From Instance to Essence

One day my friend, III, explained that there was a new name for an Open Space law I’d known for years. It was called the “Law of Two Feet” and is an important part of successfully running an Open Space. Harrison Owen, the inventor of Open Space, defined this law as follows:

If at any time you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing — use your two feet and move to some place more to you liking. Such a place might be another group, or even outside into the sunshine. No matter what, don’t sit there feeling miserable…

I learned the “Law of Two Feet” back in 1997 when I participated in my first Open Space event. Since that time, my colleagues and I have run or participated in many Open Space sessions. Over those many years, none of us ever questioned the “Law of Two Feet”, it was simply a key part of running an Open Space.

Yet on that day III explained that there was a change, a new name and better way of thinking about this law. III had been spending a lot of time facilitating Open Space sessions at the Ed Roberts Campus, a center for disabled persons in Berkeley, California. Some of these disabled people didn’t actually have two feet and some navigated the world via a wheelchair.

The Law of Two Feet was now called the Law of Mobility. The new name was inclusive of all people, revealing the true essence of the law. It made perfect sense. Thanks to III, I now had a more expansive, inclusive and universal way to think about this law from Open Space.

That was a day I’ll always remember as a movement from instance to essence. I’d known an instance of a law. Now I understood the essence of it.

What’s the Essence?

Since that day, I’ve sought to spend more time discovering and understanding the essence of things.

Merriam-Webster defines essence as “the individual, real, or ultimate nature of a thing especially as opposed to its existence” and “the most significant element, quality, or aspect of a thing or person.”

Christopher Alexander and his co-authors of A Pattern Language, sought to find the essence of living spaces and spoke about “finding the true invariant, the property at the heart of all possible solutions.”

Window Place, one of 253 patterns from A Pattern Language, is such an invariant. It defines a location where people may gather together next to natural light. Here are numerous instances of this pattern:

The authors write: “A room which does not have a place like this seldom allows you to feel fully comfortable or perfectly at ease.” And they suggest that In every room where you spend any length of time during the day, make at least one window into a “window place.”

Window Place defines the essence or true property at the heart of this idea in a way that allows for many instances of it.

From Instance to Essence in Agile

When I became an Extreme Programmer in the late 1990s, fixed-length iterations seemed like an essential part of the process. We’d plan work for an iteration (generally 2 weeks), try to do the work we had planned and then retrospect at the end, always trying to get a consistent velocity.

It wasn’t until 7–8 years later that I experimented with a simpler approach: variable-length iterations (as I called them back then). My team and I would agree on some small, important value to deliver to our customers, test and build it, ship it and repeat (see The Day We Stopped Sprinting). Our variable- length iterations were now anywhere from a half-day to 3–4 days. These experiments, along with my study of lean thinking, helped me understand that fixed-length time boxes (Iterations in XP, Sprints in Scrum) were merely an instance of something more essential: small batches.

Small batches enable delivering value continuously. They enable “flow”, help us complete work sooner and help us learn and adapt faster. A small batch is executed quickly. It doesn’t need to be fancy or polished. A quick draft of an email, a sketch, a bug fix, an embryonic version of something, an A/B test, a quick experiment are all examples of small batches. If I wait 3 month to clean my car, it’s a big batch because there’s a lot of dirt and dog hair to clean up. If I clean my car more regularly, there’s far less work to do and that work happens more efficiently.

Small batches don’t take long to perform, yet they aren’t so tiny that they slow us down either. There’s no law that says a small batch must be completed within a fixed-length time box. Of course, you can have a long range goal and use small batches (and hopefully evolutionary design) to help you get there. The goal is simply to carve out something valuable, do it quickly, learn something (if applicable) and continue onto the next small batch.

In over two decades of studying and practicing agile and lean methods, I now see small batches as essence and fixed-length iterations/sprints as instances. And just as I no longer introduce Open Space newbies to the Law of Two Feet, I no longer introduce agile newbies to fixed-length time boxes. Sometimes it’s better to begin with essence instead of arriving at it via instance. And sometimes the essence is merely meant to be a guide.

I believe the real power of looking at essence is that it can help us be more generative: inventing, discovering or re-discovering practices that ultimately help us implement the essence.

So what is instance or essence in lean/agile work? I don’t have a comprehensive list. I’d love to hear your suggestions. Here are a few examples I came up with:

Instances: Sprints, Iterations, Work-In-Process Limits -> Essence: Small Batches

Instances: Post-Mortem, Retrospective, After Action Review -> Essence: Inspect & Adapt

Instances: Test-Driven Development, Behavior-Driven Development -> Essence: Example-Guided

Instances: Exploratory Testing, Chaos Monkeys, Fault Tolerance -> Essence: Resilience Engineering

Instances: Pairing, Mobbing -> Essence: Risk-Managed Collaboration

Instances: Daily Standup, Team Huddle, Pairing, Mobbing -> Essence: Continuous Integration of Ideas

Instances: A/B Test, Feature Fake, Spike -> Essence: Capital-Efficient Experimentation

If you enjoyed this article, please share it. And thanks to Industrial Logic coaches, Bill Wake, Matthew Carlson and Perry Reid for their reviews and comments.