Sowing Organic Change

by Deborah Hartmann Preuss on Jun 08, 2006 |

Kevin Rutherford is an Agile Coach in the UK, and one of the people behind Carnival of the Agilists, a monthly digest of notable Agile postings. Last week he wrote, on his own SilkAndSpinach blog:

"Through bitter experience I've come to recognise that change works best when it isn't inposed, and when it is allowed to occur over a period of time."

The tools he uses to foster more organic change include:

Current Reality Tree,
Simulations and
Hansei-kaizen.

The latter is a set of Japanese terms, used in the lean manufacturing arena. But by any name they are also key practices upon which Agile's empirical processes are built: relentless reflection (hansei) and continuous improvement (kaizen). This pattern is repeated in various ways in Agile methods - from micro (TDD unit testing) to macro (project retrospectives), and everywhere in between. Unfortunately, he hasn't provided a link for further reading on this thinking tool, but it's found throughout the agile literature - watch for terms like "reflection", "retrospective", "inspect-and-adapt', and, less originally, "learning". It even extends to management: Joshu Kerievsky of Industrial Logic teaches organizations to use management tests as yet another opportunity for incremental learning.

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Community comments

More info? by Michael Furtak Posted

Re: More info? by Deborah Hartmann Posted

More info? by Michael Furtak

This is interesting, but very light on information for those who are not that familiar with all aspects of the Agile process.

What is a "Reality Tree"?
What are involved in these "Simulations"?

Re: More info? by Deborah Hartmann

Hi Michael.
Agile coaches (and other kinds of teachers)are always creating new simulations... they're often proprietary tools of the trade, but sometimes they get published. Good sources are Bill Wake, Jean Tabaka who taught how to run this simulation at Agile2005 and those who attended would have her materials. The Lean and TOC schools have spawned a number of simulations - I'll use a simple one at Agile2006, but you can see a more complex one for teams.
And you can follow the CRT link from the blog above to the focusedperformance.com site which teaches about CRT.
(Hope these links work... :-)
deb