Skip to main content

Welcome to the not knowing ( we need to embrace uncertainty ) - Mike Cohn

In one scene of the TV show Mad Men, a young advertising copywriter (Peggy Olson) asks her boss (Don Draper) how to know which of her advertising ideas will work best.
He tells her she can’t know in advance, which frustrates her. He then adds that part of her job is “living in the not knowing.”

Part of our job, too, is living in the not knowing.

To survive--perhaps even thrive--here in the not knowing, we need to become comfortable with uncertainty. That means we can’t:
  • Know six months in advance exactly what will be delivered on what date and at what cost
  • Know exactly how much more productive one team is than another
  • Know how users will respond to a feature before they see it

Similarly, we can’t even really know things such as that velocity will go up when a good, new member is added to the team. It should, but it’s not guaranteed.
I can think of at least a couple of situations in which adding a good person to the team reduced velocity for more than the first few sprints while the team adjusted to the new member.
And, of course, we can’t know what external forces may affect our product, company or industry.

We are all living in the not knowing.

What can we do about it? As Kent Beck put in the subtitle of his book XP Explained, we need to embrace uncertainty. We can do that by:

  • Realizing that whatever uncertainties our organization faces are also faced by our competitors. To outdo your competition, you don’t need certainty. You just need to deal with uncertainty better than they do.
  • Not wasting needless time trying to eliminate uncertainty that cannot be eliminated. You could waste a lot of time striving for certainty. And living in the not-knowing, you’ll never reach it, so stop trying.
  • Acting on whatever information you already have or can get quickly and efficiently. In a world where we can’t know everything, the best recourse is to act on what we already know and then learn more by iterating on the product.
Welcome to the not knowing. The sooner you can get used to being here, the sooner you can succeed with agile,
Mike
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PDCA & SCRUM (or Agile); Why is it important?

The PDCA (Plan DO Check Act) cycle was made popular by Dr. W. Edwards Deming. This is a scientific cyclic process which can be used to improve the process (or product). This is cyclic in nature and usually time boxed. Plan  This is the first stage of the process. During this step the team discusses the objectives, the process and the clear conditions of exit (conditions of acceptance). This stage sets the measurable and achievable goals for the team. DO Team works together to achieve the objective set in the planning phase. Team works with the set of agreed process. Check Once the implantation is done team regroups and verifies the output and compares it to the agreed conditions of acceptance decided during the planning phase. The deviation, if any, is noted down. ACT If any deviation in planned tasks is observed during the Check stage, a root cause analysis is conducted. Team brainstorms and identifies the changes required to prevent such deviations in future. Team also
Post a Comment
Read more

Product Backlog: Should you write everything in user story format?

I like user stories a lot. They help everyone talk the same language and results in a better product. User story alone does not constitute product requirement. User story is supposed to be a place holder for discussion which should happen between the team, Product Owner and the customer. This discussion result in a common understanding which along with the user story content is the product requirement. This format captures the essence of requirement without confusing the readers User Story is only one of the many different ways in which requirements can be represented. This is not mandatory in any Agile “process”. But many have made this mandatory. I have seen many spending countless hours trying to write the requirements in user story format when they could have easily written that in simple one-line sentence in few minutes.   I have seen team members refusing to even discuss the requirement until product owner rewrote the requirement in user story format. Once I
Post a Comment
Read more

Why is potentially shippable product quality important

Agile teams work in iterations. During this period, they are supposed to work on product increments which can be “delivered” at the end of iteration. But how you know that the correct product was delivered? Many teams have different kinds of acceptance criteria and Definition of Done (DoD). But in many cases, this “done” is not the real “done” there might be some testing pending, some integration or review pending or anything else which prevents the actual use of the product increment. Many of these teams will need additional iterations to finish hardening their products. Many teams will implement different types of “gates” or approval steps to move to next stage. The free flow of product will be interrupted. They might end up doing mini waterfall within their agile process. Many don’t even realize this. This results in poor quality and requires additional effort to “harden” the product. Potentially Shippable Product increment The acceptance criteria and DoD should be modified
Post a Comment
Read more