Agile tessellations

Confronted with a consistent inadequacy to grasp the very essence of Agility, both in the company of Agilists and non-Agilists, I have gone a long way experimenting before I started working with tessellation techniques. In cooperative learning, tessellations are sets of physical objects that can be touched, taken, moved around. Their tactility permits not only the learning process to move from pure cognition into the realm of sensibility (I mean: making use of all the senses) – it also suggests a strong sense of free association and co-creation.

At first sight, tessellations are somewhat like puzzles. But now is not the time to discuss technologies of learning tools. Here, I will stick to the concept of Agility proper. Which is complicated enough, because …

Agile is more often defined by what it is not then by what it is. Saying what it is not, is easy. It is not: a verb, a noun, a religion, a sect, a methodology, a way of managing projects, a set of rules and tools.

Saying what it is, is way more difficult.

For sure, it is an adjective – and adjectives never stand on their own. Adjectives need nouns like adverbs need adjectives or verbs. So, there is always an Agile something. Like: an Agile community.

I have been (very) active in the online Agile community for a whole long while now, discussing stuff and sharing ideas. I think one can safely say that, at least on LinkedIn, the Agile community is one of the most vibrant ones of all, always teeming with activity, conversation, dissent and eagerness to share and learn. For a life-long learner such as I, existing in the Agile community has surely been a blessing.

So what does the Agile community stand for?

The easier way is to start from the Agile Manifesto – a minute piece of text, published online in 2001 and signed by 17 authors. The few lines of words, because basically that’s what it is, were scribbled together during a non-formal meet-up at an inn at Snowbird Ski Resort in the Wasatch Mountains, Utah – while it was acknowledged in real time by Jim Highsmith, one of the gang, that a bigger gathering of organizational anarchists would be hard to find anywhere else, at any time.

So be warned, the Agile Manifesto is nothing for the conformist. None of those present were suits and the whole bunch was about as far from corporate culture and lingo as one can get. The authors, bathing in a spirit of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), could hardly call themselves The Secret Seven or The Famous Five, and went for the Agile Alliance, brushing aside the arguments put forward by Martin Fowler that Americans had no clue about that very British kind of word and would never manage to pronounce or understand it properly.

Another fact to acknowledge is that the Agile Alliance never had in mind to come up with a prescriptive model or a how-to tutorial. They merely discussed their experiences with software development, which happened to be their common ground. They compared notes and let go of frustrations and exchanged ideas, and ended up with these few lines of text, which they thought somehow described the best way to play the development game:

… and that’s it. Somewhat petite for a manifesto, admittedly. Nowhere near an Ashokan pillar edict or the Tablets of the Covenant. But wait.

Try to look at this in a fresh way – as if you are seeing and reading this for the very first time.

The key concepts in the first sentence are uncovering, doing it and helping others do it.

The idea of uncovering entails a deeper reality: the message that follows in the Manifesto has always been there, it seems to suggest, only it got covered, perhaps by what people had come to understand as doing stuff in a business sort of way, or perhaps because power structures came in the way - and what people would normally do, the organic approach, the natural way, got blurred in corporate fogginess. The Agile way, then, represents the natural way, but rediscovered, revisited.

Doing means to be hands-on. It means to work and learn in an experiential sort of way – just like helping others do it means to create a context in which others are enabled to learn from their practice like you did from yours. For the practitioner, the essence is in the doing – but mere doing just won’t do, pun intended. Agility is not for solos and silos: it cannot exist in isolation. There is a clear message, some sort of mission: we need to involve others – and in this, it isn’t so much a question of showing them how it is done or teaching them how we are doing it, the matter depends entirely on them doing it themselves and the only thing we can offer is help of some sorts. Doing and helping others do it, in other words, represents the kernel of co-creation, cooperative learning – and, ultimately, servant leadership.

