So with the new Work Sea­son start­ing on April 1, I’ve spent some time revis­ing my active project port­fo­lio. A few shifts, a few start-​​of-​​the-​​month and tax-​​time digres­sions, but on track again.

One delayed item came to fruition this week, as I spent a lovely two-​​day trip in Cleve­land vis­it­ing Lean­dog, an agile soft­ware stu­dio I’ve heard a lot about. They have a nice open door pol­icy, and wel­comed my pry­ing “let me watch you do it” vis­its both morn­ings with grace. Had a nice (but brief) chat and lunch with Zee Spencer, Angela Harms, and Jason Felice, gave a “light­ning talk” (I think I yam­mered on for an hour) at CleRB about genetic pro­gram­ming, and spent Fri­day morn­ing chat­ting with Lean­dog founder Jeff Mor­gan, from whom I will even­tu­ally learn where to buy a pizza with egg on it in Cleve­land. And quick meet­ings with a num­ber of other folks, notably Matt Bar­comb and Michael Nor­ton, to be con­tin­ued next time.

There were three main rea­sons to go to Leandog.

First, because I know at least four inter­est­ing peo­ple who have gone to work with Leandog—sought them out, I think—and that’s inter­est­ing. Since I want to make places peo­ple seek out, it’s worth­while merely grow­ing that social net­work one more step out, adding more peo­ple who can have such allure. Rule one: Always add inter­est­ing peo­ple to your network.

Sec­ond, because after eight years I still con­sider myself as work­ing on a long-​​term project that’s equal parts com­plex sys­tems stuff, com­mu­nity design, and agile project man­age­ment. I love oppor­tu­ni­ties to see healthy, pro­duc­tive, community-​​driven work­lives like the Lean­dog folks seem to have. Workan­tile is a step towards what I have in mind, but it’s not the thing. Mix­ing in some Leandog-​​style struc­ture will be helpful.

And third: because peo­ple complain.

I hear a cho­rus of dis­may and dis­ap­point­ment com­ing from the founders and early adopters of Agile (from way back before it was called “Agile”). They’re dis­mayed or dis­ap­pointed in the way the move­ment seems to be going, the way things shift as more peo­ple start “doing” it in a cor­po­rate cul­tural set­ting. Or say­ing they’re doing it…. And in turn there are peo­ple tout­ing “post-​​agile” and “anti-​​fundamentalist” approaches to the same stuff.

It’s like a car­toon exam­ple from Andrew Abbott’s The Sys­tem of Pro­fes­sions, frankly.

Cross­ing the Chasm was always, in my dot­com days, con­sid­ered some­thing to be sought, and you’d think any­body who founded or pro­moted a worldview-​​changing approach would be pleased when all of a sud­den a bunch of hith­erto deaf and blind main­stream adopters showed up ask­ing earnest questions.

But that’s not always the way it feels. I suf­fer from this myself some­times, when run­ning into some­body from a totally dif­fer­ent back­ground, who appears as though he’s just using our words to describe his old bor­ing bad harm­ful worldview.

And that’s inter­est­ing. A trend in my life.

As I’ve said before, I remem­ber when Chaos The­ory started to be invoked to math up all kinds of mar­ket­ing bull­shit, and how the actual math­e­mati­cians and physi­cists said their work was being sub­verted. About how the com­plex sys­tems research com­mu­nity still has this bad taste in its mouth from new uses and abuses of “emer­gence” and “edge of chaos” in mun­dane worka­day set­tings like con­sult­ing and pol­i­tics. About how those of us in the early 90s who wanted to do com­pu­ta­tional biol­ogy got all pissy when the bioin­for­mat­ics peo­ple took the mind­share away and made it mean “data­bases and string han­dling algo­rithms”, not actu­ally mak­ing dig­i­tal organ­isms like we had planned. And the noises old col­leagues are mak­ing right now to what they per­ceive as “com­modi­ti­za­tion” of genetic pro­gram­ming (as if that were a thing). And lately the ten­sion cowork­ing peo­ple have voiced over the “cor­po­ra­ti­za­tion” of cowork­ing, and threats they per­ceive about it being trans­formed into a tool for com­pa­nies to make quirky “inno­va­tion fac­to­ries” (as if that were a thing).

A trend, as I said. Enough data just from my per­sonal expe­ri­ence to call that social dynamic inter­est­ing. It feels like some kind of coun­ter­point to the innovator’s dilemma: a sense that when an inno­va­tion starts to take off, it’s out of con­trol of even the founders and core philoso­phers, those with a deep per­sonal inter­est in see­ing it suc­ceed on their terms. “No, trust me, I invented it: you’re doing it wrong.”

So I went to Cleve­land to think a bit, and see one of these chasm-​​crossing transitions—the agile one—as it’s happening.

From what I saw, Lean­dog attracts peo­ple who have strong tech­ni­cal skills, but who also work well with peo­ple. They believe that some companies—the ones falling on the scale some­where between floun­der­ing and try­ing to improve—can actu­ally learn and adapt and become more agile. And that “becom­ing more agile” means some­thing real and use­ful, about chang­ing cul­ture, not adopt­ing diluted ritual.

All my evi­dence argues that Lean­dog is good peo­ple, and they have good cus­tomers that are being helped and changed. Not because (as a com­menter said recently) Cleve­land is some kind of back­wa­ter where they’re just now catch­ing up, but because things are dif­fer­ent every­where.

That’s my point.

I’m not con­cerned with evan­ge­liz­ing agile busi­ness prac­tices. That will sort itself out. I’m much more con­cerned about some macro-​​scale cul­tural prob­lems com­ing down the road.

