Causality I have been reading a bunch of books recently and just found Peter M. Senge. He is a champoin of Systems Thinking. I have finsihed the Dance of Change and am about halfway through The Fifth Discipline. There is a passage in The Fifth Discipline that just screamed agile at me:
Many feedback processes contain “delays”, interruptions in the flow of influence which make the consequences of actions occur gradually. Delays are interruptions between actions and their consequences. Delays can make you badly overshoot your mark, or they can have a positive effect if you recognize them and work with them. Delays exist everywhere in business systems. We invest now, to reap a benefit in the distant future; we hire a person today but it may be months before he or she is fully productive. But delays are often unappreciated and can lead to instability or even breakdown, especially when they are long. Adjusting the shower temperature, for instance, is far more difficult when there is a ten-second delay before the water temperature adjusts, then when the delay takes only a second or two. During the ten seconds after you turn up the heat, the water remains cold. You receive no response to your action; so you perceive that your act has had no effect. You respond by continuing to turn up the heat. When the hot water finally arrives, it is too hot and you turn back; and after another delay, it’s frigid again. Each cycle of adjustments in the balancing loop compensates somewhat for the cycle before (see figure 4).
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