The rest of the Manifesto describes an intricate 8-fold valuation system of what the authors conveniently call items. I have broken my head over a better word for this. At first sight, the series contains a motley collection of unrelated subjects, objects and action nouns – each of them paired in a twosome, or as two zero-sum extremes on an scale of some sort. A concluding sentence appears at the bottom of the Manifesto as a postscript – a clarification, perhaps, as if the authors suddenly realized how badly or mistakenly their stuff could be interpreted by a reader, if not severely and purposefully warned. But the warning counts: Make no mistake, it says, there is value with the items on the right - only, we, the Not-So-Secret Seventeen, find more value in the items on the left.

The Agile Movement’s valuation system

So how could we best describe the Manifesto’s 8-fold valuation system? Could it be that the items, in a very condense manner, roughly represent most everything we are occupied with, when in the process of co-creating stuff? Are we looking at the 8 most basic foundation stones of working together, the 8 kind of activities we cannot do without? A kind of Noble 8-fold Path?

Let us make 8 cut-outs and look at the lot in an unordered, unbiased sort of way. Let us open our minds and look for value in all of them. And as we are doing this, thank you for allowing me the freedom to de-softwarize the system. After all, this was about software development only because the Wasatch Mountain bunch happened to all be in that trade, and since they were, their experiences and stories were bound to have software development as a subject. Which isn’t necessarily the case for all of us.

□ Processes and tools is a cut-out reminding us of “proper”, “decent” (project) management. Anyone who has ever found herself in a situation of being involved in a manufacturing line, or in project work, or who has ever followed a typical (project) management course, will think it obvious that processes matter a lot and tools are objects helping us get our processes right and do our work properly. But come to think of it, processes remind us of more. In many cases, processes are not the standardized descriptions of how people work that some would expect or want them to be – they are prescriptive, represent an order established by pockets of power and authority, ensuring process lines to pass their way often enough to keep control over what happens. Processes reveal hierarchies. With processes, we guarantee that the organisation works and keeps working towards the targets and strategic goals which are believed to be the very lifeline of the organisation.

□ Comprehensive documentation, our next item, reminds me of my home library, spilling over the borders and walls of the one room originally assigned to hold it, having invaded every nook and corner of my house, vastly, quickly, intrusively and demandingly expanding over the years, its average speed of growth only slowing down at the arrival of the cloud-based information services of our day. But no, stop growing it did not. Rather, now it is growing at an ever bigger pace, in the cloud, invading space and the universe, and containing every single string of documented knowledge ever created by mankind.

I started buying and collecting books, way back in the seventies, because as a lifelong learner I needed documentation to be at hand in real-time. When it wasn’t, there was nuisance. My B?htlingk und Roth’s Grosses Petersburger Sanskrit W?rterbuch was thoroughly fumbled with and thumbed – as were Alfred Wainwright’s Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, Salim Ali’s incomparable India bird books and my third-or-so copy of Jerome Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters!

Learning is building, is making connections, is walking pathways, squeezing through loopholes and constructing bridges. A learning mind is a well-documented mind. I have a past as a somewhat mad hatter, I know, but also as a part-time documentalist, a technical writer. I have conceived and written (technical) manuals galore. Without a manual, there won’t ever be skill or knowledge, hmm, QED.

□ People and Interactions, one surely cannot do without. Even in our current age, in which many believe that AI is on the verge of replacing most every intervention by humans, people remain at the very core of any system. The reason for this is existential: If people would cease to interact and co-create and leave everything to outside tools, people would essentially cease to be people. I have had endless discussions on this, over coffee and keyboard, with both strong believers and ardent contradictors. The crux of the matter is whether we believe that the tools of the digital world should replace our human space, or fill it, or sustain it, or be at the service of it – whether humans should occupy themselves to make tools better tools, or should be concerned with developing better tools permitting us to be better humans, excel more in our humanity.

