I’m currently reading the excellent book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. Written by Andy Hunt of the Pragmatic Programmers, it contains a lot of information about how your brain works (your main asset as an knowledge worker) and strategies to get more from it. In the chapter about stimulating your brain, it talks about a deck of cards called Oblique Strategies. Each card in the deck lists an aphorism meant to jog your thinking, send it in a different direction or encourages you to look at the problem from a different angle.
Yesterday I installed the Oblique Strategies Linux screenlet on my laptop. A small black rectangle in the corner of the screen shows me one of these cards. Today, it says:
“Into the Impossible”
Huh… Ok, well, applying that to my current project, of course there is something that rings a bell. Across the board, software projects have a very low chance of success (only 32% of are considered successful according to the 2009 CHAOS report). Aside from the overall success rate, the project has some additional factors that make it hard: a fixed deadline, unknown and wildly varying scope, no clear handle on the architecture yet and the software developers to work on it still have to be found.
But it still isn’t impossible to successfully deliver software by the deadline, that contains features useful to the customer. I like to think of it as improbable. Now that’s something else altogether. If something is impossible, it can’t be done, no matter how hard you try. But if it’s merely improbable, then there is room for success.
Another way to look at it is to accept the premise that what you are trying to do really is impossible and list the reasons why. My project is impossible, because the deadline is completely unrealistic. Well, what if we have an extra month? What if we deliver a small increment first? What if we scale up another team? This may lead to ideas that can turn your project from impossible into merely improbable.
It’ll be interesting to see what other oblique strategies come up and whether they’ll be helpful.
