And then from that create a unique pathway and which is contextually appropriate.
Miljan: That means that you have to be willing to be a chef, like chefs know at the core, at the chemical level, how ingredients interact with each other, right?
Dave: You can mis it. I mean a real chef will sit probably about a 10 or 15 year apprenticeship. And this is what Aristotle called Saphir and panesis. So they have panises knowledge in their fingertips and they have a theoretical knowledge, but the theoretical knowledge is so ingrained in what we do every day. They don’t have to summon it explicitly. Equally the recipe book user is just saying, well, I need all of these ingredients and I need all of this equipment. And then I’ll follow the recipe. There is actually several stages in between. And this is where modularity comes in or granularity as we call it. So I can actually identify. And what’s interesting, I’ve gone back to my old object orientated textbooks in the nineties on this. You can actually, if you get the granularity, right, you’ve got polymorphism in inheritance and you’ve got input output.
So if you can get that definition, right. And people can assemble things, knowing what the output has to be for the input somewhere else. And you can give them a lot of the capability of the chef without them needing to go through that process. But you avoid the non-linear recipe. And one of the reasons why a few weeks ago, we put all of our methods into opensource in wiki which, we’ve now got several hundred people involved in, which is usually encouraging, is basically the, say the field needs to expand quickly. And we need to get this modularity into the space in opensource because too much of our job gets locked behind proprietary walls. One of the great success that Ken did with scrum when he launched it, is scrum was open source. So you tended to go to him for the methods and training, whereas safe is, is a lockdown. And then you get, some of the really crazy stuff.
I mean you got Agile 2 nonsense coming out now, which is just hysterically funny because they’re trying desperately to say they’re not going to create an accreditation scheme, but we all know that’s what they’re doing. They’re going down a well-worn pathway. And I think it was interesting because I was one of the three founders of DSDM when it started, which is one of the big things which went into Agile. So agile is mainly XP, scrum and the DSDM and DSDM was formed when three of us met at a pub in Cheltenham for a meal because we’re British. So we can do things over a pub. We don’t have to go to a ski resort for a week. But the critical thing was, we said that DSDM, which is now called something else I think, effectively between three competitors. Three competitors met and agreed to create an independent standard. We didn’t try and lock it down and make it proprietary and I think that was one of the really big mistakes that the agile movement made. And even scrum has now made it, I mean, the legal suits flying around in the scrum community at the moment, would be amusing if it wasn’t for the negative impact on the field.
Miljan: So, now I completely, I mean, I shared the same thoughts and one of the things that kind of inspire me, you and Andrea did the talk back in 2019, I believe agile to agility. And as you can see, that’s the name of my podcast. It wasn’t the thing that triggered it. But when I saw that you guys did it too, I was like, this resonated with me. I thought you guys had, I got the agiletoagility.com and it expired or somehow I ended up. But what do you think, for the last 20 years there’s been so much focus on big and agile and tools and these, what do you think are the next five to 10 years like? When it comes to agility, focus into agility?
Dave: Agile as a movement is coming to the end of its life cycle. It’s had 20 years and if you want the indications of why you can see the commoditization as safe and the fact that PMR didn’t have the guts to take it on, but are trying to imitate it. And that’s a mistake. Alright. The other thing is that the fact that the big consultancies have all adopted it. So they bought agile brand companies at ridiculous P ratios just to get into a market. Now, if you’ve been around long enough, and if you know enough about the theory of market life cycles, that means the market is in engineering commoditization stage, which means that’s the time when you introduce new things because the market’s stale. Now, you don’t do that by trying to be romantic about the past or trying to create your own new, special thing.
And to be quite honest Dean with safe, moved into that field before anybody else and owns it. I mean, it was unscrupulous, it was stolen off a pyramid selling scheme. He’s now trying to introduce quality, but that’s to stop other people doing what he did to get established in the first place. And, yeah, fine. The point is it, that always happens and it happens about that life cycle. Now what the new thing is, I think is open, if you want my view on it. I think first of all, most software development has followed the sort of engineering metaphor that underpins systems thinking. And it uses manufacturing metaphors in the main, in terms of the way it thinks. Now complexity takes an organic metaphor. So for example, if I look at some of the work we’re doing at the moment, we’re looking at mapping existing capabilities against the articulated needs.
