Visualizing Agility With The Cone of Uncertainty, Part 1

By James K Smith, linkedin.com/in/jamesksmith, [email protected]

In Part 1 of this article, James uses his favorite business graphic to illustrate how humans are already wired for agility. In Part 2, James will show you how to use the Cone of Uncertainty to help you create high-performing teams.

I love the Cone of Uncertainty. There is no other business graphic that helps us visualize idea refinement, clarification, and iterating over a problem to reach a minimum viable solution in such a simple way. In just two lines it embodies how effective a process based on agility can be at solving a problem. Consider:

When we are faced with solving a problem, we begin our attempt at a solution not even knowing what we don't know. Signal is insignificant, while noise is very high. Over time though, we keep nibbling away at the problem and when a solution is arrived at, signal is high (enough) and noise decreases substantially. The Cone itself illustrates not only increased understanding of the problem domain over time, but even more importantly, increased efficiency at understanding the problem domain and yielding a minimum viable solution in the soonest time possible.

That's the high level view. Let's overlay a process for increasing signal and reducing noise on top of our Cone. I'm going to illustrate this process with a real world example showing how humans are actually wired for agility when it comes to solving problems.

Many years ago, I owned a personal training studio that included some early model elliptical trainers. You know, those exercise machines that move your arms as well as your legs. The early models didn't come with more than just a couple of programs as I recall. And the common sales pitch at the time was that the elliptical made it easy to lose weight (what's wrong with that statement?).

So I took on a new client who I had using an elliptical exclusively to lose weight. Her training time consisted of 45 minute workouts, five days a week. In the beginning of her training, she was losing weight at a reasonable pace. It seemed like the elliptical was delivering on the promises the salesperson made to me.

But around about the fourth week, her weight loss started stalling out. She began losing less and less weight in the following weeks, even though she had made no changes in her diet. By the end of her eighth week, she had completely stalled out and wasn't losing any weight at all. So what happened?

Ok, let's take a look: Initially, the client's body was faced with a physical challenge – could even be life threatening. Benign exercise or real threat, the human body always goes into survival mode when faced with a challenge. So the body immediately executed a process specifically designed by thousands of years of evolution to respond to this threat. It began inspecting and adapting just enough to make it through the threat, but never more so. What's interesting is that as it was faced with a similar challenge again (the next workout), the client's body had learned something about that challenge. It used what it learned the last workout to help it inspect and adapt even more the next workout (increase signal, decrease noise). To be sure, there are mistakes the body will make along the way, but the body compensates by making mistakes that don't involve overcommitting to any solution. Overcommitting could mean death since it doesn't account for changes. Let's use our Cone of Uncertainty to visualize just what happened.

This is a view of the Cone sectioned into workouts. As the body begins working the problem, it becomes more efficient because it is repeating this survival process over and over, and gets better and better at responding to the exercise. Note that we don't tell our bodies to execute this process. Our bodies just do it thanks to instinct.

Consider how we respond to a survival threat by repeating these same techniques over and over:

1) Doing just enough, just in time to survive to the next threat. Never overcommit, since that encourages doing too much work and making bigger mistakes that we can't recover from.

2) At the same time, when our bodies are inspecting and adapting, they do so like our lives depend on it (meaning - a productive sense of urgency to work the problem is done instinctively).

3) Maximizing the amount of work not done. The body conserves energy, or has it available to take on extra threats or additional changes. Most importantly, less work means less time required to reach a minimum viable solution to the problem.

4) Since the process is instinctive, it assumes responsibility for our survival in its most elemental form. We don't have to tell our bodies to execute this process when faced with a challenge. We just do it.

What does all that sound like we're describing? Sounds like the Scrum process to me. Scrum is taking what we're already wired to do to solve problems and raising it to the team level.

So what is instinct for the individual becomes the ability to trust and follow the process for the team. And a high performing team executes Scrum almost instinctively.

As an aside, it should be obvious now what makes for an effective workout that will help you continue losing weight over a longer period of time. Refer back to the Cone. Don't give your body a chance to start increasing signal and reducing noise – keep it guessing by staying at the mouth of the Cone. Change your elliptical program every workout. Better yet, swap out every workout with a different calorie burning exercise.

Why Relying on Time Estimations is an Agile Anti-Pattern.

We are notoriously bad at time estimations for finding minimum viable solutions to previously unknown problems. That seems like a serious flaw in our ability to survive, doesn't it? Well actually, it's an incredible advantage. Refer to the Cone above. At workout 40, the client's weight loss had all but completely stalled out. Her body had adapted so well to the workout regimen, it had become a master at handling that physical challenge. It was doing just enough, just in time, and maximizing the amount of work not done, which is of course why she was no longer losing weight. At the same time, her body continued inspecting and adapting with a healthy sense of urgency as if her life depended on it.

Interesting. So her body never had a clue how long it would take to get to workout 40 for a minimum survivable solution (MSS), but still got to that MSS in the least amount of time possible. What it did though was inspect and adapt with urgency. We are so good at our survival process, we only need one unit of time to work with – URGENCY TIME. If our process is efficient as illustrated by a properly formed Cone of Uncertainty, it takes as long as it takes to get to MSS and we can't make it happen any faster. That's actually quite brilliant, because the reason we can't properly estimate the time required to solve a problem accurately is because that estimation assumes no change will occur in our problem domain. Additionally it assumes that we know all we need to know in advance of working the problem. And those assumptions are completely unrealistic.

So we instinctively execute a survival process that doesn't depend on time, or even knowing everything about the problem up front. Even so, we still manage to get to a Minimum Survivable Solution in the least amount of time. No wonder humans are survival machines and are the apex species on this planet.

Ok, so how do we get to the ideal Cone shape and not get trapped in the following Cone where signal is increasing so slowly there's a risk of never reaching a Minimum Survivable Solution in time?

Stay tuned. I'll provide you with a strategy on how to get to that ideal Cone shape represented by a high-performing team in our next article. Here's a closing thought: Organizational Agile is just as much a realization as it is a mindset.

Until next time,

James

James Smith has a 25 year career building high-performing technology teams and organizations for a multitude of industries. He enjoys working with startups to some of the largest corporations in the world, has held several highland games world records, and has pitched to VC using nothing more than napkin drawings and a bowl of M and M's. He claims there's only one truely always-optimizable XOR result in the universe, that either 2+2=4 or it doesn't, but not both. Otherwise, some of the best answers can be found in the grey areas.

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