Attracted To The Desert (Or The Forest)

Attractors

One of the initial reactions we are getting to Forest & Desert is “My company is a little bad but it’s not that bad” or “There’s really no difference”.

Metaphors We Live By claims all metaphors are physically based & that “up” generally maps to “good”. With this in mind, if we treat software development as an optimization problem, we would use a fitness function where more was better. “Value”, for example, would work.

The problem with this rendering is that it confuses our intuition about an important part of the system dynamic—attractors.

Attractors

If the space of all possible ways to develop software was flat & featureless, then we’d expect a wild variety in development styles. Instead, we tend to get a few recognizable styles. It’s not that everyone starts at the same place, it’s that there are a few directions that tend to tug on change. Change enough times & you end up in a similar place to many of your peers. They’ve been going through a similar process.

Attractors don’t guarantee identical outcomes. Everyone is going to keep changing. It’s just that changes tend to pull back towards the attractor more than they pull away from it. This persistence of attractors is not accounted for in the “more value is better” rendering of software development.

Reverse The Axis

Let’s make a strong assumption to start—communities of people are generally productive (with exceptions) except when they are interfered with. It’s not that we want to push more value, what we’re trying to do is eliminate waste.

(You Lean Manufacturing folks will recognize where we stole “waste” from.)

Why are we having this planning meeting? Is it pure waste? Let’s try eliminating it. Oh, no, that creates bigger waste under our current conditions. Resume meeting.

Now we can feel, in our bodies, the effect of attractors. We try something different, but then we’re more likely to go back than to go forward. We tend to slide down to that more desirable state.

Conclusion

Now we can respond to those saying, “Forest, desert, whatever.” Those two spots, even though they exhibit the same amount of waste, are not at all the same. On the desert side, yes you can improve, but only so much. The forest has more potential. Where you’re going changes where you are.

P.S. Slope Matters

Now that we’ve drawn all these illustrations maybe we made a fundamental mistake. It’s easy to lose the forest. We’ve seen one person come or go, one policy instituted, & the whole team shifts from forest to desert. This distinction doesn’t come through the above illustrations.

Maybe the illustration should look like this:

Climbing out of the desert is hard because it’s so steep. Leaving the forest is easy by comparison. But then this illustration seems to imply that the forest is much bigger than the desert & that’s backwards, so maybe we’ll just leave it alone for the moment.