Project Management

Never Tell Me The Odds

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Han Solo’s famous quote (and Harrison Ford’s brilliance) aside, sometimes I want to know the odds. Actually I definitely want to know the odds, because I’m someone that likes to plan things, evaluate success, and plan for contingencies. I say this as a person who has debated with himself on “what day of the week does the week really start” kind of planning.

The odds, to me, a professional Project Manager (which I suppose means I’m worth listening to), are a way to calculate what to build. They let me evaluate success, plan for contingencies, and make something solid. If I do things right, the odds barely come into play because the plan, risk assessments, and options are all in place.

The odds are, at best, a tool, a way to get better, a way to improve. For all my world of flowcharts and checklists – professionally and privately – my world is one of solidity. I deal in how and results and measurements. From personal zines to environmental systems, it’s about results

But right now it seems society is more and more about playing the odds. As my friend Serdar put it once, more and more aspects of our society are coming to resemble a casino. The problem is casinos aren’t about building things, and that’s the problem.

As of this writing there are plenty of discussions about Kalshi, Polymarket, and other activities that are “prediction markets” which are really just gambling. That’s it, they’re gambling, and you can’t call it anything else. Draft Kings may have led the way with sports betting, but now we have prominent gambling companies. Call it what it is.

Our society is a casino. But it has been for awhile.

The stock market is not the economy, as we’re often reminded. It is, to an extent, about playing the odds and estimating chances. Now any economy is going to have some of that, as will any part, but if you ever looked at overvalued stocks and wondered, it’s not about the economy in many cases. It’s about the odds that something pays off, and it’s why some investments in companies that don’t do anything pay off, because people think they can sell before they loose.

Then there was Crypto, which really is just a stock on the blockchain. Then there was the NFTs, which thankfully crashed and burned then sunk into a swamp, that was gambling as well. Now we’re just to plain almost-honest gambling. It’d be refreshing if it wasn’t so prominent, so pathological, and in more and more cases it seems about people manipulating odds.

It’s all been a bit of gambling for decades – centuries? – but now it’s all gambling front and center. Bets and odds and manipulation. Know what it isn’t? Doing something with measurable achievements..

Where’s the plan? The results? The thing built? The thing made? Something that gets something done, that helps people, that can be felt, seen, touched, used? Where’s something I can break down into a Kanban backlog, where I can say “yes, here is a distinct result.”

But it’s a Casino. It’s about playing the odds, getting money, and that’s it. Nothing to be built, to be made, to be achieved. If you can manipulate things (say, with a bit of insider political information) so much the better. Why do something that has a role, a result, a history when you can just get paid for wondering what the body count is in a train wreck?

Play the odds enough and that’s all you can do. Look for the gamble, the payoff, the high. You just slosh money around and play the odds. That’s it.

The Casino economy is forgetting how to do things, and forgetting the value of doing things for and with people. And as a Project Manager, a person, and a citizen, I hate it.

Steven Savage

Scrum At Scale and Society

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

As per my last post I said I will be talking more (but not entirely) about politics. And if you think I’m going to jump into something big, right now, not really. Well I kind of am. Because I want to share something that I find useful in thinking about society, politics, and how we get things done at scale.

It won’t surprise you that it’s about Agile methods, but one that affects my politics – and might give you a few ideas.

For anyone not familiar with Agile (a vanishingly small number of people who read me as I talk about it a lot), it’s an approach to work, started in software, about reasonably-sized teams working in short increments. The popular method is Scrum, where teams take a list of priorities, tackle a limited set over a short time, and then review and do it all over again. I’ve applied it to writing, art, and more.

But as you may guess, small teams is like about 5 people give or take. So how do you do a big project? Well someone invented Scrum At Scale. You have teams, but team leads from those team meet on their OWN Scrum teams to coordinate. Bigger project? Then you have teams of team leads of team leads, and pile it as high as possible. It’s pretty cool and isn’t the giant process-haul that rival SAFE is.

It also affected my view of politics.

First, one of the problems of politics is non-participation or exclusion. To be part of society is to be part of it, like it or not. At the same time plenty of people want to exclude others to get their own “selectorate” to make holding power easier, and of course usually screwing over everyone else. Scrum at Scale made me realize how important it is for people to be involved and involved at multiple levels.

You should pay attention to your community, but also to your state/province, federal, and the world and be involved. If necessary hold office even if it’s an informal community thing. Good leaders should also be trusted if they can and have held positions at lower levels and have actually done something. I’m no military adventurist by a long shot, but there’s a reason I sometimes vote for ex-mils as well as doctors, emergency workers, etc.

Scrum at Scale is about being involved and being in touch among levels. A team lead on the lowest level scrum team might be a representative on one team, and the team above that, and so on. That’s the kind of thing software development or society needs – integration of people.

But there’s one more factor as well. Scrum of Scrums, especially, emphasizes communicating problems upward. What a team below can’t solve, the team above tries to tackle, and so on up the chain. Eventually unsolvable problems land on a leadership group, and if no one else can fix them that’s their job.

Problems go up, solutions come down. If you’ve ever seen politicians try to solve issues that they usually make up you realize how important this idea is. The higher up the chain you are the more you should help fix the unfixable things below. If no problems come up then you keep things running, which is important because I can say quite cynically many a problem is caused by a politician trying to keep their job.

Honestly, a lot of my politics are influenced by things that aren’t seen as political – project management, biology, and so on. But as I’ve noted before everything is really political, so we should learn from everything.

Steven Savage

Can You Imagine Starting?

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I was going to do a post on media forms and what we can learn about today’s media from the Dada art movement, but Serdar had to go and get all brilliant and discuss how people can’t and shouldn’t wait for the right conditions to start something. It deserves it’s own blogpost, so me discussing art movements has to wait.

Serdar points out how people wait for the right conditions and how you can always find advice, from Doris Lessing to Buddhism that the time is never right, never perfect. The problem of course is helping people understand it’s time to get off their butts and do it. If you’ve ever tried to get someone – or yourself – “going” you know what I mean.

Now I work with Agile methodologies, as anyone who’s known me for five minutes is aware. Agile is about breaking work down, doing it in order of importance, and very importantly getting going. Just start and take feedback later – in fact doing something means you at least get feedback so you can do better (or even just quit). Agile isn’t “move fast, break things” it’s “move fast, make things.”

Thus as you can imagine I have to help people “get started” and “just get going.” Which should be easy as I have a lot of experience, a lot of certifications, and a very irritatingly effective attitude of “just do it.” Should be easy with a person like me, right?

Of course you know the answer is that it’s not, which irritates me at an irrational level. Sometime I “buddy up” with “just give it a try.” Sometimes I “Agile harder.” Sometimes I end up a therapist. But Serdar’s post made me realize in some cases what people lack is the ability to imagine starting. It’s easy to look at a big project or some ambitious idea and be so overwhelmed you can’t imagine starting – and in some cases it’s easier to imagine failing.

It’s easy to imagine not starting. I’ve realized as I mull offer Serdar’s writings that people like me are trained imagining how to start, other people have that imagination of how to start and we have to help others develop that capacity.

Of course easier said than done, and each person or group is an individual case. Maybe we have to inspire. Maybe we have to (in some cases literally) draw a picture. Maybe we encourage a prototype. Maybe we just “give it a shot.” But we need people to be able to see starting despite “imperfect” conditions.

Which means when we’re trying to help someone overcome a fear of imperfect conditions, our first job might be to help them see what’s possible. But the next job is helping them develop that imagination.

Steven Savage