Two decades ago a small group met to share what they felt was new about how they developed software. Their operational observations were expressed as unexpected preferences and collectively dubbed "agile". The word stuck. But we might ask, what lead them to this unusual agreement?
We now know that their observations were so powerful that positive results have been had even when their specific methods were misunderstood and improperly applied. What then is this secret sauce?
Thompson recognizes a specific shift in mindset, the established set of attitudes held by those engaged in an endeavor, as the root of agile. The "agile mindset" then is the patterns of thought that come engaging in agile-like practices whatever they might be. We can escape this circular definition by looking more closely into what had changed about software two decades ago.
Computers were cheap. They weren't cheap yet but they were to become very cheap. And they would be personally owned. And linked together. And they would do nothing new without software, original software that did things yet to be imagined.
A few labs in Boston and Palo Alto put these soon to be cheap computers in front of children to see what they could make of them. The young mindsets were still open to new things they reasoned. What would they want? How would they be empowered by the brute force of technology humanized for their use?
The kids were curious. Not yet brilliant but curious in ways that the brilliant researchers had to struggle to remember. And theirs was a profession that honored curiosity. Imagine their dedication in the face of professional demands.
We are a curious species. Not so much so our Neanderthal ancestors who made the same stone tools generation after generation for a thousand generations. Could not one of them become bored, an anthropologist asks?
Our working life favors curiosity even if we at times forget this. I am reminded of my friend, an engineering manager, that was asked, like all employees, to work in the warehouse during the Christmas rush. Why, he wondered while restocking returns, did so many items go to one particular isle? He walks behind the shelves where bins were loaded to find the SKU numbers off by one on that side making every shipment wrong.
The Agile Manifesto authors, and the researchers they followed and even my friend in the warehouse, were all given space to be curious. They were privileged in a way that many then and today are not. Thompson reminds us that the agile mindset requires courage to work outside of expectation.
Only in a one-dimensional linear environment like working towards sales quotas does the shortest path to exceeding expectation pass through meeting expectation. So why to we shame those who take a chance on something different and punish them if it doesn't work out? Even in sales we will find that the small increments available without creative energy will be overshadowed by those who take unexpected leaps. Adherence to routine provides only a long-term path to failure.
Thompson describes one school systems journey toward a process of creative discovery that involved rapid trial and error with the understanding that even disappointment involves learning. This would be the "hacking" component of his agile mindset looking back to the kindest interpretation of that term rooted again in Boston's MIT. In both the educational and industrial versions, the hack must show creative opportunity within acceptable risk. This judgement comes from those closest to the problems: the students themselves, or the computer programmers that the Manifesto authors advised.
This last point can't be overemphasized. Creativity can most easily be motivated by recognition by one's peers. Peer groups immersed in the details at hand borrow from each other's successes in a way that does not easily breakdown into measurable parts. We expect these small clusters of original thought to behave as if they are one, a whole as if it is itself alive, motivated by a higher purpose shared by all within.