Now that’s a complete switch away from traditional procurement and software design, but actually it allows you to progress faster, quicker. We’re looking at architectural issues in which, as I said, back in the eighties, but nobody listened to me then. People are objects too. So organizations and people and identities are objects. They have input output. They interact with technology. If you architect the system properly, then radical innovations will emerge through those interactions. And I think that’s the really important lesson of complexity. It’s not about things. It’s about how they interact, and if you change the interactions, then radical change happens. If you try and change things, nothing changes.
Miljan: So it’s really about influencing the system and designing the?
Dave: Designing the architecture. So for example, we’ve developed a whole typology of what’s called scaffolding. So for example, do you have an endoskeleton on an exoskeleton? If you have an exoskeleton, the thing is contained; you know what it will look like. If you go and endoskeleton, then you have a coherent structure, but a huge amount of variety can develop very quickly. And the issue is to make choices like that, and this goes way beyond things like perpetual arthropel, perpetual betray as well. If you can stabilize your objects, whether they’re people objects, or software objects, then allow the interactions to determine what the system, as a whole looks like. You’re effectively allowing things to grow or evolve rather than trying to define in advance what they should be.
And that means to create far more resilience. And if you look at it, that’s actually where the internet has developed. Things like hashtags suddenly became ways that you can act different things, right. And nobody designed that, it just kind of like happen. And I could go through other than examples. The key thing there was the creation of open standards, so the fact that all of these and again, open standards are interaction protocols. So if you can create a common understood interaction protocol, all sorts of exciting things can evolve.
Miljan: That’s really interesting. So coming back to the topic of what’s next, what’s the next wave, or maybe even paradigm going to be, it’s really focusing on like complexity management, living systems and the really trying to understand how patterns may be work. Would you say that?
Dave: Yes, no, you need to be careful because then people dive into [22:41 inaudible] and pattern language. And again, that was insightful, but it’s not where we’re coming from. And I think we’re in, I mean, if you look what happens in the eighties systems thinking, which is popularized as systems dynamics and cybernetics comes along and it’s considered highly academic, and esoteric one year, then three years later, it just dominates the world through business process re-engineering and through learning organization.
And we’ve had a whole series of micro patterns within that, you know, BPR, six sigma, agile is one of those at the moment. It’s going through exactly, blue ocean strategy. I could go through a whole bunch of these. They’re all kind of like, they all have this character and this has been a characteristic post scientific management never did this, he never made that mistake. So assume there was a solution to fit them all, one solution to buying them in the darkness to go back to talking. And therefore, when the solution fails, it’s bound to, so business process re-engineering evolved in manufacturing where it works. It was then moved into services where it’s a disaster. And so then when people come along with something new to replace it, and then that doesn’t work. So it’s an attempt to create universals rather than context-specific is fundamentally characteristic of systems thinking and the engineering metaphor. And with that, those things like corporate objectives, mission statements, purpose, statements, management budget, all of those sort of things. You don’t see any of them in the scientific management era. They’re all a product of post eighties.
So I think what COVID is triggering, is the switch from engineering to ecology is a major paradigm shift. And then there’ll be cycles within that. And during the major paradigm shift, all you can do is try and influence it, which is one of the reasons we went to open source because you can’t deter, to get my favorite example on this at the moment, somebody told me the other day, I have to go and watch frozen 2. Now my daughter is in her thirties and thinks I don’t understand delusion epistemology and I haven’t got grandchildren yet. So I’ve got no excuse to watch frozen 2. So I sort of covertly went into the sitting room on my own and watched it. And it’s actually quite a good movie. And the reason they said I should watch it is there is a key phrase in frozen 2, which is do the next right thing. And that actually is kind of like the key principles of complexity.
