Only Fools Rush In

Creating wise teams will create great teams. This is the hypothesis I submit before you. 

I'm going to ask and attempt to answer three questions in this article: 

What is wisdom?

What is a wise team? 

Why would a wise team become a great agile team?

Buckle up. Here's a photo of Socrates to get you started. 

What is a wise team?

Wisdom is 'the ability to contemplate and act productively using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight'.  Thanks Wikipedia. We know wisdom when we see it. Think of someone wise. What are the qualities you see in that person?

At the very basic level as humans we have problems and we need solutions to those problems that a) achieve the goal and b) do it without lots of unintended consequences. 

For example, if I want to make toast I have a few ways I can do it. 

I could:
a) burn your house down

b) toast it with a candle 

c) put it in the toaster

d) use the iron 

e) build a rocket to the sun and strap the bread to the front

There are infinite ways to make toast. Wisdom is the thing that helps us distinguish the bad solutions from the good solutions.

One needn't be educated or even intelligent to be wise. There is the wisdom of 'street smarts'. I think we all know someone who has a high IQ, is great at solving puzzles, but acts foolishly. Foolishness is the opposite of wisdom. Foolishness is the quality of bringing your mind to bear on a topic and somehow coming out with the option that doesn't achieve what we overall want to achieve.

As my Dungeons and Dragons friends put it - 'Intelligence is knowing the Tomato is a fruit, Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.' It would ruin the flavour and wreck your dinner party. 

It's a reasonable assumption that a wise person would not only be good at making salads but also at writing a book or teaching judo. The qualities that make you wise in one domain will map to other, distinct, unconnected domains. Why is that? 

It comes down to how we make decisions. One way is to make hard and fast rules. 'Never use a candle to make toast, always use a toaster'. But what if the toaster is more expensive than the candle? Or if you want to win a bet or just make yourself giggle? In those cases it makes more sense to use the candle than the toaster. 

The 'right' decision will always come down to the context of that decision. Nothing sits in isolation and whether you've made the right decision depends on the context. Which elements of the context? That's not so clear. The relevant factors will be different from context to context, situation to situation. Professor John Vervaeke outlines this in his theory of Relevance Realisation. According to his theory, Wisdom is our ability to find the right things relevant in a context to solve the problem optimally. It's also about our ability to choose the relevant elements in what we consider optimal. 

A wise person would presumably be good at writing a book, making salads and teaching Judo because they are good at finding the right things relevant. Their relevance realisation machinery is well atuned. They therefore would be better at understanding what is relevant for success in each of those domains (e.g. creating a writing habit, experimenting with ingredients and breaking down moves into small parts), and know how to work out how to achieve that success.  

The reason why this is cool is that reality itself is infinitely complicated and interlinked. In order to act well in the world we need to:

a) choose the right goal from infinite possible goals
b) choose the right path to achieving that goal from infinite possible paths
c) choose the right approach to choosing those goals and paths
d) have insight into whether the way we choose that approach is the right one and change it
In order to do this a person must have insight into the problem, and further insight into their own solving of the problem. 

A classic example of insight in action is the so called 9-dot problem (Weisberg and Alba, quoted here)

Take a peice of paper and draw a 3x3 dotted grid. Try to connect all the dots with 4 straight lines without taking your pen off the paper. 

Have a go! Read on when you've done it. 

go on, really have a go... I'll wait. 

The vast majority of people (including me) fail this repeatedly. Don't beat yourself up. The solution is as follows:

It's not a connect the dots exercise, you are totally allowed to have turns not on a dot. I didn't say anything in the rules about that needing to 'stay in the box'. Interestingly this is apparently the source of the term 'thinking outside the box'. 

Insight is the process of being able to recognise that you are being held to unconscious assumptions that are preventing you from achieving your goal. In this case insight helps you solve a problem. In John Vervaeke's language - you didn't find the right things relevant about this problem so you weren't able to solve it. 

A wise person is able to have insight at all the levels from 'what is getting in my way of solving this particular problem' to 'what is getting in my way of choosing the right problems to begin with' and have insight in their own thinking and processing along the way. Maybe you're brilliant at making toast quickly, but your dinner guests are gluten free.

It's a curious thought experiment - what are the '9 dot problems' of your life where you are solving something in the wrong way on account of bringing the wrong assumptions? 

There's evidence that wise people are happier. This would make sense, they know what they need to know about how to get to that overall goal of happiness.

What is a wise team? 

Wisdom is what allows a person to orient themselves appropriately to do the right things in an infinitely complex reality. 

I'm arguing that cultivating Wisdom at a team level would lead to more successful, well adapted teams who do the right stuff and thrive. 

A wise team and organisations will be good at working out:

1) what goals are the right goals from infinite possibilities

2) which path to take from infinite possible paths

3) which approaches to use to decide the paths and the goals those decisions in the right way

4) how to have the insight to change those goals, paths, and approaches if they have chosen the wrong ones

In the world of agility we talk (rightly!) about complexity theory and how agility is the best answer to creating emerging solutions for complex problems. 

A wise team can identify which of their problems are complex, complicated, simple and chaotic. They would be able to tailor their approaches conscienciously to each type or problem space. 

A wise team learns from its experiences and knows how to deploy its shared knowledge. A wise team can generate and share and adapt to insight about their problem space and how they solve them. 

A wise team recognise itself being foolish and stop.

All in all a wise team will get shit done and do it well and know how to make themselves better at doing all that.

Why would a wise team become a more agile team?

Hopefully by this point it's becoming clear where the overlaps in wisdom and agility might be. 

We talk about continuous improvement - a wise team knows how to do this and what to improve. They know what is relevant and therefore what to focus on.   

We talk about delivering value - a wise team will have a deep understanding of value both in terms of their particular mission and their organisation's mission. 

We talk about quality - a wise team will pay attention to high quality where it matters, and not waste time and energy where quality doesn't matter

and so on and so on. 

We should strive to create wise teams. If we do, we give ourselves access to the tools and methods that foster wisdom in individuals. We can dust them off, spruce them up and adapt them for use in our agile teams. I'll write more about what those tools might be at a later stage. 

That's it for now - if you want more of this kind of thing, sign up to receive the Agile On The Mind newsletter here.

Until then, I'd love to hear your thoughts - comment on the LinkedIn post :) 

afterword: 

These ideas are pinched and adapted from Professor John Vervaeke. I highly highly recommend his series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. It's been a big inspiration for ideas and understanding for me in the last few months. 

Alternatively read Relevance, Meaning and the Cognitive Science of Wisdom by Vervaeke and Ferraro