Agile Management – Struggle twice for improvements.

Agile management is taking advantage of many contemporary sciences, one of them is chaos theory. One principle of chaos theory is universality. Universality means that it doesn’t matter which type of chaos system one is observing; it will follow the same principles and have the same characteristics as any other chaos system.

Introducing changes to a system is an important characteristic. Once a change introduced to a system, after struggling twice the system will reach a flow.

In real life, this is how you will experience this system behavior. You will introduce a change to the system. The system performance will go up, then the system will struggle, and production will go down. After a while, the system will get back to flow. After the system reaches the second peak in performance, it will struggle again, and performance will go down. The second time system performance goes down is the step where most of the people giving up and therefore missing a big jump to better performance (flow) of the system. Eventually, the long-lasting flow will supersede the system’s low performance before and during the change.

Once you know this pattern, you need to watch how reality folds after you introduce a change. As long as you see that events are following this pattern, don’t give up. If events are not following this pattern, raise a flag.

One of the common questions is the duration (in time) for each struggling step in the pattern. I couldn’t find so far a solution that addresses all scenarios as the length depends on the complexity level of the change introduced to the system. As a rule of thumb, the struggling duration is 2/3 of the total time it will take the system to adopt the change.