Oddly Influenced

 Michael P. Farrell's Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (2001) is about how groups of people ("circles") begin with discomfort about the status quo and, after collaboration and discussion, make creative breakthroughs. It's based on six case studies. Four are circles of artists and painters, one looks at the early development of Freud's psychoanalysis, and one is devoted to a particular group of "first wave" feminist agitators.

This episode aims to tempt you to want to learn more: by summarizing two of Farrell's case studies. My original thinking was that Farrell's model of circle development would be generally applicable to software teams dissatisfied with the status quo of development and who didn't fit common models like forming-storming-norming-performing. As I dug into the details, I realized it's not as widely applicable as I'd hoped, at least without substantial customization. So the episode ends with some reasons you might not want to listen to the next one. But I hope you do!

Other sources and references

• Cem Kaner and James Bach, Context-driven testing, 2012?
• Cem Kaner, James Bach, and Bret Pettichord, Lessons Learned in Software Testing: a Context-Driven Approach, 2001
• Donald Davidson, "Lee in the Mountains", 1938
• The "Yes, and..." rule in improvisational comedy. See also Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979). Looking for links, I also noticed Yes, And: How Improvisation Reverses "No, But" Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration (2015), which seems to be a more standard business book. I haven't read it.

Credits

The episode image is "Ulysses and Nausicaa" by Charles Gleyre. In theme and style, it's the kind of art the Impressionists were rebelling against. 

Jessica Kerr (known to computers everywhere as @jessitron) is a software developer, speaker, and symmathecist. (A symmathesy is a learning system composed of learning parts. To her, each software team is a symmathesy composed of the people on the team, the running software, and all of their tools.) @jessitron is another of those people who apply ideas from outside software to software, including in her role as a developer advocate at Honeycomb, a company that aims to make the workings of software visible to its developers. Were she not engaging, personable, and enthusiastic, she'd be scarily like me. This conversation is about C. Thi Nguyen's book Games: Agency as Art, whose blurb starts, "Games are a unique art form. Game designers don’t just create a world; they create who you will be in that world. They tell you what abilities to use and what goals to take on. In other words, games work in the medium of agency."

Jessitron links

• jessitron.com (symmathesy)
• Mastodon
• Twitter
• Her calendar for observability office hours

References

• C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art, 2020
• Pandemic (cooperative board game), 2008
• Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, 2019
• John Kay, Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly, 2010
• The "Farm to Tabor" podcast episode: "Donut science, cars, & grassfed beef", 2018
• James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998

In the podcast, I mentioned classic English country gardens. I riffed a bit on Tom Stoppard's play "Arcadia". It "explores the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, certainty and uncertainty. It has been praised by many critics as the finest play from 'one of the most significant contemporary playwrights' in the English language. In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it one of the best science-related works ever written." I cut the riff out because – embarrassingly – I couldn't remember the names of either the play or its author. From personal experience, I can recommend this full cast performance for a road trip. On that trip, we also listened to the Alzabo Soup podcast's multi-episode commentary. 

Photo credit: me

The final episode of "the Foucault trilogy". Ways of evaluating humans that became common during the ~1750-1850 period. Bentham's Panopticon as a metaphor. Self-improvement via exhibitionism. Final reflections on Foucault.

Sources

• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975.
• C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000.
• Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?, 1999.

Other sources

• Mississippi State University Extension, "Dairy Cattle Judging".
• Jeremy Bentham: The Panopticon Writings (PDF), Miran Božović (ed.), 1995.
• The Koepelgevangenis panopticon is described in "The Panopticon Effect" podcast episode. (There is no transcript, but there is a longish narrative.)
• Ron Jeffries, "Big Visible Charts", 2004.
• "Brainless slime mold grows in pattern like Tokyo’s subway system", 2022 (video).

Contact links (if you want the bonus episode on "Edgelord Foucault")

• Email: [email protected]
• Mastodon: @[email protected]

Picture credit
BigVisibleCharts.com (archived), Marty Andrews.

