Out of all the talks and discussions at Agila Sverige 2009, the most useful tidbit I took with me was this:

Evolution = Variation + Selection

The equation is obvious, and yet it was useful to have it spelled out like that. The moment I saw it on the screen, I knew it was just what our Agile project needed right now.

I’d been thinking for some weeks now that our project felt a bit stagnant. Everything was going well, we were delivering good stuff, the process was flowing smoothly, but there was something missing: change. And if there’s no change, there’s no improvement, and I get restless.

We’d had our regular retrospectives, and we’d always come up with some points for improvement. But I felt that we were often saying the same thing every month, and that any adjustments we made were small, on the margin. Looking back (with that equation in front of me) the reason is obvious. We had a good deal of selection (critical evaluation) but far from enough variation. We need to experiment more, change our routines and our processes more (more often, more extensively, more deeply, more creatively) and see what happens.

The first thing we’re going to change (after we all get back from our vacations) is try 1-week sprints/iterations instead of 4-week ones. And I’m going to spend a lot of time during the summer doldrums (when we’re between iterations) thinking up more variations to try.