Agile for Anarchists

A multiplayer turn-based strategy game IRL

It’s important for us, riders of the hedge, to face two facts at regular intervals: one, we lack essential farm experience, and two, any farm venture has the potential to consume all our time.

To collaborate our best, Maren and I use a system called  Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA). Forged in the hellfire of global mega corporations, PDCA is an anarchic system with many derivatives. The most popular among them is Agile.

PDCA is anarchic because  it doesn't require an authority. Unfortunately for people trying to get work done, bosses usually don’t endorse systems that obscure their own presumptive utility. Because PDCA makes many management practices superfluous, it doesn’t often thrive in the corporate environment.

That doesn't mean PDCA can’t work well for corporations. I've spent two decades running some form of PDCA in large complex companies. But without a supportive workplace, the anarchic ethos will probably only exist in silence or disguise.

On the farm we embrace it.

At the Hedge we feel most  comfortable navigating our inexperience with caution. And by reviewing our work at fixed intervals we check that we're still doing what we want to do.

What we want involves, above all, having a good time. We are also trying to eat good stuff, make the farm pay for itself and take care of our land.

Here’s how the process works:

• Step 1. We plan some work

• Step 2. We attempt to do that work

• Step 3. We check how we did (What got done? What didn't?)

• Step 4. Last, we act on observations from step 3

Our farm meeting is once a week and takes between 15 minutes and one hour. Because we need to look back before we can move forward, the meeting starts at step 3. We talk about how we're feeling, and move on to reviewing what got done.

Then we commit to work we think we can complete within a week. Most of the time there is carryover from the previous week. – that’s fine. There are countless forces outside our control that will dictate the pace and priority of our work.

Finally, we talk about anything we'd like to change, based on our observations in step 3. Over the past year, we've changed everything from the way we document our work, the type of things we work on together, and the color of our post-it notes.

We plan the next week of work, and we start doing it. 

With every boring turn of the PDCA cycle, we shed a little of the anxiety that our routine chaos lacks direction.

Many thanks to Maren (who makes all these posts happen), Brent Hurley (who taught me all about this agile stuff) and Steve Solomon (team productivity genius) for feedback on early drafts of this post.

Moon starting week 4 of life

Pile of shit

The wild Canadian geese are also raising their young right now.