Quote of the Day

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather up the wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

– Antoine De Saint–Exupery

This is the basis of Capabilities-Based Planning.

We need a ship capable of sailing the open ocean from our home in Northen Europe to the shores of North America

The result was a Viking ship with specific capabilities, being slender and flexible, with symmetrical ends with a true keel. They were lapstrake built with overlapping planks riveted together with the hull planks overlapping each other, with iron spikes.

Both sails and oars were used to propel the ship, at times together so they had the capability to make way even in the absence of wind.

Without knowing what capabilities are needed to accomplish the mission or fulfill the business strategy, the result is usually a solution looking for the problem to solve.

This is the case in our modern time of agile development "solutions" - without knowing what problem we are trying to solve, the root cause(s) of the problem, with its conditions and actions creating the cause we are many times disappointed with the outcome and wrongfully blame the solution instead of our inability to define the problem.