Category:
Complex Systems (29)

Complexity versus Lean

This is the presentation I made for the LESS2010 conference in Helsinki. I will repeat it again at XP Days Benelux. Hope you like it. Upd...

Read more

Simplicity: A New Model

Note: This article will be is part of the book Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders. Ah, simplicity. We all...

Read more

Scientific Case for Bottom-Up Rulemaking

In his book Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity computer scientist and psychologist John Holland describes a generic pattern f...

Read more

Management 3.0: The Era of Complexity

I know. Management 3.0 is a silly name. We already have Web 2.0, Government 2.0, Project Management 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and RSS 2.0. And...

Read more

Managers Are Not Game Designers!

Conway’s Game of Life has always been a classic example of a complex system. In designing his game John Conway found that some sets of ...

Read more

Management: A Deceptive Metaphor

The observation from scientists is that rules in a complex system must be tuned for the system to be both stabilizing, lively and creativ...

Read more

So Now You’re an Agilist, What’s Next? (Video)

This is the video of the talk I did at the Agile Eastern Europe conference in Kiev, a few months ago. The talk is called "So Now You...

Read more

Emergence in Development Teams

When trying to translate the concept of emergence to teams, we can recognize a host of interesting phenomena. The first is the possibilit...

Read more

Self-Organization vs. Emergence

This is the 3rd post in a trilogy about self-organization. The first one was Self-Organization vs. Anarchy, and the second was Self-Organ...

Read more

The Danger of Lean: Ignoring Social Complexity

After reading three books about Lean software development I feel slightly uncomfortable with the heavy emphasis the Lean community seems ...

Read more

What’s in a Word? From Science to Software

In my previous post (Are We Abusing Science?) I wrote that we need to be careful when applying terminology from the sciences to software ...

Read more

Are We Abusing Science?

In agile software development we regularly hear references to scientific terms such as self-organization and emergence. Next week, when I...

Read more