You can’t know the future, but you can move to the adjacent possible and you can choose where you move next and stay open to possibilities as you go forward. And I think that’s where we are at the moment. And to be honest on a major paradigm shift, success will go to those people that work across boundaries rather than those people who try and create boundaries because if you try and create boundaries, you can’t move fast enough. We went open stores on the Wiki. Now open source means anybody can use it, but we’ve done more in two weeks that we’ve done the previous two years when it was internal, because you’re bringing in a greater amount of people to that. The whole strategy at the moment is to open up boundaries, not to close them down. The other really big thing is to avoid platitudes. If I could say the worst thing I’ve seen in my career from the eighties onwards is the constant desire to write wonderful words on flip charts and then call them mission statements or purpose statements or objectives. And if you do an analysis on it, they all use the same rough, small number of words, and we can combine them.
Miljan: And nobody can recite them, or they just know that they exist?
Dave: The other thing is they’re actually bad anthropology. If you look at all the major world’s religions, none of them use that mechanism. They will all teach through parables. Now we’re actually launching a parable project next month. That’s part of our numinous project where every quarter we’ll present a new parable from a different religion and get people to say what it means to them in their current role and where they’re going to go. So we’re starting off with the parable of the sower. We’re moving on to a Sufi story of the [inaudible 27:00] and then we’re moving on to the [27:02 inaudible] rider, which is a wonderful Maori film.
And the point about parables is they give you a sense of direction without being absolute. And they can’t be gained. Anybody can gain a purpose statement. I’m saying the way purpose took off. So if you look at it, there’s nothing different in purpose from mission statements, they are the same thing. But somebody realizes in the market, they publish a best-selling book with lots of retrospective case studies, they give it a capital letter instead of a small letter. And they dine out on the speaker fees and the big consultancies pick it up because every three years they want you to complete redo everything. So you can have a large team of what I call semi house trained pole cuts at $5,000 a day working for you and the whole industry now. And it’s actually quite dangerous.
Miljan: Do you think that is going to continue? Cause it’s been like that for a long time
Dave: I think the big consultancies rose on the back of business process re-engineering, before that consultancies are small groups of experienced people with a very low ratio between partnership and consultant. What then happened is consultancy became industrialized because business process re-engineering created a market for large teams of people doing the analytical work and the business schools actually grew up to [28:22 inaudible]. I mean, people get this, the business schools and the big consultancies are a 30 year old phenomenon. That entire model is these large scale change programs. So I don’t think that will survive. I think we’re talking about alliances of small specialists in the future rather than the sort of big generalist.
Miljan: And at least when I look at it and I don’t know from your perspective, but a lot of these change initiatives that you just mentioned, a lot of these transformations, what we call even agile transformations, like most of them, 90 in opinion plus fail. They actually never work.
Dave: They consistently failed for 30 years, but people keep thinking if they do it again, this time it will work. I mean, it’s kind of like really rather stupid. But the other problem is it’s actually one of the things that safe sold off. So safe sold off three things. It’s a good illustration. One is the huge desire of agile people to have something they could train people in, because training revenue is high margin. So it starts off, do the five day course. You can then do the four day course, provided you pay me a royalty. And that was the pyramid.
Secondly, the desire of executives to say they’re doing something which they’re not doing in practice and the safe diagram allowed them to say they are being agile but have this huge bloody waterfall in engineering to deal with. But the really cynical bit is what executives really want if they’re cynical. And there’s enough of them around, it’s a major program, which will take three years to implement and cost several million dollars, because then they get all the kudos from having initiated it. But they move on before the consequences are known and that’s become a very scary pattern. And it’s partly the short-termism of executive employment.
I give an illustration too, when I was first a general manager. This is back in the eighties. I had to do a year in production, a year in support, and a year in sales and hit my targets. Until I’ve done that I wasn’t even able to become a general manager because if you haven’t and people should do this, if you haven’t, not known whether you can pay your mortgage or not because you haven’t made a sale. Until you’ve lived, you do not understand salespeople. And if you’re on a support line, you know that it’s not how long the calls takes on average, by the number of calls, divided by the number of people. It just doesn’t work like that. So that tacit knowledge was key.
