Dare to be bold: Navigating the Unpredictable Waters of Emerging Technologies

I was walking along Oregon’s Rogue River bank with Kent Beck , circa 1999, during a meeting with a group of XP proponents. This was the pre-agile days when traditionalists still dominated software development and Kent was concerned that Extreme Programming was too, well extreme, for the times. My response was,”What are you going to call it, “Moderate Programming?” In the late 1990s and early 2000s the internet was booming, GUI interfaces were new, and IT organizations were shifting from automating well known internal, operational applications to unknown, external, customer facing applications. This was not time to be timid, but to be bold, like XP and other emerging agile methods were.?

In those earlier years technology and methodology pivoted together. With 63,000 AI companies in the world today, the pundits disagree on much, but do agree that the changes will be widespread and happen quickly. What can we gain from the past to help us with the challenges of today? The cover of the August 2001 “Software Development magazine carried the headline, “The Agile Manifesto: 17 anarchists agree on light methods–do you?”

Maybe it’s time to kindle a little of the anarchist spirit of excitement in addressing today’s issues. Maybe in Reimagining Agile (RA) we need to consider at least two paths in how we move? “Forward to the Future,” a Moderate Path and a Speculative Path. Which path you might take depends on a variety of factors, the two critical ones being: How fast your competition moves and your company culture (including tolerance for risk).?

The Speculative Path has the greatest upside, but is obviously riskier. In 2000, I published “Adaptive Software Development,” in which the iterative life-cycle was Speculate-Collaborate-Learn. “Speculate” replaced “Plan” because sometimes, at critical pivot points, it’s hard to redefine words that have carried a certain meaning. The word “plan” carried, and still carries, a lot of baggage. To venture into the world of AI and other emerging technologies, we need to be explicit in admitting the need to explore, journey, experiment, and create call on us to Speculate about the future and not try to plan it (although, speculate did bother my early banking clients).

This was how I defined Speculate in “Adaptive Software Development:”

“In complex environments, planning is paradoxical. Since outcomes are unpredictable. Yet endless, aimless experimentation on what a product should look like is not likely to lead to concrete results either. Planning, whether it is applied to develop overall product specifications or to articulate detailed project management tasks, is too deterministic an activity to associate with a complex environment. The word carries too much historical baggage. Speculating seems closer to what actually occurs. When we “speculate,” we define a mission to the best of our ability, but our choice of the word admits that in some important dimensions of our mission statements, we are more than likely wrong. Whether it is technology changing, or competitors coming out with a better mousetrap, or our own misreading of our customers’ needs, the probability of mistakes is high. So, let’s be honest, postulate a general idea of where we are going, and put mechanisms in place to adapt—to explore the territory."

“The ability to plan for what has not yet happened, for a future that has only been imagined, is one of the hallmarks of leadership of a Great Group.”?- W. Bennis [1997], p. 40.

Speculate has several other benefits: it encourages short iterations. It encourages innovation. It encourages realistic evaluation and feedback. It encourages learning. Is there a downside? Of course, if planning fosters rigidity, speculation can foster an “anything goes” mentality. It needs boundaries and constraints. Speculate operates in the exploratory lifecycle “Speculate, Collaborate, Learn.” We don’t want endless speculation, but enough to start the initial iteration.?

In the throws of AI, Web 3.0, immersive user/computer interfaces, blockchain, and the hovering specter of quantum computing, it’s time to de-emphasize the word “planing” and use a word that more adequately reflects the times–let’s keep SPECULATE alive and well.