Agility is like healthy. Every time you hear that in your head, think someone is trying to understand how to become healthy. Scrum is like running, it’s a way some people choose to start getting healthy. And if you run a whole lot you’re going to get healthier. And you’ll also realize, perhaps these two packs of cigarettes are bad and I should cut those out, or eat more vegetables, or lift weights. But if you start running you’re on the road to health. Design any method of getting after creativity is a way of doing that. Workshops are lifting finger weights. Doing design blitzes, hanging out with other people, taking things from different contexts and applying them — at some level everything we do.
I love that design thinking is the manifestation of John Boyd’s Destruction and Creation essay. He’s talking about recombining elements of different vehicles and coming up with the snowmobile. All of the ideas are already out there, you just need to step back and look at things first through a keyhole and then decomposing everything and recombining it until it is something new.
That was Jon Margolick on the DisruptiveAF podcast, “Keeping your eye on the problem with warfighter-centered design pt.1“. Here’s another good part of the episode:
I like to fight against this concept of system of systems, because it gives us the confidence that we can control things… Human systems aren’t machines. They’re organic… One of my favorite things people say about complex systems is that the only accurate model of a complex system is the system itself. You can come up with an idea of what the system is, but it’s not going to be an accurate depiction. Compliance is often based on our analysis of a system at a snapshot in time, but because it’s a complex system that rapidly stops being reflective of the true nature of the system.
I like the idea of contrasting systems design with compliance-centered design. The DoD largely focuses on compliance design, which as described articulates a snapshot of a weapon system and an operational environment, but doesn’t do well in updating that concept with a change in information that inevitably follows.
All this is, of course, very John Boyd. When operating from inside the system, which we always are, you cannot gain a perspective on that system as though you are on the outside looking in. This is one of the fundamental problems of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Godel’s incompleteness theorem. And so there is always uncertainty and ambiguity to decisions made from within the system. But we can always grope towards higher levels of understanding through a continuous process of reformulating our knowledge of fundamental constituents into new and more powerful concepts.
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