And then we expected if you were in a general management role, you had to legally commit to be in it for at least three years. You couldn’t leave because three years, you can’t run out fast and the consequences of your decisions. Now you get somebody, you know, they’ll often get parachuted into a general management or a [31:04 inaudible] having done a BA in business studies and MBA and being at consultant and never got any real experience. And they ended up trying to run a company. And of course the only way they can do it is through spreadsheets.
Miljan: Or bring somebody else like a big consulting company to the actual.
Dave: Yeah, the one who originally employed them. And then some of them actually do that, they push people out if they can’t make partner, but they push them into industry and then they create an obligation.
Miljan: So you mentioned safe and you know, pretty much all of the agile scaling frameworks in my opinion are unsuccessful. Right? So like, there’s something about agile community that, and even scrum, I mean like you said, it’s a great framework, but it’s a team level and it’s trying to do almost like tame, like you said, you know, things from complex to complicated and that doesn’t work always either as great as the framework it is. It comes back to scaling, I really want to, maybe just your thoughts first on scaling and why did the agile community, why do we keep getting it wrong?
Dave: We did not understand the basic science of it, so you scale, you downscale a complex adaptive system and it is a complex system by aggregation or imitation or combination. You scale it by decompensation and reinteraction. So you actually break it into smaller components and then you allow those components to interact in different ways. And if you think about it, the whole of organic life form comes from four chemicals in different combinations. So this can be [32:42 inaudible] DNA, right. But they didn’t do that. So they held things. So if you look at safe, the way safe is anything, anybody wants to buy Dean puts on the diagram and sells you a certificate and just added time thinking to it. So the granularity is wrong, right?
If you look at scrum, the granularity is things like sprint retrospective. If you get that granularity, you can substitute. So we’ve developed three pre scrum techniques for agile communities because they deal with things which are truly complex. Whereas scrum deals with things which is still complex, but can now be made complicated. And for some reason, the agile community has completely got rid of time boxes, which were a major feature of DSDM and were hugely valuable. So you have a minimal viable product, a maximum product, and a minimum level restores the maximum. And you promise to deliver on the day, but agile got himself hung on this fact, nobody can hold us to a delivery date. And that’s a bloody nightmare if you’re an executive or you’re managing a large project, the time box method said, you knew on this date, you’ll at least get this functionality for this cost. Then you might get something out.
Now, as I say, you can start to do clever things with scrum. If you start to, for example, take a sprint and make it a time box retrospective in different ways. And I think that that’s where we’re going to go in future. It’s a multi methods, multi-vendor approach. And the key thing will be understanding the interaction between methods. And that will be unique in context. So if you look at the safe diagram, they can’t even fit their linear model on one line now. It’s sort of snakes in a big [34:22 inaudible]. If you start here you could go through here. By the time you get here, you spent about $5 million and you can’t go back.
Miljan: So is it really about, I mean, it’s about time boxing, but it’s also delivering within those time box, because you can time box things, but not delivering?
Dave: Yeah. But that was the contract. So as a team, you’re contracted to deliver at least the minimal viable product for the maximum resource. So you could vary what you deliver. Then you could vary the resource, but you had to deliver at least this on that date. I’ve actually works quite well because it’s event driven. And I’ve managed software and I’ve been a software developer. If you allow software developers, you don’t put fire under their feet on a time-based delivery, they never get around to delivering anyway. I mean, the only way I’ve managed software teams on my life is to have a client’s screaming and making sure the software development teams get the grief. So I’m not feeling from it and magically, they produce things or they make necessary compromises. So I’m not arguing that the time box is a solution, I’m saying they’re part of the solution.
So scrum is a key part of the solution as a collection of methods, but not as a framework. Kanban is a very useful technique. Time box is a useful technique. XP has got a whole body of stuff that everybody’s forgotten about.
Miljan: I was gonna say about that because that’s one of the things that people say like, oh, let’s do scrum, but they completely like when you look at their architecture, when you look at the technical practices, they’re not.
Dave: Remember the problem her. If agile being built in the back of XP, none of us would be talking about it now. What Ken did was codifications and abstraction. That’s what scrum was. So, because scrum was Codified and abstract, it could actually diffuse very quickly. This is how [36:17 inaudible] work. XP doesn’t diffuse because it’s not, co-defined, it’s not abstract and it requires high expertise. So as [36:25 inaudible] he said it [36:25 inaudible] that was in Scotland. I remember saying this. That was when I also upset David, because I said Kanban was a complicated technique, not complex, and sort of flurry of tweets come in from our founder on the sideline.
