Just pick your average Lean software development book, go to the index, and try to find references to concepts like motivation, creativity, innovation, personality, or fun. You probably won’t succeed.
I agree. Lean practices add value, which is why I recommend some of them for game production, when the pipeline is better known, the team has discovered the core mechanics, iteration is limited and the project has mass produce a dozen hours of content. Still Scrum should remain the core framework of game teams since collaboration, innovation, creativity, fun, etc still have a place in production.
What is especially brilliant about this post is how he ties the work of David Snowden and Ralph Stacey together into a discussion about Complex Adaptive Systems. CAS describes the way nature works and even how groups of people work together to create things. CAS and Social Complexity is the realm of Scrum. It's the best model we have at the moment.
Lean has some fantastic ideas, as there are great ideas in Agile too. But neither Lean nor Agile is a complete model of a complex system. The only accurate model of a complex system is the system itself. Which means you must focus on the entire system, including the people. And not only on value streams and waste reduction. It takes a complex mind to recognize the dangers of incomplete models.
I'm really looking forward to Jurgen's book!
6 comments:
"I'm really looking forward to Jurgen's book!"
- And I'm really looking forward to yours!
Thanks, I appreciate the support! :)
Except that Ralph Stacey doesn't think that organisations or any social endeavours are Complex Adaptive Systems, or systems of any kind.
@Stephen: True, but I don't tend to agree with him on that, and I have the feeling that neither do most others.
Lean is very much about teams and creativity. Perhaps not motivation. No one can really motivate another - although they may be able to demotivate them. There are many lean books that talk about teams and how to assist them. Scholtes has written a couple, David Mann on creating a Lean culture also discusses it.
This is a misunderstood part of Lean because it isn't rah rah let's have the team be all there is.
A large part of the problem is whose definition of Lean are we using? "Many Lean books talk about..." doesn't mean all or even most.
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