Changing Software Development: Learning to Become Agile

12.6. Three Interlocking Ideas

Behind the learning and change agenda laid out in this book are three key ideas:

• Drive to do better: No matter how well we're doing today, we can do better. In everything we do, there's always opportunity to improve. Problems are easy to find, but demoralizing: once we get past problems, we need to maintain our drive to find opportunities and repeat the process. We can always do better.

• Systems thinking: Although this book hasn't dwelt on systems thinking in detail – there are plenty of other books that do – it's key to helping us learn, change and improve. It isn't enough to improve single aspects of what we do. We need to look at what these aspects link to. This will help us to find new opportunities for improvement.

  There's a tension here: constantly applying systems thinking will lead us to examine bigger and bigger challenges. The bigger the challenge, the less is our ability to do anything about it. Some problems are so big that while we can make an improvement, it will have very little effect. It can be difficult to solve some big challenges because there are too many pieces (including people) involved.

  Sometimes we need to bound our changes in order to do anything. The danger is that improving one aspect of a system may impair a larger system.

• Continual change: The drive to do better should lead to continual improvement. But we can't solve everything at once, so change needs to be incremental.

Continual incremental improvement addresses the systems ...