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Essap 2008 in Varese This year’s Essap course on agile development will be held in lovely Varese from June 30th to July 4th. If you want to learn more about the theory and practice of agile in beautiful, relaxing surroundings, this is the place to be. Matteo, Federico and Vieri have created a great course with interesting speakers. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend this year, due to other commitments. If you have the opportunity to attend, don’t hesitate. Go Essap! The Space Game
We set up shop in the friendly environment of the Royal Festival Hall with our game props: a galaxy game board, space ships, planets, sweets, maps, stories, news items, stuff to play with… The usual motly, colourful items that signal to participants that this is safe, ‘just’ a game. Portia told the story behind the game: participants had to fulfill a mission to preserve peace across the galaxy. We explained some of the rules. Participants had to ask us more questions to discover what this simulation was all about. We played the game in several rounds. In each round, the teams had to plan their move and then execute their chosen move on the game board. Along the way we introduced real options concepts. The players were really ‘in’ the game, fully absorbed. Near the end, they discovered an important concept. I can’t tell you what, you’ll have to play the game yourself! After the game, we held a retrospective with the players. This was the most important part of the evening for us, because the first rule of game and session development is:
If you want to create a great game, session or performance, iteration is essential. You gather your ideas, create a structure, bring in all the props… and then the real work begins. You get valuable feedback from the participants and by observing, you improve the game. And then you do it again. And each time the performance improves. Yes, release often, iteration, feedback and simplicity are useful for game design too. And courage… We were a bit nervous. Would the game work? Would the concepts be clear? Would the participants like it? The participants did have fun and learned something. We learned a lot. There’s a lot to improve. Come out and play If you want to have fun and learn more about real options you can play the game at Agile North on 26th of April and at XP Days France on 5-6 May. See you there! A big T-H-A-N-K Y-O-U to David, Daniel, Maria, Sharmila, Matt, Chris and Henry for being such great players and for the excellent feedback. Respect and Trust Portia stresses the importance of Respect and Trust as agile values. Respect for people is one of the two core principles of Lean. Trust and respect from leaders and managers is crucial to a great team. But trust and respect is not a one-way street. It goes both ways. Do you trust and respect your leaders and managers? If not, why not? They might take the wrong decision A long, long time ago in a company far away from here, management asked the software development teams to come up with options and estimates to renew our product line and move to a different platform. The senior architect presented a proposal with a ludicrously high number of features for a ludicrously low estimate. I couldn’t see how we could ever implement that much in so little time. When I asked the architect about his estimate, he answered with a straight face “Oh, I know it will take 6 times as long as that estimate.” If he knew this, why had he quoted such a low estimate? “Well, if I tell them the real estimate, management will take the wrong decision.” Meaning: they would not go with his proposal. Well, if management had known that this proposal would take 6 times as long to implement, they would have been worried. Was this project worth the investment? Wouldn’t customers become impatient if they had to wait so long? Would our current platform become obsolete before we could move to the new platform? They would have thought long and hard before launching this project. They still might not have taken the “right” decision, but at least they would have had better information. As it turned out, the project did not take 6 times, but 10 times the original estimate to complete. If management would have known it would take so long, they would have worried that this project might bring the company down. As it nearly did… Trading places A bit later, in another company I was in a similar situation. Only now I was on the “other side”. I learned that I had not gotten some information from the development team. They were afraid of giving me this information. I felt awful when I realized this. I couldn’t imagine what they could be afraid of, but I must have done something (or ommitted to do something) to earn that distrust. I was out of my depth. I realized that now that I was a manager, I had started to do things that I hated in people who managed me. Luckily for me, there were some people who weren’t afraid of telling me the ugly truth. Evil Queens? I’m better at respecting and trusting than I was, but I’m still learning. Sometimes I still feel, as one of the participants of the “Mirror Mirror” session at SPA 2008 said, I need to “out-evil the Evil Queens”. Why do I see some people as Evil Queens? What can I do to understand their goals and motivations better? If you’re a manager and/or a leader (and who isn’t?), what can we do to earn that respect and trust? Maybe we can start by investing a bit of respect and trust. Respect and Trust for everyone we work with.
