6
The Rise of the Agilistas
Sometimes at Edwards they used to play the tapes of pilots going into the final dive, the one that killed them, and the man would be … screaming into the microphone, but not for Mother or for God or the nameless spirit of Ahor, but for one last hopeless crumb of information about the loop: “I’ve tried A! I’ve tried B! I’ve tried C! I’ve tried D! Tell me what else I can try!” And then that truly spooky click on the machine. What do I do next?
— Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff
In reflecting on the labs we ran, it became clear that first-generation social labs suffered a serious challenge. We called this the challenge of the right-hand side, which referred to the right-hand side of the U Process, concerned with realizing or cocreating. The right-hand side was all about action and in some ways the most familiar part of the work we did, and hence, most prone to habitus. Moving into action required the skills of crystallizing ideas and then prototyping. Beyond that, however, things got rather murky. While prototyping as an activity made sense, what did a prototype actually look like? Where does one take prototypes? What do you do with a successful prototype?
Looking at what worked during the Bhavishya Lab, I came to the conclusion that our design for it had followed an innovation process only up to a point, beyond which we fell back into a traditional planning mode—packaging up the initiatives that emerged from the lab into project proposals, staffing models, and Gantt charts. Habitus reasserted itself, partially because we ran out of theory to guide us as the pressure grew.
The approach we fell back on comes from a classic project management model, the Waterfall, which comes from software development and sees progress as a sequential movement, from top to bottom. Like all planning approaches it is built on the principle of BDUF (Big Design Up Front). But this expression of the planning paradigm has a terminal problem: it assumes perfect knowledge of the future.
Tom Rautenberg pointed out in one of his memos, “It’s not clear to me who here is capable of executing successfully on the ideas and plans presented in these initiatives. Asking for volunteers with the time and passion to work on these projects as fulltime initiative leaders is a scary recruitment process. Where’s the task-based competency model? Where’s the due diligence? Is anyone willing to reach out and find the most qualified professionals and/or organizations to lead these initiatives?” (italics added).
Bhavishya, however, retained its innovative approach despite the reassertion of habitus, largely by accident. Tex and the champions threw out the BDUF that the lab team presented to them because they weren’t convinced and it was politically acceptable in the Indian context to allow this kind of failure. The lab team was not “too big to fail.” In the end Bhavishya exemplified a prototyping approach.
After “failing” the lab team work and considering the next steps, the champions did not throw everything away. For example, the insight that we should intervene in the urban context—which had been ignored for a long time due to the complexities of informal settlements—resulted in a whole series of successful interventions. And so did the idea of using technology to address malnutrition.
After hewing to our approach so religiously, the fact that we resorted to BAU planning bothered me intensely. During the preparation phase of the lab, we had discussed how prototypes and initiatives would be managed. The main proposal on the table was to invite one of the Big Five consulting companies to come in and run a classic program-management process. I objected, citing a few instances where they had performed disastrously in the social sphere, but I couldn’t put forward a coherent alternative at the time.
How is it that after all the hard work we had done, we were resorting to Soviet-era modes of command and control? Is this really the best we could do? What practices were out there that could help?
These questions set me along the path of trying to figure out what worked about the labs, what didn’t, and why. What are they actually doing differently? Why did the Food Lab, the Bhavishya Lab, and, more broadly, social labs work?
THE PRACTICAL WISDOM OF SOCIAL LABS
In considering what parts of first-generation labs worked and what parts didn’t, I applied three rules for evaluating effective practice.
Rule #I: Make what works stronger
Rule #2: Let go of what doesn’t work
Rule #3: Discover what you don’t have
We have a bias toward what’s new, believing that new situations require new solutions. And we have a tendency of rejecting all past wisdom, which sometimes means throwing out what works alongside what doesn’t. Applying these three rules of thumb to our practice gives us a more nuanced view of what effective practice looks like.
In order to better understand which practices fall under the first rule, I turned to a distinction first posed by Aristotle and later revised by Danish professor Bent Flyvbjerg.1 In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes the distinction between three chief intellectual virtues, including scientific knowledge, art, and practical wisdom, which he names episteme, techne, and phronesis.2 Roughly, episteme is theory, techne is technology, and phronesis does not have a modern equivalent, but is perhaps the most relevant.
