Punctuated Disequilibrium

I’ve heard people talk about the gradual gains that agile teams make over time as they engage with continuous improvement, but I’m here to tell you that isn’t what I see in the real world. I guess the expectation (perhaps my own included) is that when teams start to improve they will make many small changes over time and reap corresponding gains in performance. You know, a little change here, a little gain there. I guess I envision it looking a little like this:

However, I see something different. What I’m witnessing with the teams that I work with appears nothing like that. Instead the teams seem go for long periods with no evident change in performance or productivity. They just seem to trundle right along and then BANG! You see a dramatic improvement. It sort of looks like this:

The team is trying out different things the whole time. They’re failing at some things and succeeding at others. They are continuously playing with the chemistry set we call Agile Development. From the outside you don’t see much happening. Sometimes for long stretches of time – we’re talking years here. The point is that my experience is that often, it’s a combination of many things that leads to significant performance gains by a team. Finding that combination of what works can take a while. But when it does happen, it is reflected in a rather dramatic improvement in performance. It’s not a slow gradual change.

Of course there is a flip side to this change. Here’s another example:

Some teams that I’ve worked with have made great gains and then “jumped off the cliff.” What goes up can come down. I call this “Tom’s First Law of Team Performance”. Just as there is sudden improvement, there can be an equally sudden decrease in performance. Team’s can make a change that kills performance just as easily as they make a change that improves it. I’ve seen it work both ways. Sometimes it is change outside the team, within the corporate culture at large that causes these radical swings in performance. Software teams work in a complex ecosystem. When change happens, I think it tends to either be suppressed by the system or, when the conditions are just right, lead to dramatic changes in performance.