I remember saying that, if agile is scaled around the XP, it will be much more excited and if scrum and all the XP cheered me. So I thought I’d call this. I said, the problem is that nobody in XP can talk to ordinary mortals, so there was no chance that it would ever scale. They’re still trying to work out whether that was an insult or not. They haven’t made up their minds yet.
Miljan: Yeah, I think, and I mean, if I look back on the agile manifesto and what they did really did set the foundation, but without Ken we wouldn’t be where we are. Well you recently publish a report of the complex 21 trend sense maker report. What was the most interesting thing that you got out of that report?
Dave: You’d have to ask the team I wasn’t involved in that.
Miljan: You review it? No.
Dave: No we split cognitive edge into two, a commercial working dated network and the navin centre, which is the research, not for profit government group, which I run. So that was done in the commercial side. I think they published stuff and they run a webinar the other day, but I wasn’t involved in it.
Miljan: I saw you recently, and this is more of a fun, it got me curious and I don’t know really what you meant about it, but you twitted about having wine, rum and whiskey in the same day. And you said it’s that type of day. What kind of day requires wine rum and whiskey?
Dave: When I get on to rum then I’m in a very dark mood. It was about, too much time with lawyers, too much with people I trusted not being trustworthy and too much time with doing 18 hours a days. And those hit you from time to time. I’m probably better able to cope with them than 20 year olds, because I’ve been through too many in my life. And to be honest, twitter is great, I mean, I get into trouble for it from time to time. I regard social media as a wonderful way of letting rip at something and it gets it off your system. I mean, it’s amazing how you tweet something targeted at somebody? And you got all these emails from people that you say, you don’t mean me did you? I say well actually I didn’t but if the cap fits wear it.
Miljan: That’s what happens, you know, when you have a following. Another thing that the kind of stood out to me when I was looking about the questions to ask you, is you said the single most fundamental error of the last three decades is to try and design and idolize future, rather than working the evolutionary potential of the here and now. And you alluded to this earlier in our conversation, but would you maybe elaborate, like the biggest thing in the last three decades, that’s a pretty big statement.
Dave: It is most interesting, it’s fairly recent and it’s got the highest volume reposts of anything I’ve ever done anywhere on social media. So it kind of like, obviously, you know, struck a bell, as they say, I wrote a blog post on this in more detail, but what came in. And I think this is the, whether you call it systems thinking or systems dynamics, or cybernetics, or some other name, but let’s summarize that as the engineering metaphor, which came in in the eighties and the way that you handle uncertainty, and Sandy was one of the first to do this. Was to say, well, the way we’ll handle uncertainly is all too difficult. So we’ll decide where we want to be. And then people can close the gap. And that gave rise to the whole mission statement, value statement, future, and thereafter, every time somebody wants to do something, all the executives sit down and decide where they want to be.
And then they try and close the gap. And of course they never achieve it because it’s a complex system and you can only have another next right step. So in complexity, you describe the present, you identify where you can move. So you start journeys with a sense of direction. You don’t have goals because goals mean you focus on goal achievement and you miss opportunities you’d find on the journey. And if you look at it, every single method or every single approach, which has come out since the eighties, it always starts with the leaders sitting down and deciding where they want to be. And it hasn’t worked in three decades. So maybe it’s time to stop.
Miljan: And maybe that’s kind of part of the fundamental of complexity and complexity management of just things emerging and not trying to control.
Dave: You can manage them, it’s very important to understand this. I mean, some people use complexity as an excuse not to do anything. And the agile community are very prone to that is complex, so don’t expect us to commit to deliveries. Well, actually one of the ways you manage complexity is to commit to a delivery and find a way to do it. And actually human beings are really good at this. I mean I’ve done this all my life. You give a team a deadline, somehow they magically achieve it. If you say, use your best endeavors somehow you never get anything. So these tend to be event and that’s for anything. And I say, one of the reasons scrum was successful, it created shorter cycles. So there was more event driven stress in the system. So you’re more likely to get deliveries out of it.
