Fruits & Roots

The forest offers much but demands much too

Here’s the live-drawn slide from our recent keynote introducing The Forest & The Desert.

The big question we were answering was, “What do you see in The Forest?” Some people have never seen The Forest. Some have experienced it only briefly, that one team in their career that really clicked. So, for the uninitiated, for those without hope, what do you see in The Forest?

We want to be clear what we’re, well, “advocating” isn’t quite the right word. We stand in awe of what folks are able to accomplish in The Desert. We’re impressed with the value they create while creating at a fraction of their potential. However, we want to point out the possibility of The Forest as an alternative, since some folks claim it’s impossible.

The Forest isn’t impossible. It’s hard to get to from The Desert, that’s true. It’s fragile in a way—self-sustaining but easily disrupted. From The Desert it can sound unrealistic, a fairy tale. But here’s the story, whether you believe it or not.

The Fruits

In what follows we aren’t going to try to justify here why any of these things happen. Ask in the comments if you doubt. We just say, “In The Forest we see…” When the observation is a comparison (like “sooner”) the comparison is in relation to The Desert.

Here are some of the externally visible properties a Forest environment might exhibit:

• 0 bugs—Forest projects have close to zero bugs reported from production. Those that do manifest are dealt with, both symptoms & causes, before returning to feature work.

• Sooner—Forest projects deliver externally visible value sooner.

• More—Forest projects deliver more value per unit of time.

• Good news—Forest projects frequently deliver good news to the external world: sooner, better, cheaper.

• No blockers—Forest projects make progress even at large scale without waiting on other teams.

• Customer present—Forest projects include the people whose lives will be most affected by the software being written.

• Skills—Forest projects encourage the rapid development of outstanding skills.

• Demos—Forest projects demonstrate new customer-valued features every week.

• Experiments—Forest projects routinely discard risky changes that didn’t work out.

• Joy—Forest projects elicit laughter & satisfaction on the part of all participants.

There’s a book to be written about each of these topics, but that’s the outline.

Here’s the thing—almost everybody wants almost all of those properties, the fruits of The Forest. Folks may value various fruit more or less, but they are all attractive. If you could figure out a way to slice the fruits off & sell just them (e.g. “twice the work in half the time”) you’d probably have a good business. For a while.

The real fruits of The Forest, though, come at a price. It’s a price that’s uncomfortable to pay at first. After a time, though, the price seems like the only way to develop (which in fact it’s just the only way to stay in The Forest). The price is:

The Roots

The roots are the activities we tend to see within The Forest. It takes the combined efforts of the roots to produce the fruits we desire.

• Plan half—In The Forest we never plan for more than half of what we think we can accomplish.

• Collective code—In The Forest anyone can improve any part of the code at any time.

• Learning—In The Forest we optimize activities for learning, not production.

• Cycles—In The Forest we sync up with each other on various cycles: hour, day, week, month, quarter.

• Magic circle—In The Forest before we begin work we consciously set down our “me” goals & mindset & pick up “we”. When the cycle ends, we reverse the process.

• Incremental design—In The Forest we continually improve the design to accommodate new learning, new demands, new colleagues.

• MMMSS—In The Forest we continually figure out how to go forward together in Many More Much Smaller Steps.

• Programmer tests—In The Forest programmers are fully responsible for the reliability of their changes.

• Teaming—In The Forest it’s common to see 2, 3, 4, or more people collaborating on a single task.

• < 40 hours—In The Forest no one works more than 40 hours in a week.

• Relaxation—In The Forest folks take time to play.

The Trunk

The connection between the roots & the fruits consists of a couple of properties:

• Shared purpose—everyone involved is working in their own way towards the same goal.

• Community—folks in The Forest are connected various ways person-to-person.

No Roots, No Fruits

That’s one way to spot The Forest. Each Forest is a little different, but each is also similar. The claims may sound fanciful, but we’ve seen them time & again. We’ve also seen teams living in The Forest pruned out of their Desert companies for not fitting in. You can have the fruits over time, but only by investing in the roots, investing in community.

Message Kent if you’d like a custom remote talk for your engineering team.