This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Simplicity and Complexity
Good managers fail because they don’t understand the difference between simplicity and complexity.
Command-Control management is insufficient to manage in complex ecosystems. Both silver bullets and Command-Control management seek easy solutions, craving a return to simplicity and simpler times.
I recently read a passage in an intriguing book called Making Sense of Wine that offered a view that, counter to popular opinion, we may actually prefer complexity over simplicity.
- It appears that we are, in fact, set up to respond favorably to complexity. Decades of work in experimental psychology have revealed that when people are free to choose between a simple visual image and a more complex one, they gravitate to the complex. . . .
- What satisfies us so fundamentally about complexity is still the subject of speculation, largely in the academic field of aesthetics. It appears that we favor. . . uncertainty or lack of predictability.
- The more things are jumbled, the more ‘information’ can be conveyed at one time. . . . In short, there must be both pattern and uncertainty (complexity) for sustained interest.
- —M. Kramer [1989], pp. 23, 24.
The final sentence of this passage crystallizes the philosophy behind Adaptive Software Development. ASD is a framework, a pattern, which provides some boundaries and some fundamental principles. At the same time, by being a framework, it remains open to, and moreover acknowledges explicitly, uncertainty and turbulence.
We are drawn to serial, non-iterative methods because they appear to be simple, silver-bullet approaches to managing complexity: “Just follow these 1,432 simple, sequential steps and you will be successful.” But, possibly at some fundamental, philosophical level, what we really crave is a more holistic approach—one that speaks more to our sense of aesthetics than to our fixation on certainty.