Tough questions. But fortunately, we can discuss this at a much more profane level. People and interactions prevail, because people do not come as isolated organisms. People live in spaces – complex systems, in which interactivity explores a myriad of non-predictabilities and uncertainties: spatial and sense-related information, emotions, feelings, touch, bodies, air, temperature, and much more. Try digitally making love to your beloved – and you will know why people and interactions matter so much in co-creation (double-entendre intended).

□ Contract negotiation is the next cut-out. Try doing business without it. Our lives and systems are pervaded by contracts and agreements, and since our ethical and moral and perhaps religious value systems are so widely different from one another, every agreement is bound to be the result of meticulous negotiation between parties positioning themselves at different sides of the spectre. Contracts need to be perpetually negotiated at every instance where there is more than one of such parties. Contracts eagerly grow and procreate in a rich human compost of different interests, different agendas, different visions, different worldviews, different U’s and different I’s.

Also, contracts are at the core of transactions, at the very heart of the commercial enterprise. Currency is a contract, a promise guaranteed by law. And where would we be without currency? Or would you like to not be paid for products made, services delivered?

□  Which brings us to stuff that works, our next cut-out, which doesn’t mean that brooding over things and documenting stuff that doesn’t work has no value, or isn’t fun. Really, I have spent long and glorious hours thumbing through the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci, marvelling at things that could have been, if only they could have been. There is no greater pleasure than gaping at the curious, imaginary contraptions co-created by artistic minds such as these of Hisashi Tenmyouya, or Indieguerillas, or the Belgian surrealist Panamarenko, or whoever is out there turning the wheel of nonsense and uselessness. All very nice and well. But let it be said that coming across stuff that works is a bit of a pleasure unsurpassed by dreams and imaginations.

Look at pre-school children, untainted by the constraints and imperatives of adult behaviour. And behold the smile on the face of one of them, who has just put two blocks on top of each other, for the first time ever making a tower, a real lasting tower, on which goes a third block, hop and hurray.

Surely, It works! is the better of any Eureka! in the history of humankind’s joys, toils and troubles.

□ But for things to work and for us to be working and learning and co-creating in a constraining structure of processes and negotiated contracts, customer collaboration is about the only system of trust that we can fall back upon. Here, we should be kind enough, and careful, not to smack into the commercialisms of the word customer. Consider that in a system where people live and work and co-create and learn together, everybody is everybody else’s provider and customer – and seen in a context of modern standards and quality of customer service, to imagine one’s every deed and action in a provider/customer framework is an excellent guarantee to ensure the highest quality of all the interactions between the people in our communities and larger systems of interrelatedness.

Also, think of customer as one who embodies or practises custom, the dictionary meaning of which is frequent repetition of the same behaviour, or way of behaviour common to many.

Other sources would have custom mean something like habitual practice or communal method of doing, living or behaving. In whichever way one looks at it, the concepts of custom and customer presuppose community and community interactions, whether they follow negotiated processes or happen in the realms of the natural, non-artificial heartbeat of interhuman relationships.

But there is more to this. The cut-out currently under inspection isn’t so much about customer, it is about collaboration, the literal translation of which is working together. Collaboration is a geometrically interesting constellation. As opposed to negotiation, which has a linear set up, with two parties at either end, and the object, or even the result of the negotiation somewhere in between, collaboration suggests a triangular set-up, with the object/result well downstream of two (or more) collaborating parties:

□ So, downstream we go forward, hey ho. Our seventh cut-out, then, looks like a matter of convenience and good governance. Yes, in matters of continuous improvement as well as in human enterprise, there is a lot to say for there being a well-designed plan – and following the plan is generally considered to be a great quality of those who find themselves in the position of leadership, be they project leads, team leads or stewards in the vanguard of entrepreneurship and progress. The logic of having a plan and sticking to it, is obvious: it creates a highway to performance and results.

But having a plan can also mean identifying a goal – and who among us has not been trained in defining goals for herself? Goals provide meaning. Goals provide structure and a sense of direction. Without goals, a game of football could never be played – let alone won.

