Fourth Time Insight

We've noticed that teams adopting agile require a few iterations before the magnitude of the transition sinks in. Perhaps this wiki works the same way.

Many of agile's practices exist to allow creative redefinition of problems throughout a software development project. This makes the end goal a moving target largely due to ongoing learning of all parties involved.

# Insight

It is at about the fourth iteration that team members will exclaim, Oh, now I get it.

What is it that you get?, I might ask.

My job really is to help others succeed

# Iterations

Agile methods recommend delivering software in iterations starting with planning and ending with delivery. Insight occurs after planning and delivering about four times. This is independent of how long an iteration lasts.

Presumably the middle of an iteration has little to teach the new agile team. It's just programming. But the creating of commitments and delivering on them is where the novelty of agile becomes apparent.

# Conversations

I will speculate that the wiki iteration begins with entering a conversation and ends with mining the persistent product to fuel the next conversation. Think together with one community then carry those ideas forward and weave them together with the thoughts of the next.

Its like running a blog for a couple of years and then moving on to another one. Just faster.

I made a mistake dragging two months of previous journaling into the happening. I missed the chance to start anew. I've started dozens of wiki, why not one more for each happening?

I'd like to read through our work here and assemble what I've learned into a bundle on a site that I know will be mine forever. I'd like to deliver this to me.

Its like breathing in and breathing out.

reflection

"It is at about the fourth iteration that team members will exclaim, Oh, now I get it."

and

"I will speculate that the wiki iteration begins with entering a conversation and ends with mining the persistent product to fuel the next conversation. Think together with one community then carry those ideas forward and weave them together with the thoughts of the next."

Looking carefully at this: the team and the communities are not the same. Of course they aren't.

And yet, a small associated question: what (or who) is the persistent product? Who mines and fuels? Who carries forward? and what happens to each community? There isn't another social platform that has used this cohort model, replacing one community with the next that forms, except maybe education itself.

But it may address the particular question of scale that community raises: the scalability of comfort in the company of strangers. (This is a small note that Alyson Indrunas or Alan Levine might find, in relation to a conversation elsewhere. blog )

As a writer and reader I'm also taking away a bundle of ideas that I've learned. I understand FW now as a kind of affordance, that can change the way communities or teams approach tasks or topics (including teams of strangers).

So looked at this way, it's something to be used, not itself a community to join. And yet, there is is: FWH as flashmob. I'm still trying to figure out what has made the company of these strangers so appealing, so encouraging to reading and writing.