So I think it is this concept of, if the world is uncertain, you can’t know the future, but you can know what direction you want to travel in. And I think that’s the big switch, which we’re now starting to people. COVID has helped that because nobody knows what’s going to happen a week out. Actually quite interesting. So a lot of this work came from work I did with Admiral John Poindexter when he was running DARPA programs. So I run a big DARPA program for him, with people at mailer park and others, on the human sensor networks. And that was before 9/11. I was actually in Arlington the night before, throughout that night and pick up the news next day. And it was about three weeks before I knew my team was still alive because we’ve been in that part which got hit.
So either way, it then got interesting. And we ended this big retrospective with Clinton’s Al Queda team, which included some very senior, very well-known names. Nice thing about US system is all the previous politicians are available for research when [43:32 inaudible]. So we went through the 9/11 report and from using Kenivin. And every time they went through it, they say, no, no, no because we should have known that. So everything became complicated because they had the benefits of hindsight. And John and I, and Las were beginning to despair, we’d never get them anywhere. And then over lunch, it was when the Americans were hitting somewhere in Iraq. I can’t remember. It was a major siege. Nobody knew what the hell would happen. They started to talk about it. And then they started to use Kenivin, because they didn’t know the future and that was actually really important because after that, we realized with the benefits of hindsight, everybody will see causality.
So you don’t try and do a retrospective. And some of our work, for example, some of the techniques, software techniques we’ve been developing is to create real-time continuous retrospectives in scrum rather than the one time. And again, that’s this concept of componentization and if you swap something out with something else. So you get rid of the retrospective at the end of the period, you move into continuous work recording, which generates retrospectives. Now it’s not that you always do that, but when you do it, it produces a different result.
Miljan: I mean, I think that going back to the combination and like understanding like the purpose and even in scrum, the retrospective is a formal activity to inspect and adapt. You don’t have to wait till the end to do that. So it’s just the knowing. What do you think, I would like to get your thoughts on the link between lack of resilience and organizational failure. You asked this question or what did you find as far as the link between lack of resilience and organizational failure?
Dave: Okay. So the more efficient you are as an organization, the more you’re optimized for your known context. So if the context shifts, you’re highly vulnerable. And two English words, which are the same interesting as Scandinavian languages, but different in English, which is efficiency and effectiveness. I mean, we have a saying in Wales, English is too good for the English, and we generally think most things are too good for them. But it’s this hugely rich language. I mean, Shakespear brought in 750 words from Welsh because he liked the sound of it. So you can be very, very subtle in English and English was designing for ironic conversations, which is an unfair tactic against Americans. But basically if you want to be effective, you’ve got to be efficient to a degree.
And the way I normally it illustrate this is the difference between a seawall and the salt marsh. So a seawall is highly efficient, because you can drain the land on one side, you don’t get leakage, you’ve got long form until it breaks. And then it would be better if the sea water hadn’t been there in the first place. A salt marsh is not as efficient because it uses some land badly. But it absorbs water and even when it’s saturated, it doesn’t release it catastrophic. And that’s it. And antifragile is just a subset of resilience for everybody unless you’re called the [47:01 inaudible] at which point you have to create something unique every three years to sell a new book. The reality is systems that succeed by failure or a type of resilience system. It’s only one type, but it’s a very dangerous type to emphasize. So the bones are actually benefited by stress until they break and then they never fully read it. You gotta be careful now. So one of the things we’ve been working on is how do you measure the necessary degree of inefficiency, Max [Name] and I did this. So how inefficient do you need to be in order to be resilient because you actually need surplus capacity in this system. And you need diversity in the system because, and this was one of the big problems with education. So education became very specialized.