□ … unless the situation is liable to change. In that case, sticking to the plan would be a fool’s job. If the Titanic had been bound for New York in the first place, there was that cold and foggy night time, when nothing very much seemed to happen till there came that unwanted moment on which the captain needed a whole lot of responsiveness to change. The goal needed abandoning, and the matter narrowed down to saving as many lives as possible.

Sudden changes and unstable systems are hell for anyone committed to planned progress. Everyone who has had children growing from childhood into adolescence will testify to the fact that some serious changes in parenting style are called for, often at the most unexpected moments. Whether a relationship, a family, a system, will be able to withstand the pressures exercised upon it by randomness, depends entirely on its competency of being able to respond promptly and adequately.

Interconnectedness

See how everything is interconnected. Processes and tools with comprehensive documentation with people and interactions with contract negotiation with stuff that works with customer collaboration with following a plan with responsiveness to change. And check out how everyone feels the fit. In all this time of being involved with Agility, I am still waiting to come across one single person who does not recognize that yes, in fact, these are the 8 factors in the game of working and learning together.

But how exactly does this interconnectedness work out? What touches what and how and why? How do we create balance, find harmony?

I love the concept of harmony – that elusive, phantom-like aspect that we know exists when it is there and we keep looking for when it isn’t – what in Japanese culture is referred to as wa (和). 

Wa implies beauty – imperfect because it is never fully there but always becoming. It suggests peaceful unity and equilibrium within a social group, the members of which would naturally come to prefer the continuation of a harmonious community over their own personal interests.

If you ask me, harmony is also what the authors of the Agile Manifesto have been after. This is suggested by how careful they have ordered the 8 aspects of working together in a 4x2 valuation matrix, identifying pairs and constructing columns, with 4 aspects on the left and 4 on the right of each line – and recognizing that the ones on the right weigh so heavy, are so demanding, have such a strong and often slowing impact on the system in which they operate, that they risk tilting the balance of the system to their side altogether.

The 4 aspects on the left are different. What binds them together is a certain lightness of being. How close they are to the wondrous and wonderful world of the pre-school child. Interacting, finding out about stuff that works, co-creating stuff that works, me and my mommy and aunty Gertrud, and if the weather’s nice we will go out and do something else but it will be fun and useful and we will learn lots of things and all will be fine.

By all means, the items on the left cost less. But for their better price they operate more indistinctly, are sometimes near invisible. It takes some time for them to penetrate deeply into the inner workings of the system - while they are continuously at risk of not getting enough time, care or attention to ever get there. Yet, they are important. More so: they are very important. They are essential to make the system future-proof. They are the carriers of the power of innovation, natural growth and survival. They are the only answer to the innate complexity and instability of the system itself and the systems surrounding it.

In brief: The items on the left are the keys to the system’s Agility.

In complexity, and from a systemic point of view, processes and tools might be needed, but people and interactions matter so much more. Documentation might be fun, sometimes a sine qua non, but, after all, an application that needs explaining is a bad application – and having stuff that just works is so much more important to keep the spirits up and keep going. Yes, we need currency. And yes, sometimes a contract might be negotiated to keep us in a safe zone. But working together, in collaboration, co-creating, seeing more and more of the light as we get along and go along: these are the things that drive us thither. And if there is a plan, let it not be a covenant. Let it be prone to change, lest we get titanicked in the wet and cold mists of randomness and disruption.

 Agile mosaics

Think it over. I think that the Manifesto is a very beautiful piece of work. I really like to play and toss around with it – always pondering over the words and what they might mean. I fumble it and feel it and I would sometimes honestly prefer it to be an object rather that a string of words – for then it would be easier to really feel it and look at it and see it from all possible perspectives.

