Nothing very profound in this comment but something I wanted to post because I’ve been thinking about it all day…
I started reading a new book called Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. It’s about why some ideas are “sticky” and spread while other ideas die out. They start with the classic urban legend of the guy who is drugged and wakes up in a bathtub full of ice and discovers his kidney has been stolen. That’s a sticky idea. Many of us have heard it, and we remember it after hearing it. Sticky ideas and stories aren’t necessarily bad; they are just things that change our attention at just the right time and that are so intriguing/compelling/interesting that they spread like wildfire.
This got me thinking about sticky stories from my past and how perhaps stickiness has changed given the rapid communication of today, including and especially the Internet. One real story from my life is from back in January 1981. I was in college and living in the dorm. Ronald Reagan was newly sworn-in as President. A common joke at the time was that Reagan would start a nuclear war and blow up the whole world. The previous summer the US had boycotted the Olympics because of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. It was a bit of frightening time.
That’s why I remember how scary it was one Sunday morning when our whole dorm woke to rumors that the US and the USSR had declared war on one another. We couldn’t confirm this, though. Not a single person in our dorm had a TV. None of the radio stations were saying anything about it. This was before Al Gore had invented the Internet. This rumor of US-USSR war was *sticky.* It spread around the whole dorm building within minutes. People were waking others, pounding on their doors saying, “Wake up, we’ve declared war on Russia!” Still, we couldn’t get any real confirmation of this.
I finally called my parents who lived two timezones away and were still asleep. I sheepishly asked, “Mom, did we declare war on Russia this morning?” She thought I was crazy so I explained. While I did that she turned on her television and confirmed nothing was being reported. That was good enough for us. All of us college students went back to sleep.
Two thoughts strike me form this: First, Communication has changed that much in 27 years. It was possible back then to be unable to verify something like a war. If that happened today I’d browse the web on my phone and know in seconds. Second, that was a very first-hand example of how quickly a sticky idea could spread.
It seems that agile might be a sticky idea.
Great story; I was still at school in the UK then and we were all worried about that too.
I think agile is a sticky idea in the development community, the techies, certainly but I don’t think its having quite the same impact on the business community, those who are paying for the software. For the developers Ron’s already pushed the red button and the sirens are screaming, but the commercial guys are still stabbing each other with poison tipped umbrellas and living a lie – my little attempt to carry your metaphor forward
BTW if I pointed out that Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet, not Al Gore would I be correcting your mistake or missing some obscure point in your message?
Leading into the 2000 US Presidential elections, candidate and then VP Al Gore said, “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” He didn’t really mean he invented it, but his opponent, current president George W. Bush accused Gore of claiming he invented the Internet. I think Gore overstated his role in “creating the Internet” but Bush made it sound worse than it was.
For more see: http://www.perkel.com/politics/gore/internet.htm
I beleive that Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the internet, he started the the World Wide Web which is a piece of the interenet.
But I could be wrong.
A great book on the subject of sticky ideas is The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Together with his other book Blink, I felt many parallels between the subject of the books and Agile/Lean thinking.
In particular the anecdote in Blink about the war games performed prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion: the General appointed to play the Iraqis (Paul Van Riper) applied what could loosely be described as emergent tactics, and won (if that’s the right word), despite the USA’s massive resources as part of the game.
The killer blow for me was following Van Riper’s victory the Military brass reset time, “un-sunk” their warships, reversed and then blocked every move Van Riper had previously made. Of course, this time they won, and they took this prediction of a winning result to their superiors.
Avoiding the obvious political angle, this part really sang out to me: Van Riper applied emergent, adaptive tactics; basing his decisions on constant feedback from the field of operations and adapting accordingly. His opponents relied on predicting his every move up-front and assembling a devastating array of resources based on those predictions (which proved to be wrong) but were unable to adapt to his changing approach.
By accounting for his adaptions by effectively using a time machine, they were simply repeating their first mistake; the available change in the system was by no means exhausted.
Anyway, both books are well worth a read, imho.
ps. Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, not the Internet, though the two are largely analogous these days
pps. I think business isn’t adverse to the promises of Agile (for example, they salivate at the thought of the productivity of Toyota via the TPS), but they find it very hard to let go of years of hard-baked cynicism.
In _Made To Stick_ the authors give credit to Gladwell for discussing the “stickiness” of ideas in _The Tipping Point_.
“If that happened today I’d browse the web on my phone and know in seconds.”