And so we don’t have any generalists left, well if you don’t have any generalists left, how the hell do you synthesize things? And then people talked about T-shaped generalists. You have deep expertise in one field, but you’ve read a few books in 10 another fields, that doesn’t count because you’ll always privilege the field you’re an expert. Generalists know enough about multiple fields that they know when they don’t know enough and they know which experts to go and talk with, but they don’t privilege one technique over another. And again, I think, yeah, it was quite interesting. I was one of these in IBM until when Lou Gerstner was there. This was common. It went with Sam, is there was almost like a competition between senior general managers. And these are really important men, they are both VPs and IBM. Most of them have budgets. I mean, the one I worked for is rounding error every quarter, was quarter of a million dollars, was under quarter of million as it got rounded down to zero, which is how we hit things, including me.
But there was like a competition between them as to who had the most dangerous Mavrick, because it was almost like you could almost hear them a meeting and saying, well, yeah, my, Maverick is upset, they dumpsite more people and your Maverick accepts that and I’ve had 15 requests for him to be fired where you’ve only had two. This actually was a conversation. I overheard it once. And I was the one with 15. And it was quite interesting because they were holding people who thought differently. It was actually as a status issue to do that because it was an expression. Those were all eliminated when Sam came along, everybody got eliminated, who was different because the assumption was, everything could be found in the center.
And I still remember Sam at a session we had with him over on the West Coast. And he said the idea is that we actually have a computer program, which takes my strategic intent and implements it without people getting in the way. And I said, well, where do you think people like you are going to come from the future, if you get rid of middle management and he hadn’t thought about that. He just didn’t really genuinely haven’t thought about that in terms of the way it works. So either way I rambled around a bit. I call it requisite variety. And it shouldn’t be one of the key performance indicators for any organization. And the level of requisite variety will vary according to context. So you may need to build networks into other institutions to give you the variety.
Miljan: And then that’s also, again, like, you’d go back and it’s really like, this is all fundamentals of complexity management. Wha do you think the agile community, or in any matter, like what do we need to do to get better understanding complexity management?
Dave: You’ll need to go and rehabilitation programs to stop yourself being obsessed with credentials. I mean, I’ve got three sets of letters I can put after my name. They all came out of years of study from universities and I never bothered to put them after my name, agile people like to string 15 qualifications based on turning up to a two day course and filling out a multiple-choice questionnaire and then have an open book exam. So you really need to break that because it’s a completely false representation of knowledge. I think the most important thing is to break away from the vendors specific linear frameworks, which actually aren’t [51:15 inaudible]. Scrum, is in framework, whatever they want to call it. It’s the collection of methods. And it works for certain types of software development and it works for certain types of programs in HR or finance, but it doesn’t work for strategy.
It’s a really bad method of handling strategy because it’s too structured. So you need to have different methods in different combinations of methods from multiple vendors working in parallel, which is why things like safe to a lesser extent last ironically. And I would have said until PMI got involved, but that was probably even better, but PMI will structure things. It needs to get away from these highly structured single vendor solutions because they’re actually really dangerous. I mean funny story on this. I was lucky. I taught leadership with Peter Drucker. So the first time I spoke on the same platform as Peter Drucker, which was at the hotel down in Coronado, which is one of my favorite hotels in the world. So I’m speaking before Peter Drucker. So I think this is wonderful. I did a savage naive attack on Taylorism and I knew Frederick Taylor, but I knew people who knew Frederick’s Taylor speech, you know, like that famous put down at the American vice-president.
If you’ve ever been rendered into a puddle of humiliation by a 96 year old genius, when you were thought you were going to be accolated you know how I felt. Either way he decided that was retrievable and took me out for dinner. And then we actually taught three major courses together. And we saved my bacon one day because Lou Gerstner got an invitation to come to an exact invitation only seminar run by Peter Drucker and Dave Snowden. And he wrote the posted note. He told me afterwards, we said, who is this person I gathered he works for me? And that happened about half an hour before two people came in with manufactured evidence to have me fired. So that was really lucky. But one of these Drucker and I agreed is that scientific management and complexity they have a lot in common, far more than they’ve got in common with systems thinking because both of them automate what they can automate, but they actually have apprentice models of management and they respect human judgment.
And what happened with systems thinking is an attempt to remove human judgment from the system completely because it was all meant to be an engineered algorithm or a control mechanism. HR departments move from supporting managers, making decisions to producing spreadsheets about what salaries they could give to people.
