Rewilding Agile - Dave Snowden

David Snowden Blogs Re-wilding:
I want to develop the rewinding idea into a wider consideration of a different way of designing and managing an organisation, or indeed society. That gets in with the wide wider rewinding movement going in conservation. The term was coined towards the end of the last century as a way of arguing for the restoration of a natural balance in nature by reducing biodiversity loss and over-exploitation of the land. In the days of Covid, we should all pay more attention to this as the stress on the ecosystem and on animal life is increasing the volume of animal-to-human disease transfer and consequent mutation. Rewilding then also involves the reintroduction of apex predators and keystone species (or proxy versions thereof) to restore balance in nature. The idea is not without its problems, excessive focus on conservation can restrict the ability of people to earn sustainable livelihoods and the people affected are generally amongst the poorest. Read the full post here 👇
Re-wilding 1 of 2: thecynefin.co/re-wilding/

[@JosephAuslander]

This is great!! Dave, do you have any material on things to consider when training a customer to talk to tech?

[@thecynefincompany]

Thank you for your comment. Please check our Method Kit thecynefin.co/method-kits/ and Estuarine Mapping thecynefin.co/estuarine-mapping/

[@henrikmartensson2044]

Though I agree with most of the things said, I strongly disagree with the "Waterfall has value" idea. Waterfall is a degraded version of the methodology developed at the SAGE project in 1953-1956. Benington, who published the original waterfall paper in 1956, later said that he was misunderstood, and that he had left out important things that the SAGE project did, for example prototyping. He called Waterfall "disastrous".
Winston Royce, in 1970, also protested against waterfall. He is often mistakenly regarded as the creator of waterfall, but his paper is really about an iterative method, with prototyping.
In 1994, the US Department of Defence expressly forbid their subcontractors to use Waterfall, because of the disastrous results.
From a queuing theory point of view, Waterfall maximizes the internal build-up of Work-In-Process, which maximizes project lead time, risk, and cost.
There is great value to be found in traditional, heavyweight methods, like CPM, Critical Chain, the Spiral Method, RAD, and so on, but Waterfall has none of the desirable properties of those methods.
So why Waterfall?

[@henrikmartensson2044]

@@andropovstyle69 Snowden misses one important thing when he talks about Waterfall, the effects of large sequential batch transfers on lead time, and the subsequent effect on economics.
Some time ago, I read a pro Waterfall article that had an example of how to plan a small project. I wrote a blog post were I did two remakes of the planning, one with 90's style heavyweight methodology planning, and one with an Agile approach. Both the heavyweight method and Agile beat Waterfall by a lot.
Whether heawyweight/Critical Path planning or Agile works best is a different matter. That depends on circumstances, but Waterfall looses every time.
Here is the link. You will find the comparison towards the end of a way too long article: kallokain.blogspot.com/2023/09/waterfall-dark-age-of-software.html