When I was a little kid, must have been four or five years old, I was wandering around with my cousin behind our open back yard and in the neighborhood. And we found these four kittens. They were very skinny and scared. Of course, we decided right away we will save them, so we found a box and took them home. There was a big shed in our backyard with lots of tools and wooden pieces of all sorts. I found four large wooden blocks and built a little house for my kittens where they would be safe. My cousin got some warm milk in a bowl and we took it to the kittens.
Seen from above, it looked something like this:
Despite obviously being malnourished and in distress, the kittens were not interested in the milk at all.
They were all trying to escape from the beautiful house I had made for them. I took them one by one and tried to dip their mouths in the milk, but the result was the same. A little time passed by and I saw my dad passing by. I told him of the problem we were having and he came closer to take a look. He kicked two of the wooden blocks aside and told me that the kittens didn’t want to eat because they were not free. With the walls gone the kittens went straight for the milk… they were absolutely not interested in anything else (at least for a while until their stomachs got full).
Today, I see us habitually experimenting with adding new constraints on the thing that we all love – building products with software. We put a well thought out agile process on one side, we put a nice set of metrics on the other side, team agreements, roles and responsibilities… We try having it as airtight as we can – for more safety, less risk, more predictability, more psychological safety.
And I wonder – how hungry these kittens gotta be in order to actually care about the milk?! Should we maybe consider kicking a few of the stereotypical walls aside and letting them swarm over software product development and genuinely having fun… until their stomachs get full and warm.
Freedom is good, having someone around who cares is good, and having kittens with full stomachs is good.
What constraints do you recognize in your daily experience? And which ones can you kick aside?
