When you work across multiple paths, you are conducting exploration – when you take a one off the table, it should be to exploit a superior one. Sometimes this is very early, and sometimes it is later in the game – but it boils down to a very common problem known as explore-exploit. It typically involves working in multiple ways toward a single destination until the paths diverge to the point that one “has to go”. Preserving options while making progress requires non-standardization. There is a misconception that delivering fast is about working chaotically – it is about working purposefully in a chaotic world. Allowing time and chaos to play out allow you to execute the best option available when you reach the point that a decision must be made. When a decision is made, options are taken off the table there is not a reason to handcuff yourself before you must. The fact is that this instinct is a survival mechanism, and something far-worse is pushed on businesses – a term behavioral economists call “pre-crastination.” Procrastination can be harmful – this article refers to “mature procrastination” or what Lean principles call “deferring decisions to the last responsible moment”. Society often berates procrastination as a plague. “Late is better than never, although never is often better than right now” – Zen of Python Everyday occurrences like getting sick, turnover, home relationships, traffic, and even luck experienced by each individual on a daily basis will impact your team’s dynamic.
Something as simple as team maturity/efficiency, which is often assumed to be linear (team performance improves linearly or proportionally to time), is much more likely to be modeled by chaos – with random oscillations caused by the smallest seemingly unrelated item. A single interaction between team members can impact team dynamics and, ultimately, a deliverable. The continuous delivery of new technologies and enablers changes the relative value of what we produce (and ultimately how we work). A competitor’s output – or even statements can change the trajectory of our own work. The butterfly effect very much applies to teams and businesses due to both internal and external variables. It is why no matter how hard we try to model the weather (and humans have tried hard), a weather forecast falls apart after just a few days – and has even limited accuracy within a day. The most famous example of chaos is often explained as the butterfly effect (a butterfly flapping its wings may trigger a hurricane across the globe). Globalization, advances in technology, and an increased focus on collaboration (while positive) have only acted as levers to our systems (businesses/teams) by adding variables, sensitivities, and unknowns. Most of the items we try to plan out in business will not be neatly pre-packaged or insulated from randomness with linear predictability – but instead, are engulfed sphere of unpredictability. As much as we like to think of our world as predictable and controlled, we very much teeter and mostly live in an unpredictable one. Chaos theory defines a system as chaotic if it is highly sensitive to inputs and responds to variables in a non-linear fashion. Our world is chaos – in a very literal sense.