For over two years now, I have been obsessively thinking about and actively working on simplification.
Building XP, we made a racing car. Faster than any other, better than any other, could win any race, but only if it didn’t blow up before the end.
When we get things right, the results are spectacular, but as we grow, we find that people don’t always get why we do things, so they shortcut. They turn purposeful actions into tasks they have to do, so they try to get them done as quick as possible, or get away with not doing them when no-one is looking...
...it’s a natural thing to do, and so we call it ‘entropy’... when we see something not quite right, we recognise we need to use our energy to reshape the systems we have created.
But because XP was so complex, there were many moving parts, and not many people understood how the whole thing works. On top of this, if you tinker with one thing, something else is affected elsewhere, or more than one thing, or sometimes a cascade of things. Schools are not jigsaws, they are more like neural networks. People networks are complex.
There are a number of quotes that struck me... I think all of them are from dead white guys... but y’know... for me, they get to the heart of the power and problem of simplification to solve the issue of entropy.
1. Blaise Pascal was a French dude, so this is paraphrasing, but his note went something like this... “I’m sorry for writing you this long letter... I didn’t have time to write a short one...” - I love this quote, because you equate brevity with time, and it’s just not true. To look effortless takes a hell of a lot of effort.
2. Albert Einstein - again paraphrasing - “Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler” - there is a balance here, and if you go over it, you lose all meaning.
3. Antoine de Saint-Exupery - another French dude... “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. “
There’s another quote, but I’ll leave that till the end... ...back to our story... we were seven years into our XP journey, and we’d done all this work on simplification... if you simplify things, more people understand it, so more people will do it right, they will do things faster and better, so the quality goes up and interestingly, the cost goes down. You normally equate quality with speed and cost. There is a ‘quality, cost, speed’ triangle where you can only pick two.
Well, here’s a secret... if you simplify things, you achieve the genius of the ‘AND’... you get all three.
So we’re simplifying like crazy... aligning things left, right and centre, using numbered lists, using ‘pattern language’ (another blog post...), colours even etc all the design tricks in the book...
...and then we realised we hadn’t looked at what started XP in the first place, our design principles... we realised that the things we used to build XP were only understood by a handful of people at most. So we turned our gaze onto this.
Now, we could only do this because of the 10,000 hours we had spent previously on everything else, but it only took 30 minutes to reduce our design principles to one sentence (in reality, it took seven years)
“At XP, we build our community through activism, leadership and equity, sharing our stories as we go...”
This beautiful little sentence is our masterpiece. I will say that this is the best piece of work I will ever achieve in my lifetime. But I do not expect everyone to understand why I say this so boldly.
No, the real work has begun; to show how everything originates from this sentence, from abstract to concrete. From this sentence, we can build much more than a school, but our school is where it starts.
Watch this space...
My last quote is from Steve Jobs... “Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
Building XP, we made a racing car. Faster than any other, better than any other, could win any race, but only if it didn’t blow up before the end.
When we get things right, the results are spectacular, but as we grow, we find that people don’t always get why we do things, so they shortcut. They turn purposeful actions into tasks they have to do, so they try to get them done as quick as possible, or get away with not doing them when no-one is looking...
...it’s a natural thing to do, and so we call it ‘entropy’... when we see something not quite right, we recognise we need to use our energy to reshape the systems we have created.
But because XP was so complex, there were many moving parts, and not many people understood how the whole thing works. On top of this, if you tinker with one thing, something else is affected elsewhere, or more than one thing, or sometimes a cascade of things. Schools are not jigsaws, they are more like neural networks. People networks are complex.
There are a number of quotes that struck me... I think all of them are from dead white guys... but y’know... for me, they get to the heart of the power and problem of simplification to solve the issue of entropy.
1. Blaise Pascal was a French dude, so this is paraphrasing, but his note went something like this... “I’m sorry for writing you this long letter... I didn’t have time to write a short one...” - I love this quote, because you equate brevity with time, and it’s just not true. To look effortless takes a hell of a lot of effort.
2. Albert Einstein - again paraphrasing - “Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler” - there is a balance here, and if you go over it, you lose all meaning.
3. Antoine de Saint-Exupery - another French dude... “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. “
There’s another quote, but I’ll leave that till the end... ...back to our story... we were seven years into our XP journey, and we’d done all this work on simplification... if you simplify things, more people understand it, so more people will do it right, they will do things faster and better, so the quality goes up and interestingly, the cost goes down. You normally equate quality with speed and cost. There is a ‘quality, cost, speed’ triangle where you can only pick two.
Well, here’s a secret... if you simplify things, you achieve the genius of the ‘AND’... you get all three.
So we’re simplifying like crazy... aligning things left, right and centre, using numbered lists, using ‘pattern language’ (another blog post...), colours even etc all the design tricks in the book...
...and then we realised we hadn’t looked at what started XP in the first place, our design principles... we realised that the things we used to build XP were only understood by a handful of people at most. So we turned our gaze onto this.
Now, we could only do this because of the 10,000 hours we had spent previously on everything else, but it only took 30 minutes to reduce our design principles to one sentence (in reality, it took seven years)
“At XP, we build our community through activism, leadership and equity, sharing our stories as we go...”
This beautiful little sentence is our masterpiece. I will say that this is the best piece of work I will ever achieve in my lifetime. But I do not expect everyone to understand why I say this so boldly.
No, the real work has begun; to show how everything originates from this sentence, from abstract to concrete. From this sentence, we can build much more than a school, but our school is where it starts.
Watch this space...
My last quote is from Steve Jobs... “Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”