Aristotle begins his discourse on practical wisdom by observing, “The origin of action—its efficient, not its final cause—is choice, and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end.”3 During the course of his explanation of practical wisdom, Aristotle makes many distinctions of what practical wisdom is and isn’t, the main one being the idea that practical wisdom is embodied; it is something that an individual actually does, “that which is done.”
Practical wisdom cannot be something that is done to other people, as many policy-oriented approaches do. Policy formulation and decisions of state are thus of a different nature than phronesis.
Surgeon Atul Gawande in his book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, provides us with a study of the utility of phronesis-based approaches. Gawande draws on examples from fields as diverse as medicine, skyscraper design, and commercial flying. Gawande writes, “Under conditions of true complexity—where the knowledge required exceeds that of any individual and unpredictability reigns—efforts to dictate every step from the center will fail.”4
He argues that the humble checklist is an antidote to extreme complexity: “Checklists supply a set of checks to ensure the stupid but critical stuff is not overlooked, and they supply another set of checks to ensure people talk and coordinate and accept responsibility while nonetheless being left the power to manage the nuances and unpredictabilities the best they know how.”5
Gawande illustrates how phronesis works in the face of complexity. It operates by developing and then providing us with a set of heuristics—codified rules, or checklists—based on experience, which help us make decisions in highly complex situations.
Perception of the particular, as opposed to the universal, is a major distinction between practical wisdom and what we could consider natural science. It requires an especially disciplined approach that is somewhat alien to the social spheres (but not to social sciences), where typically the starting point is advocating for a Utopian vision.6
STARTING WITH CURRENT REALITIES
One of the most important distinctions made in all the work we have done is to recognize the gap between what is and what we desire. In other words, our starting point was not what reality we as lab participants desired. Our starting point was trying to discern the realities as they existed for the people that the project aimed to help. Even when considering the future, the starting point is to consider what is plausible before getting into what is desirable.
In modern philosophical terms, this perception of the particular is known as phenomenology, from the Greek phainomenon, “that which appears.” Founded in the early twentieth century by Edmund Husserl as a way of studying subjective experience, phenomenology developed multiple strands of thought.
A key philosophical challenge that arose from phenomenological approaches was the distinction between the subjective and the objective. Or, to get to the punch line, where does the world we perceive arise from?
A student of Edmund Husserl’s, Martin Heidegger, in his most famous book, Being and Time, attempted to reconcile the dualism of subjectivity and objectivity through the notion of Dasein, a German word that means being here and is sometimes interpreted to mean presence.7 Heidegger argued that the nature of the world is non-dualistic and that it does not make any sense to say that the subjective perceives the objective world; rather, the two are the same. (This is the origin behind the word presencing as used in the U Process.)
For our purposes, complex social problems present a particular challenge, which is, given their nature, how does one actually perceive the challenge in order to grasp and understand it? What does the “global financial crisis” actually look like? How does one perceive “climate change”? This becomes especially difficult if we accept principles of non-duality that mean we are not cleanly separate from these problems.
EVENTS RUPTURE DISPOSITIONS
To recap, the nature of complex adaptive systems is that their properties are emergent (arising from the interaction of parts), and these emergent properties are distinct from the properties of the parts (e.g., the wetness of the water is distinct from the properties of hydrogen and oxygen). So how do we see the emergent properties of the whole?
Systems thinking as a discipline approaches complexity by dealing with systems as wholes and not parts. This is accomplished through systems maps and heuristics, such as the Iceberg Model, which makes a distinction between events, patterns, and structures.8
In the Iceberg Model, what gives rise to patterns are structures that are largely invisible to us, “below the waterline,” where the greatest mass of the iceberg is found. In this context, a structure is more than physical; it is the product of a paradigm or mindset. The Iceberg Model assumes that the most effective intervention considers the whole system, or structure, as opposed to focusing on, for instance, the event level. The assumption is that an event is normalized, which, when repeated, gives rise to patterns, or trends. Each event by itself is therefore insignificant and unworthy of attention. Responding to events is the equivalent of dealing with symptoms rather than the causes; in other words, this approach is non-systemic.
A phenomenological approach sees the same hierarchy of events, patterns, and structures very differently. What we see time and time again in the world are events that are unpredictable, what Nicholas Naseem Taleb calls “black swan” events.9 These events can result in vast changes to patterns, structures, and our mental models. Recent examples of this include 9/11, the unlikely election of Barack Obama, the global financial crisis, and the Arab Spring.
