Posts Tagged ‘Process’
Moving Away From Fixed Processes
In the book “a simpler way” by Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers, there’s a paragraph that got my attention.
“Life is intent on finding what works, not what’s “right.” It is the ability to keep finding solutions that is important; any one solution is temporary. There are no permanent right answers. The capacity to keep changing, to find what works now, is what keeps any organism alive.”
In software development, teams are often asked to follow practices that seem to impede effective work. I’ve seen them respond by pretending to follow the formal process while doing what works behind the scenes. Instead of being open about what they are doing, they conceal it. And they incur the additional work of making it seem like they are following the official process by filling out the approved project templates.
How much more productive would it be if teams could talk openly about what they were doing, and other teams could learn from their experimentation? How much more engaged would an organization be where experimentation was encouraged? Where people talked openly about what they learned?
Have you been part of an organization that has encouraged experimentation with process and open discussion about the results? How did it work? What was it like being part of that culture?