Changing Software Development: Learning to Become Agile

4.5. Learning, Change, Innovation and Problem Solving

An old philosophy question asks: If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to it hear it, does it make a sound?

You may also like to yourself: If I'm told something and it doesn't change my behaviour, have I really learnt anything?

If you never learnt anything after today, would you behave differently from the way you behaved today? Unless you lived your life by a roll of the dice, there seems little reason to assume that you would. If you wore a big coat today because the weather was cold, then tomorrow you'd wear a big coat again, and the day after that. Unless you're able to learn that the weather is now warm, you'll keep wearing a big coat.

In the film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character is learning: he is aware that the day repeats itself and he learns a little bit more piano every day until he is a virtuoso. But nobody else learns: nobody else notices that the day is repeating, so they all behave in exactly the same way every day.

Informed choices such as what coat to wear, what supermarket to shop at or what brand of shampoo to buy are all the result of learning something that changes our behaviour. Sometimes this is single-loop learning – the weather is warm, so I wear a different coat – and sometimes this is double-loop – say, I become a vegetarian and decide to shop elsewhere for a greater variety of vegetables.

The relationship is even more obvious if we turn the question around: Why should we change anything ...