“[What is the scret of Toyota’s success?]. Did Sakichi Toyoda pilfer some ancient Samurai secret? […] Executives at Toyota reduce it to three words: ‘common sense engineering‘. Unfortunately, what seems like common sense to Toyota often does not seem so common outside of Toyota.” When someone accuses me of peddling “nothing more than common sense”, I wear that as a badge of honour. Of course, what I think when someone tells me that “it’s just common sense!” is: so why don’t you do it? When someone tells me “that’s just common sense”, I respond: “Exactly! You’ve really understood what I said. So… Let’s do it!” 😉 Dedicated to friends with common sense. You know who you are 🙂
Dennett begins by saying: “Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. But it’s not just a wonderful scientific idea. It’s a dangerous idea.” I agree. As a philosopher of science, Dennett first clarifies the idea, discusses some of the challenges to it, looks into the reasons for many people’s (including scientists’ and biologists’) unease with the idea and finally looks into the consequences of this idea for philosophy and morality. So what’s the big idea, then? Pre-Darwin, philosophers like Locke and Hume supposed that MIND was required to create DESIGN out of ORDER and ORDER out of CHAOS. Dennett calls this the Cosmic Pyramid. As William Paley asserted, if you should find a watch, look for the watchmaker who made it. Darwin turned the whole thing on its head. As an anonymous attack on Darwin said: “In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system that in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it!” Exactly. The dangerous idea is this: we, and our minds, are the results of billions of years of mindless algorithmic processes. Dennett gives plenty of examples and explanation of what he means by algorithm. Applying the idea Dennett explains how this idea is applied in evolution and biology. He likens biology to engineering. We reverse engineer, we assume that each adaptation has a reason, that it made the organisms that contained the feature more fit. Sometimes, these adaptations are just accidents of history, just like in real engineering. For example, why do insects have 6 legs, while mammals have 4? Sometimes, the same adaptation will be arrived at by different species independently. For example, eyes are such a “Good Trick”, such a good answer to the environment’s questions, that they have evolved in different species independently. These algorithmic processes are not limited to DNA and genes. Dennett goes back in time to discuss how early single-celled organisms might have evolved in to multi-cellular organisms. Or how the first amino acids got built. There is less evidence left from these early evolutions, but these hypotheses can be tested in the lab. There’s even a section on how the laws of physics might have evolved. This is the most speculative and weakest part of the book. Looking forward, there’s the phenomenal effect of culture. Culture works a lot faster than evolution, and it keeps accelerating. Darwin’s dangerous idea can be applied to culture in the form of memes. Like the selfish genes, they ‘care’ about nothing more than their own propagation. Attacking the idea After all these examples of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea at work, we are confronted with the idea’s critics. We’re not talking crackpot creationists here. These are respected biologists, philologists, philosophers and mathematicians, well-known scientists like Gould and Chomsky. Dennett deals with each of their “rebuttals” or rejections of Darwinism in turn. The rebuttals are shown to be wrong or to be part of Darwinism, to the irritation of their proponents who feel as if Darwinism is a constantly moving target. On the contrary, their criticism strengthens the theory because it exposes (small) weaknesses or introduces new mechanisms, new algorithms. The rejections are more troubling. For example, where does language come from? Is there some innate Language Acquisition Device (LAD)? Where did it come from? Did it evolve or did it suddenly appear? Where does our mind come from? All of these rejections boil down to it is currently unknown how these phenomena work, and the way they work is unknowable. I can agree with the first statement, but not the second. It’s as if these people are shouting “Don’t look behind the screen!” You never know what you might find there, but that shouldn’t stop us from looking. They reflect, as Dennett puts it metaphorically, a yearning for sky-hooks. We can lift things in two ways: we can build cranes (and cranes to build cranes which build cranes…) on solid ground; or we can hope for the appearance of hooks that hang free-floating in the sky. The evolution of meaning, morality and ethics Then Dennett explores meaning, morality and ethics from an evolutionary standpoint. How could they have evolved from our humble meaningless beginnings? What does it mean to “do good” or “do no evil”? Dennett looks at several theoretical models, but finds them all wanting for daily, practical use. As Dennett summarizes: “Ethical decision-making, examined from the perspective of Darwin’s dangerous idea, holds out scant hope of our ever discovering a formula or an algorithm for doing right. But that is not an occasion for despair; we have the mind-tools we need to design and redesign ourselves, ever searching for better solutions for the problems we create for ourselves and others.” Our daily moral and ethical dilemmas aren’t simple to solve. We have to solve them with very limited resources and time. As Dennett shows with a few effective thought experiments, the practical limits on our reasoning force us to take shortcuts and leave lots of consequence unthought-of. Lots of unintended effects can arise from the noblest of intentions. Or, as the song says: “No good deed goes unpunished”. I can’t say “I do no evil”. The best I can promise is “I try not to do evil”. Principles and values can help us make choices. I’m lucky, no, I choose, to work with people who live these values.
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