So once, on a blue Monday, I decided on doing exactly that, and I created a set of eight tiles and went out and presented them to people, individuals of some sorts, both clients and random passers-by, both children and grown-ups, sometimes students, some of them Agilists or so they said – and while presenting the tiles I would ask the people what they meant and how they understood the words and where they saw connections or not – and would they please try to create a meaningful pattern with them.

It was great fun. Weird and unexpected patterns emerged as the tiles moved from the left to the right and from place to place. It was like running a school of mosaics, only I didn’t just learn about geometry and floor tiling but more about concepts and meanings and about how people react when unexpectedly invited to play like children.

What can one do with eight tiles? When you know that there should be a meaningful pattern? How many tiling patterns can be made? How many connections, relationships, groups?

Weights and counterweights, heavy and light

But of course, in order to fully grasp the deeper meaning of all the interrelationships of the Manifesto items, merely sliding eight tiles around in patterns is not enough. We have to remember that the Manifesto is a valuation system, which entails that just like in Mendeleev’s chart of atomic elements, some of the items are pretty heavy while others are not – and since the heavy elements typically react in a certain sort of way when introduced into a system, while the lighter elements play an altogether different game, we need a set of differentiators, counterweights, equilibrators, alleviators, enablers - or at least a system for marking relative weights if we want to get things right.

Four items are heavy and have a devastating impact on a system’s Agility: processes and tools, documentation, negotiation and following a plan. The other four are light and increase the system’s Agility: people and interactions, stuff that works, customer collaboration, responsiveness to change. Knowing that the items on the right, although of value, are heavy, expensive, impactful and generally slowing down and sturdy, Agile organisations are encouraged to find means to lessen their burden, if and where possible. But in order to keep balance, or wa, we need a whole lot of light items, lest we fail to counterbalance even a very low number of the heavy ones.

To keep the system in balance, in other words, what we need is more tiles, …

…, which is why I started introducing ten more of them, two times five to be exact – taken from frameworks on which the very idea of Agility in the Manifesto was sourced, Lean Manufacturing at one side, Scrum at the other – all scrambled in the above figure with the purpose of play.

Alleviators

Five Lean principles in particular are helpful to enable more Agility overall and less burden at the right and hefty side of our 8-fold Agile valuation system. Most Lean principles find their origins in The Toyota Way, which was and is a comprehensive, integrated socio-technological approach to running a manufacturing business as smoothly as possible. I imagine these five to be tiles with a somewhat negative weight: When applied into a system with a predominance of heavy tiles, they have a tendency to alleviate its heaviness considerably – giving way to a system that, overall, will be more receptive to a greater number of light tiles and a somewhat higher degree of Agility.

□ Thinking of a customer first. Always think from the perspective of the user. Do our processes serve the user at all? For whose sake are we documenting? Why negotiate if giving the customer what she needs is our ultimate goal? What if our plan is creating a burdensome lead time, is leading us astray from the customer’s situation?

□ Identifying value. How do we ensure that every step we make and every activity we do creates value – for the customer, the user ? Have we thought of what value really means? Where and when and how do we create value for the customer? And when we are not in the process of creating value for the customer, than whom are we creating so-called value for?

□ Building a value stream. Do our processes represent a stream of incrementally adding value? And if not, what are our processes really doing? Is our team of co-creation like a stream? Or is it like a pool? Is there motion? Or standstill? Are our tools the stream-enablers that we need? Is our stream leading somewhere? Or is it leading somewhere and we don’t really care how it does?

□  Making the value flow down the stream. Where are the disturbances? The bottlenecks? In the processes? The hierarchy? The tools? The documentation? The red tape? The contract negotiation? The getting ourselves stuck in the loophole of the plan? - And why are we having disturbances at all? And how can they be removed? What to do to ensure a better, nicer, calmer, more harmonious flow down the stream?

□ Creating a continuous learning system. How to build-in a heartbeat of constant alignment? How to fail? How to fail fast? How to learn from mistakes? How to improve? How to continuously improve? How to continuously enable improvement?