History repeatedly testifies to the power of the singular event—man lands on the moon or the fall of the Berlin Wall. The trouble, of course, is knowing how to work in any meaningful way in the present with what is ontologically unknown and fundamentally new, something that does not presently exist but is emergent and may exist in the future?
The philosopher Alain Badiou addresses this gap in Heidegger’s work in his book Being and Event and articulates a theory of such ontologically novel events.10 He says, “I name ‘event’ a rupture in the normal disposition of bodies and normal ways of a particular situation. Or if you want, I name ‘event’ a rupture of the laws of the situation. So, in its very importance, an event is not the realization/variation of a possibility that resides inside the situation. An event is the creation of a new possibility”11 (italics added).
Applying Badiou to the Iceberg Model turns it on its head. An event, in the Badioun sense, falls outside our ontology, outside of being (and hence of knowing). It is a black swan. And black swans are the forces that disrupt BAU. An unforeseen event results in changes—in how we think, in our practices, in our policies, and in the world, whether we like it or not. In other words, events rupture dispositions.
This, of course, is true not only of events experienced collectively but also individually. On the bus during one of the Food Lab learning journeys, an executive from a food transportation company got into a debate with an activist about climate change. No one facilitated—it was just the two of them. Later on, the executive credited this event with a shift in his position on climate change. In this way, the lab served as a site for an event. Simply by putting diverse people together, the probability of such encounters increases.
As individuals, we mark out our lives through events in the Badioun sense—when we move out of our parents’ home, when we get married, when we first hold our children, and so on. Each of these events is special at the level of “possibility of possibility.” The unfortunate and the unexpected equally mark our lives; an accident, an illness, or a death also signals disruption and new possibilities, ones that we may not want.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out, “The world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.”12
Innovation is a black swan. All sorts of people, from artists to technologists to researchers, grapple with ideas that are new all the time without worrying about the kinds of problems that Heidegger or Badiou brought attention to. Practitioners, in other words, have no real problem imagining things that don’t exist. In practice this is what innovation, from its root novus, or new, is all about.
The general sense that inventors and artists are slightly crazy comes from the fact that they deal in things that don’t exist for the rest of us. There is a mysterious aspect to the act of creation. Imagine the first time Gustav Eiffel, who conceived of the Eiffel Tower, told people about the idea. How did they react to the idea of a tower made of steel bigger than anything ever seen before? How does one prove that this is the right thing to do? Imagine if they had said, “Can you prove to me this makes sense?”
This is Badiou’s point—that events fall outside of what currently exists and hence outside of conventional modes of knowing. There is no proving them; there is only doing them and learning from this doing. If we internalize this idea, it has profound implications about how we think about and attempt change in the world.
In all this, Heidegger is pointing out that the objective and the subjective are inseparable—there is no “outside.” Everything is “inside.” This insight, on the non-dual nature of being, is the philosophical backstory to the theory of action presented here, a theory of how to intervene in the world with all its complexity and messiness.
Philosophically, the Heideggerian position is that we are the systems we wish to change, and the systems we wish to change are inseparable from us. Admittedly, this is a very difficult request to make of people, particularly those of us who are classically trained to believe in objectivity and scientific neutrality. Our usual response to challenges that are too hard to grasp whole is to separate them into manageable problems or parts.
This idea of presence is a key part of the U process. Presence is a way in which the self and the other become the same. Heidegger saw presence as resolving the dualism of subjective and objective, and drew on the notion of Dasein. According to Heidegger, the route to ontology (the nature of existence) is through radical phenomenology. That is, if it is rigorous enough, phenomenology will allow us to understand the nature of reality. Badiou builds on Heidegger by saying that ontology does not cover everything because there are also events, which includes moments of insight as well as those moments when the world experiences something new. These events give rise to new systems, structures, and realities.
Badiou makes the radical point that these ruptures that result in a recasting of truth come prior to their verification. In other words, we cannot generate new systems, new structures, and new realities that are verifiable prior to their coming into being.13
The Bhavishya Lab, to take one example, was an event in this sense but it was also a site for events. And it succeeded in its disruptive goal. If Badiou calls a rupture with the present an event, then social labs are an attempt to create an event that introduces to participants the possibility of something ontologically new. A way of provoking a rupture, a new system in which children are not malnourished, a world where our resources challenges are better managed and so on—this is how I understand social innovation.
