An Agile Titanic Voyage

An agile Titanic voyage – aiming for fractal learning, not fractured learning

Seeking opportunity instead of crisis. Opportunity and crisis swirl together in a yin yang pattern.

This is included here for some reasons. One is that there is a common failure pattern in various schools, widespread in North America and China and elsewhere. The school program fails the students in some way, just like the Titanic failed. Yet very often the failure was foreseen, or foreseeable, and could have been avoided. The dominant factor is that the basic program, or voyage, is setup and the operating crew work toward the given goal, ‘blindly’ heading for the mission results, when instead they should be more agile and adaptable within the basic voyage or project or course framework. The root cause isn’t really a root, Westerners want to focus and pinpoint things; instead it’s a cultural matter. We’re blinded inside our culture, habits.

The same pattern lives in hospitals, many companies, etc. It’s likely that schools help instill the pattern in the culture.

Some background. The captain of the Titanic was going to get a hefty bonus if the ship broke the record getting across the Atlantic. So the voyage locked onto that goal, and sank chasing it. Also, part of the control system allowed a lag in response when the order came to turn to avoid the iceberg. If the captain and crew and boat were less fixated on results, and were more agile and adaptable in getting things done, then the whole affair was avoidable. This is a common pattern. Google on GetHomeItIs or financial crisis. In aviation they have adopted Crew Resource Management(CRM) to dramatically reduce the results of human fixations-errors. Yet Western medicine, military, and the Western factory-pattern education, now widely copied around the world, shed most attempts at CRM teamwork. However, design thinking and agile adaptable ways are, against all odds, being introduced in the military and Western business schools. All while the T shape designer-type pattern is already living in Toyota’s ways and its factory workers. Enough of all that, onward.

Icebergs. Certain Asian run workplaces routinely discard expats/Westerners every few months. These include Asian managed operations in China, Korea, the USA, and Canada. Part of the matter is that the local Asian staff learn to ‘scrape foreigners off’ once a few bounce off the cultural differences. Success, better performance, for such organizations is tougher and takes years longer.

Cultural icebergs, yours and theirs. Worse, there might be general culture, professional culture, corporate culture, and so on. Whole scads of mostly hidden cultural icebergs. Just lying in wait.

If Asians primarily learn by rote and directed learning, how are they going to learn to really engage with other cultures?

Approaching and navigating past icebergs in an agile way is a hunting or fishing pattern, a bit touchy feely, and capability grows with experience. It’s like a seed, first growing into a seedling, first tentative growth, and then ongoing growth into a tree. The branches might be ‘negotiating reality’, gently touching different things, learning about “what’s out there”. The matching Chinese saying for navigating through berg waters might be “like cooking small fish, delicately to avoid breaking things up.”

Lets consider the passage past the bergs in five phases. First, what’s the target condition? Second, where are we now? Third, what options, which better? Fourth, try a good choice. Fifth, reflect, okay?, do better? Compare to target condition (now going around the cycle again). This is an agile way, and adapt as you go way, and it can be done within the overall voyage or course or ‘project framework’.

An agile team might have a list of things

To Do: slow down, look, close watertight compartments, sniff, study some device readings, change directions.

Then a list of Doing, the focus. Preferably a short small chunk.

Then what has been Done (all watertight?). Do the cycle again and again to improve – just ask Toyota, and the kata. It’s actually a two thousand year old way that shows up in kata, in traditional medicine and food health, in feng shui, and in Daoism.

To Do  -  Doing  -   Done

An expert agile team breaks work up into small testable chunks, called test-first-design, that might only be a few hours of work long. So the work goes through the Todo Doing Done cycle, including test-reflection fast. Just like reading fast. Read things fast, then read them again, to improve the learning.

The agile team might have a big backlog of things to do. Some, maybe a day or week’s worth of first most important stuff is selected and put in the ToDo list. Keep things mind manageable. You can do the same for daily or weekly stuff inside the overall voyage or program or course. Just repeat the cycle each week, or some times per day inside each week. Or whatever time works, in short simple cycles.

Simple is good. Sticky notes on a wall, visual like the To Do diagram, are fine. Keep it simple.

Project management people will tell you that this is too simple to be project management, and this is the basis for agile development methods for lots of projects.

Now we’ll morph the bergs a bit.

The next four circles, for rubric, stuff to learn, teacher, and students are separated by communications links. The teacher needs to consider the rubric, the stuff to teach, and the students. The students need to learn the stuff, and to consider the teacher, themselves, and each other. The alignment in communications is poor, too complicated, and likely erratic, and normal in today’s learning places.

Another view is that teachers and students may not see things the same way. A teacher might come up with a simple practical way to teach something, and fail. The students want something relevant or realistic, so they learn. They are seeing the material and learning materials from differing view points.

They are separated by the teaching method and materials, and get blindsided as a result.

An agile team, or with CRM, the flight crew in an airplane, or adaptive surgical team, work together. Working together in a team room, war room, cockpit, they can bridge across, ask, watch, listen. See the handout materials on clicker culture as a classroom example.

A normal crew or team works together, so do that in a classroom. Have the students interdependently take on more of the learning activity. Do it by the doings, the means, less by the results/rubric.

Try to opt for less teaching and more learning. A design team learns a lot, that’s what design is about. Business is taking on design thinking to learn in the design process. So do design learning in the learning. The ‘T shape’ pattern can be used, or better yet adopt a cycle shape or spiral learning shape, that learns in the doing. Work on improving the learning processes, more pair/team learning, less lecture, more together in the same cockpit for the same flight.

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