What is Agility? – It is effectuating a series of shifts in mindset and focus, uplifting, alleviating, liberating the co-creational sphere from the heavy burdens of a series of stagnating concepts, viz., processes and tools, comprehensive documentation, customer negotiation and following a plan – all of them concepts settled in and installed by a grown-up world, where politics and strategy and power and status reign – and where megastructures and meta-structures constrain the ebullient energy and seeker mentality of the overtly keen.

Enablers

If not – there are no better enablers of Agility than the items on the left. They are light by themselves – so we need a great deal of them to act as a sufficient counterweight for the items on the right, even if these are alleviated by a mindset and approach as Lean as can be.

Let people prevail. For in the end, people is what living and working and learning together is about. Get motion. Use space. Let people interact – in physical proximity if possible. Few sights provide better vibes than a roomful of developers working at one table, elbow against elbow, the walls and windows and doors full of charts and formulas and undecipherable scribble. And talk. Let people talk. For of co-creation and learning there is none if there is no talk. Let people be children. Make stuff that works. And by all means, change your mind with the changing tides.

To do all this, or rather, to enable your system and help it value the items on the left more, a set of mindsetters taken from the Scrum framework, which antedated the Agile movement with about a decade and a half, will prove to serve perfectly. Scrum, by Agilsts as well as non-Agilists often mistaken for the Agile movement proper, was formally introduced with Hirotaka Takeushi and Ikujiro Nonaka’s seminal paper The New New Product Development Game (Harvard Business Review, January 1986), but the set of five values I am referring to here didn’t appear in this form before Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber came up with them in The Scrum Guide, 1994.

□ Keep focus. Have a purpose. Have a common purpose. Keep aligning. Be aligned. With each other.

□ Keep an open mind. Be receptive. Humble. Teamwork entails that other team members have contributions equally important as yours – even if they keep a different point of view. The force of a co-creational team is in its cross-functionality and its maturity to self-organize. Openness is one of the keys to engaged citizenship and servant leadership.

□ Be intrinsically committed. There is no team without the commitment of every team member. Be committed to the common purpose, to your role in the team and the responsibilities that come with it, to co-creation, to the co-creation of stuff that works.

□ Be courageous. Have the courage to be committed, to have an open mind, to fail, to fail fast, to help the others fail fast. Have the courage to be open-minded, to meet the customer, to be responsive to change.

□ Have the courage to respect all human beings, unconditionally – which is hard, because the strength of a team is with its cross-functionality – and therefore with its inherent, intrinsic diversity.

 An Agile tessellation

Thus armed with a set of eighteen tiles (8 taken from the Agile Manifesto valuation system, 5 from The Toyota Way and Lean Manufacturing, 5 from The Scrum Guide), I once more took to the street, the gemba, the working and learning space, this time inviting people to toss around and slide and discuss and play until an imaginary but satisfactorily harmonious and sufficiently Agile system would emerge, in which they would gladly volunteer to work and learn together.

As before, any pattern is possible in principle, the number of possibilities with eighteen tiles being exponentially higher than it was with eight tiles only. But this time, the players are requested to organize their tiles in a very special manner, the figure above representing merely an example. First, the tiling needs to permit them to tell relevant stories about their company, organisation or workplace by discussing the interrelatedness of the items that they choose to put in proximity of one another – and second, the pattern needs to allow for periodic tessellation, incubating the idea that being Agile, or practising Agility, is a never-ending affair.

A tessellation is a repeated pattern of neatly fitting polygons or other substitute parts, so well fitting indeed, that it looks as if the parts are organically grown into each other and only have meaning in relationship to the parts surrounding them. As a set, on a higher level, the pattern behaves periodically, which means that it fits into and unto itself – the recurrence of motives suggesting iterations that lead, in turn, to a bigger wholeness. Tessellations predominantly exist in mathematics and geometry – but also in art, or in a combination of art and mathematics, as is often the case in the geometric patterns used to suggest harmony all over the Arab world, or in MC Escher prints, or in William Morris Arts-and-Crafts wallpapers, or in the 18-tiles Agile tessellation game currently under scrutiny.

