Species evolution by natural selection was always a fascinating concept to me. As per National Geographic definition: “Natural selection is the process through which populations of living organisms adapt and change. Individuals in a population are naturally variable, meaning that they are all different in some ways. This variation means that some individuals have traits better suited to the environment than others. Individuals with adaptive traits—traits that give them some advantage—are more likely to survive and reproduce. These individuals then pass the adaptive traits on to their offspring. Over time, these advantageous traits become more common in the population. Through this process of natural selection, favorable traits are transmitted through generations.”
It was a notion that led many advances in our understanding, not merely related to our existence, but also related to the nature dynamics that manifest in many other situations!
One of which to me was the structure of the Agile mindset, which outlines some practices and guidelines for businesses (software-oriented primarily) to adopt and cope with its environment to not only survive, but also to flourish and shine. Among the upcoming lines, I’ll try to illustrate how similar Agile is to the broad concepts of Evolution with natural selection.
Survival of the fittest
One of the similarities between Evolution and Agile is the base both start from, Environment. In nature, the environment decides the natural conditions the species should adapt (Adaptation). In business, the market decides the business constraints which businesses or products should consider in order to meet the basic requirements for survival.
Fittest species and likewise businesses, find a way in the field. Ignore these conditions and you find yourself blocked by environmental conditions. Many businesses can have the right funding, right people, but perhaps not the right mindset to comprehend the market constraints, which leads them to unpleasant results.
In Agile, “Responding to change” is a clear direction to always consider and react to environmental changes. Given that you might not be aware of all the dimensions you’re trying to comprehend, it’s recommended to always listen to what the market is saying. You’re always trying to think in time-boxed, data-driven milestones instead of complete, perfect, long-term plans. The reason is obvious, the environment isn’t clear yet, more challenges arise, and then more flexibility is required from businesses to adapt these challenges.
Natural Selection vs. Market Selection
In nature, we have attributes that fit better than others. For example, if a creature is living in a cold environment, fur would be better than fins. In a hot environment, sweating is better to cool down body temperature. These attributes are being selected naturally (also blindly) by the surrounding nature. Likewise, the nature for businesses is the market. Market demands specify the barrier the businesses have to pass.
In order to understand what works best for the environment, you have to interact a lot with the environment, Agile advises and praises the “working software” over “documents and plans”. What this means profoundly is that experiments lead to realistic understanding of the market demands and hence lead to more fitting business.
Agile tries to draw the guidelines for such experiment methods without necessarily worrying too much about the outcomes, because every environment (market) will have different barriers. So it’s concerned with how people think, not what they achieve. And that’s the heart of Agile, how to make people behind the business align their mindset towards more realistic outcomes.
Layers of survival
Survival nowadays isn’t only about biologically surviving, it includes a social layer as well. Humans are complicated creatures who produce value over groups and big groups (nations) and big big groups (countries). That’s being said, let’s assume we -humans- have 2 layers of survival:
Biological Survival: Aims to get you functional by driving you to eat, protect yourself against predators, and reproduce.
Social Survival: Aims to get you productive and contribute to the overall survival of your group by driving you to not kill, not steal, etc..
If we applied the same thing to Agile, we can find that Agile aims to target 2 layers of business/product survival:
Organizational Values: As we spoke above about paving a mindset that reacts quickly to market changes, Agile aims to get businesses functional by empowering core values that people inside one organization should consider in order for the collective mindset to be aligned towards more environment-aware goals.
Organizational Practices: Practices are methods for organization to use for tackling its interaction with the environment. In order for an organization to succeed in a specific market, it has to be following informed (data-based) processes to approximate the outcomes as much as possible towards a productive outcome.
Many other similarities can be mentioned in this context between natural evolution and Agile as frameworks that measure and control behaviors and interactions between complex systems such as nature/market and creatures/businesses.
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