Hmm, I recall being at work in London with no TV or Radio on September 11 2001, and the only way we had to verify what was going on in the US was by instant messaging a remote contracter who could turn his TV – all the news sites were down under the load…
Good point, Ben. It’s amazing how rapidly we’ve all become accustomed to such instantaneous communication and how hard it would be to live without it.
My grandmother died a few years back and in cleaning her house I came across a magazine she’d saved from 1965 that was predictions for 1985. Not only were the predictions of flying cars hilarious, so were the real ads. They all said “write for more information.” None said “call to order with a credit card.” Very few even had phone numbers. No one would have the patience today to “write for more information.”
I agree with David’s comment that while agile is very sticky among developers, it has very little traction with management and business. I always feel like I have to educate any clients who are from the director level and up on the basic tenants and value proposition of agile.
I’ve always found that these kinds of people seem to find easier to grasp on the benefits of certain types of technology (e.g. SOA) then different, lighter weight development approaches.
On a positive note, I find it very easy to explain to a lot of clients the benefits of Web 2.0, both in terms of communication/collaboration as well as a lighter weight technology platform. I then go on to explain that a necessary precursor to taking advantage of Web 2.0 development is a lighter more agile development approach.
I.e. there’s no point in taking advantage of things like LAMP, REST, mashups, or Ajax if you are going to burden yourself with a really heavyweight SDLC.
I know a bit of a tangent, but I have I found this a great way to evangelize agile, as I believe Web 2.0 is a “stickier” topic for business folk than agile is on its own.
Jeff
I think there is also an analogy here with something I learnt about at University while studying Marine Biology and Zoology – Punctuated Equlibrium – its the theory that evolution in life moves gradually until and event provokes sudden rapid changes that result in speciation or adaptation. This theory is preferred to phyletic gradualism which states that evolution crawls along at a relatively even pace. Its interesting to me that adaptation is inherent in life and therefore must and should be inherent in everything humand do – including software developement. I missed out a few steps in my association – but I hope you get mu drift.
-Dave
In “The Selfish Gene” Richard Dawkins coined (?) the term “meme” as a thought, idea, concept, fashion, or other intellect-carried message, specifically one that seems to self-propagate (like genes). There is some evidence that memes obey some of the same kinds of “laws” that, say, viruses do in terms of their rate of distribution, infectiousness, and other germy characteristics.
Clearly the US declaring war on the USSR was a quite contagious one, though it was stopped dead by a quick bolus of TV-driven reality, courtesy of the parents. The bath-tub-and-kidney one is a stayer, and I’ve had quite sensible people who really should know better send me these things. This is where snopes.com comes in as a prophylactic device–practice safe rumor-mongering!
There are probably characteristics of urban legends and sticky memes that resemble virus behavior. For a virus to propagate it must attach to specific proteins in the host. For a rumor to propagate it must have similar fertile media: in the case above that would be the atmosphere of fear at that time (amongst other things). A virus does not carry its own DNA, but hijacks that of the host–I’m guessing that sticky memes do something similar. Obviously they need to have a human do the propagation, though mass-emailing engines might supply some of this, they don’t have the same effect as your buddy telling you the same story. I’m guessing that some of the stickiness is provided by the host retelling the story (banging on the door) and the slight embellishment that occurs.
I’m not sure quite how much Agile is a sticky meme. There appears to be some inbuilt immunity in some areas. Perhaps organizations have been inoculated by the promises of previous software development process initiatives and have built up their resistance.
William McNeill’s “Plagues and Peoples” though about, well, plagues and peoples, comes close to asserting that plagues are simply a function of the systems that are built up (in this case in human societies) and are inevitable products of such systems. I think this is what has happened with the Internet: once it got past a certain size and density and there were sufficient carriers, virus outbreaks were quite inevitable. Unfortunately, I don’t see much evidence that there is the same fertile ground for Agile. Viral marketing is all very well but the host has to be susceptible, eh?
Hi Phil–
Thanks for your comments. I read The Selfish Gene when it first came out. I didn’t recall or never knew that Dawkins invented the term ‘meme.’
The Made to Stick book that started this post includes reference to many urgan legends. In fact, they start with the bathtub-and-kidney story, which is a great example of stickiness. So sticky that for anyone who has heard that story once, just the mention “bathtub and kidney story” is enough to bring it back. That’s stickiness!
By the way, I’m a fan of your column in Communications of the ACM and of your The Laws of Software Process book. I suspect many others here are as well.