There has been a lot of talk about the apparent disconnect or conflict between
CAS and Lean-thinking. I believe all of the examples of where Lean-thinking is
in conflict with CAS are not examples of true Lean-thinking but are more
misunderstandings of Lean.

This might be self-evident when one reflects that one of the tenets of Lean is
respecting people. This is one of the clear foundations of Lean. Deming talks
a _lot_ about how you have to make people enjoy their jobs and bring their
intellect to it.

Anyway, in another mini-project of mine (I am re-organizing many of my blogs so
people can see my own personal journey to Lean-Agile) I came across a blog I
wrote in May, 2007. It's called "Challenging Why (not if) Scrum works.
http://www.netobjectives.com/blogs/challenging-why-not-if-scrum-works

One might say the most surprising thing about this blog is that it discusses how
teams doing waterfall achieved a 3-to-1 improvement over other teams doing
waterfall. Not by anything they did, so to speak, as to how they were
organized. No, to me the most surprising thing about this blog was that no one
in the Scrum community was interested in exploring this (at least at the time).
But, of course, if your attitude is that software really can't be explained,
perhaps this is not so surprising.

The case I describe illustrates how one can look at issues that affect
complex-adaptive-systems (organization, reporting structure, physical location,
level of communication) and how these can be managed for improvement. In other
words, even though we may have complex systems which we can't predict their
exact outcomes, we can set up situations so that the outcomes will improve in
their own emergent manner.

There is a big difference between causality and predictability. I may not be
able to predict things even when I know the causes of them. A simple example is
adding one pound of weight to a table top until it breaks. Chaos theory will
tell me I can't predict exactly when it'll break - but I know the cause. OK,
this is a chaos situation - what about CAS?

Traffic is an example of CAS. Last night it rained in Seattle (who'da
thunk!?!). Traffic was a disaster. This typically happens, btw. Now, 'how'
the disaster showed up is unpredictable (last night it was 5 jammed big time).
But that it will be bad is very predictable.

The fact that we are working with Complex Adaptive Systems does not mean we
cannot take a scientific approach to it. We just have to know we need to
continuously refine/redefine our thinking.

Alan Shalloway
CEO,Net Objectives
Achieving Enterprise and Team Agility