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Mike Lyons separates complicated systems like car engines, which experts can fix, from complex ones like weather and stock markets, where prediction fails. He's setting up a tool to know when agile methods actually work.
Mike Lyons separates complicated systems like car engines, which experts can fix, from complex ones like weather and stock markets, where prediction fails. He's setting up a tool to know when agile methods actually work.
Let's take a closer look at these four systems and we'll start with, with the computer. You know, recently I had a problem with, with my laptop. The thing just like, wouldn't power on anymore. So what did I do? I called in help, I called Geek Squad. The guy came out and, and ran a couple tests, and you know what, within, within like 10 minutes, he had identified that the connector to the power supply was, was broken. Just 15 minutes later, he'd swapped out the connector and, and voila, my computer was back up and running. The technician that Geek Squad sent out, he'd gone through like a great deal of training and he had a lot of experience, a lot of expertise to be able to do what he does. Ultimately, I think, like, we all know that if a computer is broken, though, it doesn't really matter what the problem is. We know it can be fixed. Sure, it might require a higher level of expertise and knowledge to fix it, but a computer, it's, it's knowable, it's, it's solvable, it's fixable, it's a fixable system. And this is why we consider computers to be complicated. Now, the same is true for the car engine. If something happens to your car engine, it can be fixed. Now, it requires a degree of knowledge and expertise to fix it, of course, but it can be fixed. The level of uncertainty on how these systems work is quite low, actually. Now let's look at the other two systems. So if you picked weather and the stock market as the two complex systems, then you were right. These are considered complex systems because they're filled with uncertainty, they're difficult to control and predict. The stock market, it's influenced by hundreds of different factors, most of which are impossible to anticipate or predict. And the same is true for the weather. We all know that weather forecasts are often wrong. Well, why is that? Because uncertainty abounds when we're talking about the conditions that create weather patterns. In the next lesson, I'm going to introduce you to a sense making tool for helping to reason through the type of system you're dealing with and where an agile approach might be most beneficial.