There’s an omi­nous sense in the air that many folks express—the one that Umair Haque in par­tic­u­lar seems to riff and run with so much. The sense that things have all gone to hell and peo­ple aren’t pay­ing atten­tion to the big pic­ture and the new ideas.

I think that por­ten­tous sense has per­fused Amer­i­can cul­ture before: at the end of the Gilded Age, and maybe also before the Civil War. And it drove us dan­ger­ously close to a kind of pop­ulist fascism.

The Cas­san­dra schtick about how Nobody is Doing it Right, and we need a Rev­o­lu­tion, and Change Agents Need to Change Stuff, it sounds to me an awful lot like the peo­ple talk­ing that talk have never really been any­where, or trav­eled much. “What these peo­ple need,” and “They ought to do some­thing,” are often fol­lowed by, “…if they don’t we will.”

There is no sin­gle “they”. There is no sin­gle “we”. Peo­ple who tell you there are—you watch out for them.

So I drove across Ohio last Fri­day. And that’s the third reason.

Cleve­land is an inter­est­ing town, not least because I grew up in the sub­urbs. Reduced in a sense to an inter­me­di­ate place, it was once a core indus­trial pow­er­house, and one that didn’t fall as far as Detroit; it was the first and best of the Mid­west Maker Towns; it seems rel­a­tively untouched by sprawl, and was already pre-​​stressed eco­nom­i­cally before the Great Reces­sion started.

I drove across north­west Ohio, the slow road: Route 6, all the way from Pub­lic Square in Cleve­land to Bowl­ing Green, with a side-​​trip or two to San­dusky and Fre­mont and Grand Rapids.

And it reminded me that the future is never evenly dis­trib­uted. To con­sider a sin­gle cen­tral­ized solu­tion to the prob­lems I saw across that cross-​​section, to imag­ine that the strengths and skills and beliefs and desires and inten­tions of all the peo­ple along that route as if they were iden­ti­cal or typ­i­cal or average—or even com­men­su­rate—is fool­hardy.

I drove past farm work­ers’ hov­els out­side Fre­mont, and sprawl­ing mid-​​century colo­nial “cot­tages” along Lake Erie with lovely gar­dens tended by the own­ers, and empty shop­ping cen­ters and lively down­towns. Antiquing towns (Grand Rapids, OH), recov­er­ing mill towns (Huron and Lorain), unchang­ing but sub­tle sub­urbs like Avon Lake, ram­shackle lost towns like Sandusky.

Through the years I’ve rid­den the roller coaster of early-​​adopter-​​enthusiasm five or six times, and every time that enthu­si­asm is sup­planted by hip-​​rats-​​leaving-​​the-​​sinking-​​ship you don’t under­stand what we were try­ing to do grip­ing. I do it. Peo­ple around me do it. And it’s finally start­ing to sink in that there’s noth­ing quite so dan­ger­ous as the glib map­ping of one’s per­sonal world­view onto the actual world.

Not news, sure. But I think it’s worth an effort to be reminded.

I ended my mean­der­ing mus­ing drive at Seed Cowork­ing in Toledo, who had an open house to show off their loca­tion and thank/​solicit Kick­starter sup­port­ers (which I am one of).

I stood around yam­mer­ing like an idiot with some Toledo folks I over­heard talk­ing about “get­ting an agile group together”, includ­ing a nice man with a startup, and some Seed folks, and a fel­low from BGSU.

And the Toledo folks made Ann Arbor sound so cool. I wish I could visit that Ann Arbor some day.

It’s funny how folks think of our provin­cial lit­tle mill town of Ann Arbor as if we were an edgy rev­o­lu­tion­ary thought leader, and not a city wannabe that’s never felt any real eco­nomic pain. Instead of a town run on the prin­ci­ple that Town­ies are early adopters and founders of New Polite Lib­er­al­ism, and that these new peo­ple and kids who come in here try­ing to build build­ings and rent apart­ments are just igno­rant new­com­ers dilut­ing the pure vision of our lit­tle Town of the Mind.

It’d be funny if it weren’t sad. It’s what dri­ves peo­ple away, that sentiment.

In a word: “con­ser­vatism”. Not the ridicu­lous pas­tiche float­ing around in polit­i­cal cir­cles these days, but the Burkean kind that’s well-​​meaning and fru­gal at its best, that hon­ors diver­sity and let­ting peo­ple have their own reins. But it’s run through with the anger and melan­choly you feel when you real­ize your kid isn’t just act­ing out, she’s mak­ing bad deci­sions, and also a dose of the eye-​​rolling you do when an earnest touchy-​​feely per­son says they want to start a com­pany that’s the next Google, as soon as they find a tech­ni­cal cofounder to work with.

It’s the same sen­ti­ment that makes you dis­miss the small suc­cesses of peo­ple around you, as you are busy striv­ing to pre­serve or revive Fun­da­men­tal Truths.

Because you really did have a good idea, once. You had the best inten­tions in the world, but after a few years you got tired of being the lone voice in the wilder­ness. And now these new­com­ers, these mun­dane folk who say they’ve heard some­thing that sounds an awful lot like what you were try­ing to say back when you still cared?

Well, they’re too late, as far as you’re con­cerned. It’s not the same, they’re miss­ing the point, they’re dilut­ing your crys­talline ideas.

But I am reminded: It’s never the same.

Go visit some­body new. Things are dif­fer­ent some­where else. And when you get back home, maybe things will be dif­fer­ent there, too. Espe­cially if you feel strongly that a rev­o­lu­tion is called for: per­haps there is one going on there, or will be here when you get back.

Or maybe it already came and went, and you just missed its threads out there on the face of the world. Maybe it’s been hap­pen­ing, here and there, all along.