I suspect I could have written a very similar argument on the subject of Complexological projects, or agent-based modeling, or machine learning or statistics. But for different reasons.
More box-stacking
A quick little coding kata
What is genetic programming?
Transverse section shows multiscale detail
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.