As far as the Agile tessellation assignment is concerned, there is no such thing as a correct or a wrong tiling pattern or tessellation. Only it seems obvious that in order to get Agility you need loads of items on the left, the B-series in the example in the figure above, and loads of enablers, the A series, will help you achieve this. Of the items on the right, the C series, you want few, but whatever you do have there, can be made less of a burden by applying the alleviator concepts in the D-series.

But this is playing with prior knowledge, which is cheating. The real and honest Agile tessellation game is when you don’t tell the players which tiles are light or heavy and which are alleviators or enablers. You just throw the lot on the ground and invite the players to get to it, letting them make reasonable guesses about what weight each tile has (in their own company, organisation or workplace reality) and how harmony could best be achieved. The only rule should be that the greater the proximity is between two tiles, the more common story there would be for the two of them. It is all about tile relationships, more than about the tiles themselves. This is where the real stories appear, the new insights, the true lessons.

This is a line with one of my favourite texts on how to decide on who and what to agree with or not, the Kalamasutta in the Pali Tipitaka – basically advising the student never to take anything for granted – lest one’s doing so may cause great amounts of suffering, both individual pain and communal disharmony. This, in an Agile world, with so much focus on people and interactions and teams and co-creation and togetherness, would be nothing short of a dystopia. The Kalamasutta’s might be an old recipe, from the 6th century BC – but meanwhile, in Greece, the scientific method was shown to establish how progress thrives on the use of hypotheses, always open to be proven wrong by any seeker of truth. This should be the Agile mindset as well. Agile should never be taken for granted and it should never be a must be. If Agility’s story is proven wrong by able and capable tessellation players, then it is proven wrong for them and nothing more should be said about it.

The creative Agilist will always listen to the stories told by the players of the Agile tessellation game, and every new connection, relationship, or loophole is worth the most thorough of examinations.

Curvilinear perspectives and tessellation user stories

An Agile transformation is a company/organisation-wide storyline, aiming at the creation and sustainable maintenance of a harmoniously balanced, periodic Agile tessellation field, where heavy elements are properly alleviated – and, where possible, (partly) replaced by (more) Agile elements.

An Agile organisation is a light and properly-balanced organism, where the items represented by the periods of an Agile tessellation have become utterly seamless, having grown into the very heartbeat of the organism itself, making it so lightweight that it is able to withstand any kind of change within itself or exerted upon it from outside sources.

But be careful. The job is never done. As we have seen, it seems to be a tendency in the world of grown-ups, organisations, businesses and corporates to lose the sense of being an organism. Agility is the natural way for an exploring child, thriving on innate resilience and keenness to learn – features that get lost as we become more “mature”. It is a heavy but necessary task for all of us grownups to continually keep looking for these qualities – the more so as we are venturing towards a future getting more complex and uncertain with every step we go.

To fill in the story needs of even more complex future situations, tessellations can exist in Euclidean geometry, but also in hyperbolic geometry, where they can fold back unto themselves, creating saddle-shape planes and ever more complex 3-dimensional bodies, at the inside of which the relationship stories of an Agile tessellation game get a whole new dimension, driven by new proximities and new correlations.

Curvilinear perspectives are optical illusions making the beholder see a 3D object, or at least suggesting the presence of such an object, where in fact there is nothing more than a 2-dimensional drawing on a piece of paper or a computer screen. I am looking forward to finding ways of adding curvilinear perspectives to Agile tessellations games, which are sure to permit additional and new learning about the interrelatedness of the tiles in the game.

The possibilities of Agile tessellations are endless – each possible constellation being the visual representation of a unique story – and each story being the unique pathway of an organisation on the journey of its Agile transformation.

===

京都, Kyōto, July 17 2018