Nowadays, if you are in the world of business, especially in software business, and criticize the "religion of agile methods", you are cursed. Scrum must be the method. There must be sprints, coaches, daily stand up meetings, post-its, burn down charts, tribes, masters, retros and other rituals... There is no room for good old fashion, heavy duty engineering and management. Besides, it is very popular to cancel the bad old practices.
I am always into knowing the essence of the things around, extracting the root idea and being able to improvise for authenticity rather than being the follower of the popular narratives. Moreover, I don't believe that any method can save you. Only you can save yourself. There will be no eternal relief or salvation... I've already explained this in detail in one of my prior posts titled "Forget about failing" so I'm not going to repeat the same things here.
Today, I am going to cite two books for supporting my ideas. The first one is "Fundamentals of Computing II: Abstraction, Data Structures, and Large Software Systems". This book was published in 1993 from McGraw-Hill and used as our lab textbook of software engineering course in Ege University computer engineering department. Please have a look at the sample page below:
I enrolled in Ege University in 1995 and graduated from Computer Engineering Department in 2000 with bachelor's degree. During that period, my dear professors worked really hard to create a computer engineer from me :)
I must salute Prof. Erden Başar, Prof. Mehmet Özel Ergen, Prof. Sinan Yılmaz (R.I.P.), Prof. Ahmet Kaşlı, Prof. Fikret İkiz, Prof. Halil Şengonca, Prof. Levent Toker, Prof. Oğuz Dikenelli, Prof. Yasemin Topaloğlu, Prof. Aylin Kantarcı, Prof. Mustafa Türksever, Prof. Ata Önal, Prof Şaban Eren, Prof. Serdar Korukoğlu; and of course the teaching assistants of that time: Osman Ünalır, Güzin Şeker, Cenk Erdur, Selçuk Kaptan, Muhammet Cinsdikici, Nur Zincir, Aziz Can Yücetürk, Aybars Uğur, Ahmet Koltuksuz, Özgür Gümüş and Tuğkan Tuğlular.
What a crew!
Thank you, thank all of you a thousand times!
Today's story is about Tuğkan Tuğlular. The course was Microcomputers. Fifth semestre. We were following the great textbook "Structured Computer Organization" by Andrew Tanenbaum. Thanks to Tuğkan's enthusiasm, every assignment of the course was forcing us to use x8086 Assembly programming language. To be honest, Tuğkan was always giving us the freedom of using any applicable programming language but somehow all of us were using Assembly :) Here is the famous assignment:
Coaches, facilitators, mentors, consultants and all the other members of the familia are cursing the "old school" doctrines, burrying the wicked waterfall software development method, so on and on...
And of course the notion of failing!
"Fail fast, fail often" motto, told by literally every one to every one. Written everywhere. People like the shocking effect of the slogan which is a linguistic poison in my idea.
The word "fail" is being repeated so often and pervasively that it starts to disturb the mindsets of the young professionals. I am against the tendency of promoting failure culture. And never praise it.
Of course, it is easily understandable that the people who are advising to fail for success are aiming to emphasize the importance of learning new things about the universe. This is not a new notion. It is called "trial and error", one of the fundemantal methods of learning and problem solving. The issue here is that, it is not the perfect way of problem solving. Actually, it costs more when compared with the alternative ways. It is possible to learn things without failing.
Moreover, it is not proper to start projects with the "failure in your mind". Nowadays, the narrative came to a point that, as if it is impossible to be successful without failing. It is not correct. It is shallow. It is a reflection of a way of popularism which praises mediocrity. Saying "you can be an average person, don't worry, there is a method to save you: if you fail enough, you'll be victorious at the end". It is not true. No ultimate methods can save you. Extraordinary people and extra ordinary events shaped the history and marked the characteristics of humanity. Repeatable methods merely work well if you want to scale up with average masses. Therefore, if you are to launch creative initiatives proposing real added-value, failure driven iterations are not the ideal paths to follow.
Let's look at problem solving.
