Aspects of Agile - Scarcity and Consistency

We're called Agile Lab - not Agile Museum. And that's because we're always working to develop our understanding of Agile, and especially, to understand how Agile thinking connects to other kinds of understanding. That's why in this lecture, given recently to final year product design students at the Edinburgh College of Art, we talk about some thinking from the field of social psychology which is powerfully relevant to project management and Agile thinking.



This is a talk which joins up a bunch of things that I read a while ago about social psychology and the "science" of persuasion, especially in a book called "Influence" by a Social Psychologist called Robert Cialdini. When I was teaching our Introduction to Agile Course, I found myself very often trying to deal with objections to Agile ideas by explaining the notions of Scarcity and Consistency. And I also began to realise that a lot of the objections that people who attended my course were raising were also motivated by the kinds of psychological influencers that Cialdini talks about. Cialdini actually talks about six different influencers, but today, I'm just going to concentrate on Scarcity and Consistency, maybe some other day, I'll talk about the others.




So when I gave this talk at the Edinburgh College of Art - I asked for a volunteer, preferably someone who could drive. I asked my volunteer to sit on a chair, close their eyes and pretend that they were driving. And since I was in Scotland, I asked them to imagine that they were driving up country at the end of the day, perhaps to a little cottage somewhere in the highlands.



Then I asked them to imagine that, as they were driving, it started to snow. And it snowed and snowed until the snow was so heavy that they couldn't see the road. Then, I asked them to imagine that they suddenly realise that the road veers sharply to the left and doesn't go straight on as they imagined! What should they do?

On this particular occasion, my volunteer wrenched the steering wheel to the left. We then discussed what would have happened if she'd done this in real life. Would she have skidded off the road? What should she have done? Steered into the skid, pumped the brakes? Changed down to a lower gear? The problem is that what you do in these situations is instinctive, unconscious and - as in the case of wrenching the steering wheel to the left, not always, actually, the best thing to do in the circumstances. But of course, with training and practice, you can be taught to do something different in those split seconds. You can be taught to do the right thing, the thing that the experience of others and lots of research has shown to be better than your gut instinct. In many ways, this is what Agile Training is about - giving us better instincts.



And I think that's why I started to come back to a book I'd read, maybe a couple of years ago, the more that I taught courses in Agile methods, because the psychology of influence is all about playing with your instincts. Most of the people who are trying to persuade you to do something (the ones who are any good at it anyway) aren't trying to make you think, they're trying to stop you thinking. They're trying to use the fact that you will, reliably wrench the steering wheel to the left and stamp both feet to the floor when you realise you've missed a turn in the road.



A long, long time ago, this was all fields. For England this was about three hundred years ago. And when England was all fields (and still some forests) how rich you were depended entirely on how much land you owned. England in the middle ages was slightly poorer than some other countries - for example Poland - because there were slightly more people per acre of land.




And this idea that land, food resources are scarce and that if there are more people, there is bound to be famine, disease and disaster is a very powerful one. In England, as the population grew it was described most famously by Thomas Malthus:

"The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world." Thomas Robert Malthus (1766 – 1834)



The irony is that at the very time that Malthus was claiming that Britain couldn't support its population, it was suffering a labour shortage because of these things. The invention of manufacturing and mass production in England and the US shifted the balance of who was wealthy from the people who owned the most land to the people who could make the most stuff that people wanted.



For a couple of hundred years, the richest men in the world were people who figured out how to make things that people want - like cars. They realised that you can get round the Malthusian problems of scarcity by just making stuff up - as long as it's stuff that people want.

Then this guy came along...



This is Alan Turing. It's arguable whether he actually came up with the design for the first real, working computer, but even if he didn't, he did come up with the idea of a "Turing Machine" which was a theoretical machine that could calculate anything. And so we moved into a new era of non-scarcity. Soon the richest man in the world wouldn't make anything that you could even touch or feel.



Yes - this guy is arguably the richest man in the world and he didn't make it from farming. Computers took us into a new age of non-scarcity.

And this guy...



Does anybody know who he is? He's arguably the first web surfer. The man who shared an office with Tim Berners-Lee.

So we've come a long way from the times when how much land you had was a direct measure of how wealthy you are. Almost all of our wealth now comes from making stuff up. But even though we live in an internet age, we've stone age brains...








For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604) or Matt@agilelab.co.uk (07713 634 830)