Freedom within bureaucracy, or reaching hackstability

Meet barbarians

Meet civilisations

5 minutes

• Yay! Groups of 4!• Create sticky notes with commonalities

between barbarians and people practicing agile software development

• Create sticky notes with commonalities between civilizations and large organisations

Agile Bureaucracy

Civilizations and large organisations =

Bureaucracy

What is bureaucracy?

David Graeber:A mechanism for the efficient extraction of value,

ultimately resting on the threat of violence

Sociopaths

Clueless

Losers

The McLeod hierarchy, or the average bureaucracy

Why the Asterix & Obelix village never became a roman empire

Clueless!!!

CluelessLosers

Guess what?Julius is a barbarian too!

The roman empire lasted 507 years

Explore-Exploit

Barbarians explore

Barbarians discover

Barbarians exploit

Barbarians exploit

efficiently

Barbarians abandon

Bureaucracy

Agile

The difference

Exploration• Barbarian• Finding a business model• Complex domain• Value discovery• Creativity and collaboration• Bottom-up intelligence

Exploitation• Bureaucracy/Civilization• Running a business model• Complicated domain• Value extraction• Rules and Procedures• Top-down control

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ― R. Buckminster Fuller

The cycle is speeding up!

Barriers of entry are lowering through

technology and human mobility

Villages of barbarians turn into roman empires, not the other way around

Let’s make the organization agile!Don’t be clueless!

Empire’s survival challenge:

How do you encapsulate small barbarian villages and benefit from their exploration and discovery?

Hackstability

Increasingly fast explore-exploit cycles (hacks), moving into a non-utopian, messy equilibrium of civilized and barbarian tendencies

Both is necessary,Strike a balance!

5 minutes

• Yay! Groups of 4!• What are the implications of this for me doing

Agile Software Development?

For me personally

• Don’t try to change organisations that have an exploitation purpose (most do)

• Don’t fight bureacracy, it serves a purpose• Find your barbarians of the exploring variety, not

the rent-seeking kind• Stay in areas where the cycle can speed up• Conquest is always from within

BreakingSmart.com