We have to keep reminding ourselves that such outcomes cannot be theoretically falsifiable in advance. We cannot, in other words, know what new solutions to problems and challenges are before they are created, discovered, or invented; otherwise we would have implemented them already.
Where we demand certainty, or falsifiable theory, before we act, we are essentially asking for an elimination of risk and failure. It’s a bit like asking for a guarantee of a great insight, a great discovery, or a great piece of art. As far as being innovative is concerned, this is impossible. When we examine how scientific and technological development proceed, we see that this is a wellknown fact. It’s the difference between buying a great work of art versus supporting the development of a great artist. The genius of Silicon Valley is in recognizing this insight and building an ecology that increases the probability that a start-up will succeed.
When we loaded participants into buses and trains and sent them to observe the phenomenon of child malnutrition and when we asked participants to eat what the families of the malnourished were eating, we were embarking on acts of perception. In mapping out systems and attempting to grapple, however crudely, with the whole system, we were trying to understand the processes by which child malnutrition was constructed and, hence, how it could be deconstructed.
All of these actions rest philosophically, on the practical wisdom and the practical philosophy of Aristotle, Heidegger, Badiou, and their contemporary commentators. In contrast, BAU strategies are primarily rooted in episteme and techne. The overlap between these two types of intellectual virtues gives rise to the modernist planning paradigm and technocrat strategies. The horrors of modernist technocratic paradigms missing phronesis are marvels of science and engineering. My bafflement fifteen years ago when I left the university was at how modern physics was taught. Why were we not being taught the practical wisdom required to wield the products of episteme and techne? It seemed to me that physicists needed to understand the profoundly social implications of their science, such as the nuclear bomb. This would require a degree of practical knowledge or wisdom that went beyond the physics laboratory. But this had no place in how we were taught.
The promise of a partnership among the realms of techne, episteme, and phronesis is the promise of a partnership of diverse intellectual virtues that together represent the best of humanity. Now, perhaps more than any period in human history, we have a profound need for what Aristotle called phronimos, the person of practical wisdom.
What I witnessed and learned throughout the last decade is phronesis. All the teachers I worked with—Myrna Lewis, Adam Kahane, LeAnne Grillo, Joseph Jaworski, Otto Scharmer, Matt Gelbwaks, Grady McGonagill, and many others—are phronimos, people of practical wisdom.
The nature of complex social challenges means that entire teams of phronimos are required to grasp a situation and make decisions about what to do in situations of great complexity.
THE RIGHT STUFF
It took only three years to act on Rule #3 (discover what you don’t have) in answer to Tom’s question, “Where’s the task-based competency model?” Then it took another three years of practice to figure out how to make it work within the context of social labs. The approach is called Scrum, and it is built on top of a software development philosophy called Agile. Scrum and Agile are textbook examples of phronesis. They are vastly superior to the neo-Soviet, command-and-control, waterfall project-management approach so common today.
In his study Unlearning Project Management, David A. Schmaltz writes, “Koskela and Howell observe that most project work is more like a scientific experiment than a finely determinable set of performance criteria. In scientific experiments, we progress even when our experiment fails, not only when it succeeds. Our plans are frequently hypothetical, intended to guide value creation, not simply blueprints guiding assembly.”14
In early 2001, seventeen “independently minded practitioners” came together and penned “The Manifesto for Agile Software Development.” The Agile manifesto is a call to arms against Big Design Up Front, and it represents a genuinely radical break in how software is developed. It articulates four values:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Scrum was developed on top of these values. The basic ideas that constitute Scrum are startling in both their simplicity and audacity.
Teams work together at the start of a project to articulate a success scenario. Once this scenario is articulated, the team brainstorms a list of all the tasks they need to complete in order to achieve success. This list is called the backlog.
Then teams are organized into cycles, composed of twenty-four-hour periods and longer lengths of time, say, a week or two, called sprints. (Sprint lengths can vary.) On the first day of a sprint, the team decides which tasks from the backlog it will attempt to complete during that sprint, which might be a week or perhaps two.
