There are three kinds of experiments. Chances are you are running way too many of the wrong kind.

Do you ever feel confused? Don't know what to do next? You know you have a problem but you're not sure what to do about it? You have a sense of what might work but you don't trust your instincts?

Welcome to the party.

The human party.

The reason may be that you've fallen for a variety of delusions.

A delusion is something that is believed to be true or real but that is actually false or unreal.

Many of these exist in the Agile space even though there is a lot of evidence to counter their beliefs.

I am not suggesting these are put forth with any kind of malice. That would make them lies. No, the people promoting them are doing so in good faith. But that doesn't make them any less delusional.

The underlying delusion is that when complexity is present we can't see what's going on. That we must always try things and see what happens. We must have faith.?

First, let’s get clear. Not everything that requires feedback is an experiment. Changing lanes while driving requires feedback. But I wouldn’t call it an experiment (unless, perhaps, you are a really bad driver).

How much something is an experiment is really a matter of degree. For clarification, I’m going to group them as follows:

1. Doing something new in a new situation where you don’t really know what is going to happen.? This is an experiment to explore behavior.

2. Doing something in a new situation based on your model of understanding how things have worked in the past. This should either result in the expected improvement, or you will learn something about the new situation you didn’t know before, or you will improve your model of understanding. This is how we navigate complexity – we try things and they either work or we discover what complexity was obscuring from us. In this case, we’re experimenting to see if our current understanding works in a new situation. We learn something new about the situation or we improve our model of understanding. This is taking a scientific approach to learning.

3. Doing something in a similar situation based on your model of understanding how things have worked in the past. This is similar to case 2, but we’re more likely to get the result we expect because we’re familiar with this situation. In other words, our expectation is to get an improvement. Now, this might not happen, there may be something out there we haven't seen. But it shouldn't happen often if our model is good.

Not attending to these types of experiments and saying knowledge work is complex has us view most of our experiments as those in group 1. But this is very limiting and has spawned many delusions.

There are several common delusions presented in the Agile space that work against the many people that accept them without critical thinking.

The biggest one is to “follow to understand.”? First of all, this is how you talk to a child. Adults don’t like this. It’s pedantic. It’s a nice way of saying “I’m smarter than you, do what I tell you to do, and eventually, if you’re smart enough, you’ll understand. And if not, well what can I do?”

“Follow to understand” creates a subconscious connection to our past as a child. Not a powerful thing.

But it’s worse than this. It doesn’t provide a connection to what we know. It’s not as if we’re learning a new game in which we have no experience at all (e.g., chess). If we’ve been doing product development, we have a lot of experience. We want to access this. It not only saves time up front, but it will have us learn faster as we go.

The fact that this connection isn’t being provided is due to original delusion I mentioned - “in complex systems there is no understanding of cause and effect." This is wrong on several levels. When you say “complex system” it sounds like the system is complex. All of it, complex. This is not true. Systems are a blend of complex, complicated, simple, and chaotic relationships. We can understand many of these and take advantage of them. But only if we accept they exist.

This delusion is accepted because it’s uncomfortable to believe there is something we should know but don’t. It’s easier to pretend no one can know than feel bad about yourself for not understanding something we feel we should.

Another delusion is the belief that being purposefully incomplete is a good thing. That people have to figure things out themselves.

If you don’t have a theory (model) to explain things this may be true. But with a good model and some experience, you should be able to fill in the blanks.

The key is to not overwhelm people. To not make them reinvent the wheel.

When you recognize these delusions:

1. follow to understand
2. knowledge work is complex (instead of it has complexity)
3. being purposefully incomplete makes sense

It’s natural to say that an approach with these delusions is immutable. But this is just a reflection that we can’t tell if a change is an improvement or not. So, we must not change what someone is promoting. It also means that there will be useful practices that the approach being “followed” prohibits us from using. We can, of course, do them, but then there’s no reason to believe that the approach will work since it was designed to not be changed. And worse, people will require courage to go beyond its borders if they were told to do it (or were hired to lead using it).

Immutability also puts a boundary around where to work. This can be very harmful. Consider Edgar Schein's observation "we don't think and talk about what we see, we see what we are able to think and talk about." This creates dogma and being stuck.

Saying an approach is immutable is only required because of a weakness in the approach. It lowers the risk of people doing the wrong thing - but also prohibits doing something better. It's real purpose is to protech the brand by explaining "it didn't work because they changed it."

These delusions ignore how people are, listen, learn, react, and resist. It’s left out human-centered design. The irony is that Agile is supposed to be about people, yet these delusions ignore the human aspect of being a person. One of the most human things of all is misunderstanding takes place in communication.

George Bernard Shaw said: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”.

This is what humans do. Any approach that doesn’t accept this is ignoring a basic tenet of human behavior.

This is why Amplio is based on the theories of Flow, Lean, the Theory of Constraints, and Human-Centered Development. It's why Amplio University integrates how to explain concepts to people. Approaches must attend to the fact that humans are doing the work, the thinking, and, sometimes, the resisting.

Amplio helps you understand what's going on by presenting a set of First Principles, Mental Models, and Values as well as a set of Factors for Effective Value Streams.

The first principles of knowledge work are like the laws of what makes knowledge work efficient. First principles stand on their own. They are not defined but are discovered through observation and relentless evaluation. Violating them has consequences, typically creating waste and lost opportunities. They can be used to provide guidance as to what individuals, teams, and organizations should do or avoid. Those listed are Amplio’s best discernment of the most useful first principles.first principles

Factors for effective value streams provide the primary aspects of what makes value streams effective. While theoretically, just knowing first principles could guide people, using them is a bit abstract for many people. The factors for effective value streams provide a concrete way to see?if the workflows in value streams are effective.

Check out Amplio Foundations for more.

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