Agile - Keeping the Conversation Going

When I was a student of philosophy, way back in the last millennium, I was often told by my tutors that all modern academic philosophy is really just a set of footnotes to the works of Plato.

I was recently reading Plato's disapproving comments on the dangerous new information technology of his day - writing - and suddenly realised that maybe Agile is doing a bit of Plato footnoting of its own.

"The fact is that this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, calling things to mind no longer from within themselves by their own unaided powers, but under the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves." (Plato, Phaedrus 67-71)

I often think - and say to people who come on our courses - that Agile methods are really about making sure that a bunch of people who have tried to get through life by making "marks that are alien to themselves" - i.e. computer programs, have to talk about what they're doing. Sprint planning, story prioritisation, story estimation, daily meetings, sprint retrospectives, pair programming, all of these are ways of making sure that we're talking about what we're doing and by doing so, hopefully, starting to make sense of it.

I'm also reminded of the words of another wise man, Taiichi Ohno: "Too much information induces us to produce ahead and can also cause a mix-up in sequence ... Eventually, it becomes impossible to make a simple change in the production schedule. In business excess information should be suppressed." (Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System, p.50)

There's a limit to what you can talk about. Agile methods (such as time-boxed meetings) use the limits of conversation to suppress excess information as Ohno recommends and keep teams focussed on what's most important right now, for this iteration.