An intermediate episode. It seems wrong to talk about Foucault without mentioning his theory of power and societal change. But I don't think there's a lot you can *do* with that theory in the sense of "applying it to software". So it doesn't really fit with the podcast theme. But his is a disturbing theory for the problem-solvers among us, so I make it more palatable by comparing it to a cult horror movie from 1997.

Sources

• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975
• C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000 
• Vincenzo Natali, script for the movie "Cube", 6th draft
• Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. The chapter I cite is “Ships and Chips: Technological Repression and the Origin of the Wage”

Other mentions

• On large language models and "a judicious amount of randomness", Stephen Wolfram's "What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?" is good. 
• Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning, 2016
• George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, 1987
• Gregory L. Murphy, The Big Book of Concepts, 2002
• The Eastern State Penitentiary was a model prison that featured solitary confinement, a Bible as the only possession, and piecework in the cell. It was the founding institution of what came to be called "The Pennsylvania System." See also  "Eastern State Penitentiary: A Prison With a Past".
• I mention an idea I got from Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. I don't exactly remember the sources. For Rorty, it was probably Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. For Fish, it might have been Is There a Text in This Class?
  Image credit

  The image is the Albion flour mill, completed in 1786, which was possibly the referent of Blake's "dark satanic mills" in his poem Jerusalem: 

  And did the Countenance Divine,
  Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
  And was Jerusalem builded here,
  Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Part 1 is a synopsis of Foucault's claim that the societal attitude toward punishment of criminals changed radically over a period of about 80 years, starting in the mid-1700s: from punishment as vengeance, to punishment as persuading the minds of many, to punishment as correcting the personality of one.

 Books

• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975
• C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000 

Random other stuff

• Brian Marick, "Artisanal Retro-Futurism Crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism" (text and video), 2009
• The environment of evolutionary adaptedness
• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962
• N.W. Mogensen, "Crimes and Punishments in Eighteenth-Century France", 1977
• Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning, 2016
• Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776
• Kieran Healy, "Escaping the Malthusian Trap", an animated graph showing the relationship between the population of Britain and its GDP over time, illustrating the discontinuity caused by the industrial revolution.
• Wikipedia article about the cult horror movie "Cube"

Credits

The image is of Adam Smith's pin factory, possibly from Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–1780). D. Diderot & J. d’Alembert.

Open Systems Theory (OST) is an approach to organizational transformation that dates back to the late 1940s. It's been applied a fair amount, but hasn't gotten much mindshare in the software world. It has similarities to Agile, but leans into self-organization in a much more thoroughgoing way.

For example, in an OST organization, 

• teams aren't given a product backlog, they create it themselves.
• if a team decides they need to slow the pace of delivery to learn new things or to spend more time refactoring, their decision is final.
• pay is based on skills, not productivity, so as to encourage multi-skilled people.
• team work is organized so that there are career paths within the team, rather than advancement depending on leaving a team and rising up in a hierarchy.

OST is even more radical at the levels above the team. Unlike scaled-agile approaches like SAFe or LeSS, OST changes the jobs of the people higher in the org chart just as much – or more? – than people at the leaves of the tree. Specifically, the shift is from order-giving to coordination at different timescales. Individual "leaf" teams are responsible for the short term, the next level up is responsible for the medium term and external partners, and the CxO levels focus on the long term.

This episode is an interview with Trond Hjorteland, who – after experience with Agile – did an impressively deep dive into OST.

Sources
As noted in the podcast, there's not much accessible documentation about OST. However, Trond and his merry band of (mostly) Agilists have begun work on a new site. Trond has also written "Thriving with complexity using open sociotechnical systems design", originally published in InfoQ.

Trond's blog.
Trond is on Mastodon at @trondhjort.

Image credit
The image is from the cover of the Marvel Comics graphic novel Captain Marvel, Vol. 1: Higher, Further, Faster, More.

I describe how the Gal Oya irrigation system got better. It's an example that might inspire hope. I also imagine how a software codebase and its team might have a similar improvement.