When you face a problem in your way, in most of the times, you use heuristics to find a solution. It's a much more faster and efficient method than trial and error is. Or you may apply algorithmic approaches for solving the problem. Or you may follow trial and error. However, if you don't have any hypotheses before starting the trial and error process, you end up with no information gain. So the main goal in problem solving is to gain new information to apply to the problem and it is obvious that there are many ways of information gaining, or learning, methods in the world. You don't have to fail to learn. In most of the times, success is not a function of your knowledge and competence. Environmental factors, let's call them context or ecosystem dynamics, are playing a crucial role. If you analyse the journeys of a set of startups, you can see that successful and unseccessful ones are doing exactly the same things. I wonder how deterministic failure prophets would explain this situation. Methodologically, there is no lock-in to failure driven prodecures, there are better alternatives of reaching success.
Take the motivational factors.
You need to feel the fire and the desire for success while you are starting things up. Failure is not a catalyst in the process. You must be brave enough to take the risks and move forward after facing blocking factors in your route. The magical factor here is not how you are good at failing but how you are resilient and solid after facing obstacles. It is you, not the method. The better you are at applying the methods, the more chance you have to be successful. Virtuosity matters. And it is about practice and training. No matter what your profession is, you must separate the training session and the performance session. Train like hell. Get down, get up, read, sweat, bleed, meet people, ask questions, expand yourself and get perfectly ready to the performance. During the performance, which is your professional daily life, never ever fail. Get the job done! Get the job done every time! Get the job done perfectly! If you face unexpected situations, just improvise like Tango performers do. No one superimposes any coreography to Tango performers, they are the experts of fundemantal steps and patterns. And they improvise perfectly on the stage. They simply handle things. For being able to improvise during the performence, you had to do your training well enough. Otherwise, you will become a failure machine. And believe me, it will not make you victorious in the end.
As I am getting to the conclusion, I want to remind that implying scientific methods to business is valuable if you know the essence of the science. It is well known that science and rationalism are being used as management tools by the authorities. A government may state that "scientific norm of the human psyche is defined as XXX, if you are not in the area of XXX you must take that pill, or the authority may send you to hospital as an obligatory measure". There are many examplars of that management style. We must never forget that science is humble in nature. Science never asserts that it will solve everything about the universe or it will bring the ultimate salvation. Science always tries to minimise the grey area, finds some variables for explaining some situations under well defined conditions. In most of the times, science gets back to you with greater but new questions, new unknowns. It is a never ending spiral. Therefore, proposing some formulae as an ultimate solution to a problem in business is almost always shallow and it is a sort of fashion. People may refer to scientific research outcomes for fortifying their formulae. It changes nothing. Be a free, intellectually sufficient, brave, hard working and creative person.
On the stage, never ever fail!
İnsanları dış görünüşlerine göre değerlendirmemek konusunda hayatımız boyunca birçok farklı otoriteden ders veya öğüt alıyoruz. Çok masum, yerinde ve anlaşılır bir önerme gibi görünen bu öğüdü biraz inceleyelim.
İnsanlar hakkında yargıya varmak için onların dış görünüşü yerine iç dünyalarının durumunu kıstas olarak almak için kişilerin iç ve dış yapılarının birbirinden bağımsız ve ayrı olduklarını önden kabul etmek gerekir. Dolayısıyla, bu öğüdü hayata alabilmek için fenomen/numen, öz/töz felsefi ikilemleri ekseninde düşünür ve yaşar olmak lazımdır. Oysa, felsefenin ontoloji dalı dünyayı algılamanın bambaşka yolları da olabileceğini anlatır. Örneğin, Spinoza'nın tekilci yaklaşımına ben daha yakınımdır. Halk arasında böylesine bir erdem vasfı yüklenmiş "insanları dış görünüşüne göre yargılamama" önemesinin bir felsefi dayatma barındırması dahi altyapısının evrensel olmadığına işaret ediyor bence.
Konuyu fazlaca teoriye boğmadan örnekler üzerinden devam edeceğim ama öncesinde durumu nasıl ele alacağımı bir mantık kurgusuyla izah etmek istiyorum:
1. Diyelim ki insanlara şeklini, dış görünüşünü veren çeper oldukça katı ve insanların daha değişken ve esnek olabilen iç görünüşlerini perdeler nitelikte (Şekil 1). Bu durumda, iç dünyanın malzemesi iç dünyanın sınırı ile dış çeper arasındaki boşlukları zamanla dolduracaktır. Aynı bir kabın içindeki suyun kabın şeklini alması gibi.