Once this is decided, the team scrums (basically huddles) every twenty-four hours. They report back to each other what they are going to do in the next twenty-four hours and what they need help with. A coach then troubleshoots problems outside of this short meeting. A daily scrum might last just fifteen minutes.
Once a team completes at least one sprint, the weekly planning meetings include a retrospective of what was done the week before. The goal is for teams to sprint until they complete all their tasks, thus achieving the success scenario.
One of the radical parts of Scrum is that the backlog of tasks can change dynamically while a team is engaged in a sprint. These changes do not alter what the team does during a sprint. Rather, at the end of the sprint, the team goes to the backlog to see what to do in the next sprint.
Under the four values in the manifesto are twelve principles. Decisions for what tasks to undertake are guided by providing value to the customer on an ongoing basis, as laid out by the first principle: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” The second principle is “Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.”
In Scrum, successful teams learn to establish what is called a stable velocity, where velocity represents the amount of work a team is able to complete during a sprint. This leads to establishing a sustainable pace, or a realistic pace for delivering the work, based on one of the principles in the manifesto: “Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.”
Teams, in other words, focus on building working prototypes that actually add value in the here and now, as opposed to some time in the distant future. This is the approach that we tried to take in all of our first-generation social labs. The point of a prototype is to start to deliver results as soon as possible and, in the process of iterating, to improve. That is the difference between a pilot and a prototype.
Why are agile approaches so well suited to complex social challenges? The concept of an agile approach arose from practitioners trying to figure out a better way of developing software, which was getting exponentially more complex each day. The conditions under which this approach was developed are similar to the context in which we were developing prototypes.
BDUF, the waterfall, and traditional planning are all fragile approaches, in the sense that the more stress put onto a system, the more likely it is to buckle and break. The planning-based approach finds its highest political expression in the Soviet Union, an entity that lived and died by planning. As our context becomes more obviously complex, we will become increasingly aware that neo-Soviet approaches put us squarely on the road to collapse.
Agile development, on the other hand, represents an “antifragile” approach.15 In the midst of uncertainty, change, and complexity, agile teams—if properly set up—get stronger. Their development muscles grow as teams practice and get better at internalizing agile processes and delivering value in multiple forms of capital. Finally, agile processes are all about timely responses to the unplanned event in order to create more value.
Agile, in other words, eats black swans for breakfast.
My introduction to Scrum and Agile came through agile trainer Matt Gelbwaks. In early 2009 Matt and I initially spent a day together in our US offices, where we came up with a rough, back-of-the-envelope method for how to apply agile approaches to the right-hand side of the U Process.
Implementing the agile approach was not easy. This was partly because it represented such a quantum shift in culture, and no one—not us, our staff, or our clients—understood this new culture. Lab team members would constantly ask, “But what’s the deadline?” and we would explain it the same way every time they asked: the end of the week if the task was on their list that week.
Agile development demands multiple shifts in perspective, ranging from how we work with clients to how we promise and deliver on results. To experienced project managers and clients, these shifts don’t necessarily make sense when viewed individually. The other reason why this is difficult in practice is that it demands discipline. And this discipline is hard.
The difficulties were both external and internal. They were external in that we had to understand and master a different way of working with new processes and protocols, where it was not obvious what to do. The internal difficulties involved practices that did not make sense to us, which provoked emotional reactions and resistance.
Interestingly, the person who took to agile development the most quickly was Leo Eisenstadt, the youngest person on our team. Leo, in contrast to the rest of us, is a natural agilista. He has no emotional attachment to planning-based approaches. He does not care about how things have been done traditionally; he wants to know what works in the here and now.
If BAU approaches are akin to flying a plane on autopilot in a storm, then agile approaches are more like a test pilot flying a prototype plane into the heart of a storm. The test pilot actively pushes the plane beyond its known limits in order to gather information on how to improve its performance. In fact, this is where the expression “pushing the envelope” comes from, an envelope being an aeronautical term that describes the safest outer boundary for an aircraft.
In his 1979 account of the first astronauts, Tom Wolfe explores what makes someone want to sit on a rocket and wait for the fuse to be lit. Many of these first astronauts were experimental test pilots. In his exploration of the psychology of these pilots and what drove them, Wolfe coined the phrase that became the title of his book—The Right Stuff. When it comes to complex social challenges, agile provides us with a sense of “the right stuff” we need to be cultivating.