Be Fragile not Agile

 

It is dawning on me that in the world of project management (and business management in general), that we are too obsessed with managing complexity and reducing chaos which are becoming more inevitable in our increasingly dynamic and hyper-connected world.  The concoction of tools, methods and processes that has flourished in the Agile community in the past two decades has all been in one manner or other, simple variations to address complexity and the ensuing chaos that results from this.

Maybe it is time to go the other direction and embrace complexity and exploit chaos.  This is very new and I’m still thinking it through, but rather than the reductive process of extrapolating out the clearly defined project activities in a controlled iteration, could there be a way to let these “run loose” so to speak, see what kind of behavioral patterns and team dynamics result and just help facilitate the team to channel the flow patterns till they deliver what they need?

I know this is what many of the well know Agile methods are supposed to facilitate, but I don’t think they go deep enough or really exploit the small perturbations that could result in big breakthrough productivity gains.

In any event, rather than Agile I would like to call this Fragile project management.  Because it’s the kind of project in which you must constantly “handle with care.”  More explorations to come!