As with earlier episodes, I'm leaning on Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, and Erik Nordman’s 2021 book, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action.

I also mention James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State, which I discuss starting with episode 17.

More about Gal Oya and similar projects

• Uphoff, N.T. "People's Participation in Water Management: Gal Oya, Sri Lanka". In Public Participation in Development Planning and Management: Cases from Africa and Asia, ed. J.C. Garcia-Samor, 1985
• Perera, J. "The Gal Oya Farmer Organization Programme: A Learning Process?" In Participatory Management in Sri Lanka's Irrigation Schemes, 1986.
• Korten, D. "Community Organization and Rural Development:  a Learning Process Approach", Public Administration on Review 40, 1980 (Philippines, Bangladesh)
• Korten, F. "Building National Capacity to Develop Water Users' Associations: Experience from the Philippines, World Bank working paper 528, 1982
• Rahman, A. "Some Dimensions of People's Participation in the Bloomni Sena Movement", United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1981 (Nepal)
• Rabibhadena, A. The Transformation of Tambon Yokkrabat, Changwat Samut Sakorn, Thammasat University, 1980 (Thailand). 

Refactoring books I have liked

• Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999
• William C. Wake, Refactoring Workbook, 2003
• Joshua Kerievsky, Refactoring to Patterns, 2004
• Scott W. Ambler and Pramod J. Sadalage, Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design, 2006

The Strangler Fig pattern

• Fowler's original blog post
• A case study I commissioned, way back when. 

Credits

 "Agriculture in Extreme Environments - Irrigation channel for wheat fields and date palms" by Richard Allaway is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

A short episode that encourages members of software teams to give Elinor Ostrom's ideas a try, in two ways:

1. I'm arranging for Elinor Ostrom's intellectual heirs to provide support.
2. Your situation is not worse than those of Sri Lankan farmers in the Gal Oya irrigation system. A commons-style approach helped them, so why couldn't it help you?

I'm looking for teams who want to collaborate with Indiana University's Ostrom Workshop, and I intend to provide financing.

Ostrom's core principles for the design of successful commons: how to monitor compliance with rules, how to punish non-compliance, how to resolve disputes, and how to participate in making rules.

Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, 1990
Erik Nordman, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action, 2021
"The dirty little secret of contract law"

Image of lobster buoys from Flickr user Raging Wire, licensed CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

This is the first of two or three episodes that draw on Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, and Erik Nordman’s 2021 book, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action.

What I hope is that those lessons apply to the problem of keeping codebases from devolving into unworkable piles of crap.

Ostrom has nine design principles for designing successful commons governance. I mention them all in this episode, and provide Ostrom's summary below. In the descriptions, "CPR" stands for "Common Pool Resource" (that is, a commons). "Appropriation rules" govern extracting "resource units" from the commons. "Provision rules" govern improvement and maintenance of the commons.

I've replaced some of the bolded summaries with my own when Ostrom's had too much jargon.

Clearly defined boundaries: Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.

The rules governing a CPR are strongly influenced by local context: Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local conditions and to provision rules requiring labor, material, and money.

Those affected by rules make them: Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules. 

Monitoring: Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators.

Graduated sanctions: Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.

Conflict-resolution mechanisms: Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials.

Minimal recognition of the right to organize: The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities.

For CPRs that are parts of larger systems:

Nested enterprises: Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

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In the podcast, I said "There will always be pressure to deliver faster. There’s been a lot written on reducing that pressure, or resisting it. That’s off topic for these episodes, so I’ll put links in the show notes." Well, I thought there were, but I don't have anything to offer you yet.

Here's a comment from Sasha Cuerda: 

"it helped that we had an already established and blessed practice of using ADRs in other contexts. They weren’t initially seen as “resistance” but as part of established good practice."

I did remember a blog post I wrote long ago, warning new agile teams not to deliver too much value too soon before they know how to do it sustainably. 

But that's not really the same problem. 

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Image of grazing cattle due to Emilian Robert Vicol is licensed under CC BY 2.0 and was obtained from OpenUniverse.org.