“Agile is like tango - it’s about the passion, not about the steps” (Jeff Sutherland, tweeted by @jaredrichardson)

Wrong on many levels, Jeff. Oh, it’s a neat soundbyte, and if you don’t know tango and are feeling enthusiastic but anxious about agile it might give you a bit of a buzz. But saying tango is “not about the steps” is like saying music “is not about the notes”.
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A delicious quotation from Ian Nairn, in a letter to the Guardian this week (from Andrew Huxtable).

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Diana Larsen recently tweeted about an ideal team being one which everyone can be a coach — a mutually coaching team. There’s an important corollary to this: such a team must be a team of people willing and able to be coached. Often not a characteristic of software developers (and — dare I say it — not as prevalent amongst coaches as we’d like it to be). Requires humility, a willingness to accept that someone else’s way of doing things might be better than yours, a readiness to learn (yes, maybe from someone younger than you, or who you consider to be less experienced) and to change.

Ever since hearing about the architecture of rapid change and scarce resources I’ve wanted to talk to Maurice Mitchell, one of its leading advocates. I was delighted when he agreed to give an invited talk at SPA2010.
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I spent a fair amount of time last year participating in, and running, games of one sort or another. It’s always interesting introducing games into a team or organisation: you run the risk of appearing “out to lunch”, and you can’t, in the end, force a group to have fun and learn at the same time. You need to be sensitive as to what will work with a particular team, and maybe more to the point find a context to introduce a game or simulation where it makes sense as part of a team’s practices. Retrospectives are clearly a good place to start, as are any more-or-less formal workshops or training sessions you’re running.
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Some reflections on two recent agile conferences I attended (and ran sessions at). Both very stimulating, with a great deal of learning going on. Both raising questions for me in several directions.
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What sort of conversations can you have with your organisation about software development practice and process? By which I mean not only – what do you talk about – but just as importantly, what do you bring to the conversation that affects how you frame the discussion, and how do you improve its chances of creating lasting change?
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So, on the way down from the high of the weekend’s (theatre) improvisation workshop at the Spontaneity Shop. Tom Salinsky is a great teacher - experienced, thoughtful, direct, entertaining. It’s a great experience, too, to participate in a group that’s being led so well, and I learned a lot just by watching and listening.

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So when it all gets too much … what do you do?

After finally solving the problem with SEF links in my Joomla/Mojoblog site yesterday morning, I’d had enough - of PHP, CMS systems, plug-ins, Chunks, Snippets, Rails, the whole lot. So a day and a half off-line has cleared my head.

Staying with Joseph last weekend rekindled my passion for food, so I’ve been cooking (a hat-tip to Joseph for an amazing asparagus and salsiccio pasta recipe). Reading - finished Geoff Dyer’s wonderfully evocative But Beautiful, and almost (so nearly) finished the amazing 2666 by Robert Bolaño - at the point where I really don’t want it to end, I’m so into it. Playing, of course: there’ll be a (rare) musical blog shortly on Sor’s Op.6 studies, and the art of balancing the apparently simple with the intriguingly complex, and achieving perfection in the seemingly ordinary.

A visit to the RA’s impressive exhibition of prints by Kuniyoshi, with my daughter Evelyn and her partner. (Amazing colours, and in the earlier warrior prints in particular an overwhelming sense of movement. These were the original mass-media images, it was interesting to try to rewind my head to the days before screens, TV, video, films, where the only images were static ones).

Having been digging for a while, I found and downloaded a great performance of the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610, by the group Concerto Italiano. Immediate and vivid, and (unlike many performances) using small choral forces.

Helped of course by the gorgeous weather and a good bottle of wine! Head back in the game tomorrow, but it’s been a good weekend.

It seems to me that some of the thinking in complexity science is starting to have more effect on the way we think about software. The very first Scrum book, for example, has a section giving a complexity science view of how Scrum works, so this thinking is by no means new.

I’m finding that many people involved in agile projects are increasingly happy to think about the structural implications of complexity (those, that is, who can get beyond the “we’re at the edge of chaos - how cool is that” reaction). However, when considering software development as a complex adaptive systems, they lose the view of what it means to be adaptive. Stating the obvious here, but to adapt (1) means adapting to something, so you’d better get good at making sense of that something, and (2) means changing - explicitly and consciously doing something different.

I think there are a lot of people claiming to work in an agile way (and there are certainly many who aren’t) who are scared of changing, resist change, or simply don’t know how to change themselves, their teams or their organisations. The system of software is not just the end product that a team delivers - it’s the team, its tools, its memory (as recorded in change logs, wikis, IRC and mail trails) and more: this is the system that embodies complexity, and the system that must (but so rarely does) display adaptation.