Today my mother-in-law (a practicing psychiatrist) was bemoaning the current medical practice of substituting action for knowledge. In her world, many doctors will make rapid changes to their patients’ therapy. Their goal is to address the issues immediately presented (patient feels sad so Dr prescribes antidepressants) rather than taking time to understand the patients’ history or make changes incrementally and measure impacts. It feels like another example of our cultural compulsion to fix problems as quickly as possible.

Her comments made me question the core way that I evangelize!

Do Lean and Agile substitute action for knowledge? No. We use action to acquire knowledge.

The fundamental assumption that drives poor decision-making is that we have enough information to make a design, solve a problem or define a market. Lean and Agile’s more core tenet is that we must attack this assumption. We must assume that we can’t gather enough information to fully define our objective. The good news, is that even without much analysis we know a lot! We know:

• roughly what we want to do (road map)
• the first steps we should take (tactics)
• who will be working on the problem (team members)
• generally how much effort it will take (time & team size)
• who has the problem that we are trying to solve (market)

We also know that we’ll learn a lot more as we get closer to our target. Every delay in starting effectively pushed our “day of clarity” further into the future. For that reason, it is essential that we build a process that constantly reviews and adjusts its targets.

We need to build a process that acquires knowledge as progress is made and makes rapid progress.

In Agile, we translate this need into the decorations of our process: reviews for learning, retrospectives for adjustments, planning for taking action and short iterations to drive the feedback loop.  Agile’s mantra is “ready, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, …” which is very different from simply jumping out of a plane without a parachute and hoping you’ll find a haystack to land in.

For cloud deployments, this means building operational knowledge in stages.  Technology is simply evolving too quickly and best practices too slowly for anyone to wait for a packaged solution to solve all their cloud infrastructure problems.  We tried this and it does not work: clouds are a mixture hardware, software and operations.  More accurately, clouds are an operational model supported by hardware and software.

Currently, 80% of cloud deployment effort is operations (or “DevOps“).

When I listen to people’s plans about building product or deploying cloud, I get very skeptical when they take a lot of time to aim at objects far off on the horizon.  Perhaps they are worried that they will substitute action for knowledge; however, I think they would be better served to test their knowledge with a little action.

My MIL agrees – she sees her patients frequently and makes small adjustments to their treatment as needed.  Wow, that’s an Rx for Agile!