Science Predicts Problems

Milk taught me about science.

“Hold him upright”, my wife instructed as she handed baby to me.

“My arms are so tired. I’ll lay him down, but I’ll keep my eyes on him.”

“No, no - he’s just been fed. If you lay him down, he’ll vomit milk.”

“He’s fine - look he’s giggling!”, I beamed as a proud father.

As I lay baby down, and milk rushed out from every orifice, my heart sank and something in my head clicked.

How did my wife know this would happen?

Alan Watts suggested, “If the business of science is to make predictions about what’s going to happen, science is essentially prophecy. […] By studying the behaviour of the past and describing it carefully, we can make predictions about what’s going to happen in the future. That’s really the whole of science.”

Richard Feynman summarised: “Science can be defined as a method for […] trying to answer only questions which can be put into the form: If I do this, [then] what will happen?”

So, science is the ability to predict.

My wife was able to predict the future based on experience: IF baby lies down after feeding, THEN milky eruption.

Great management thinkers are also often scientific, recognising frequent cause-and-effect patterns in business.

For example, W. Edwards Deming noted that IF an organisation focuses on reducing costs, THEN costs will actually increase.

For example, call centre agents are often incentivised to keep calls short, allowing each agent to handle more calls in a day. But, how many additional calls will now be received from customers whose question remained unanswered after that curtailed first call?

Separately, Eli Goldratt noted that IF an organisation focuses improvement anywhere other than the bottleneck, THEN we should not expect an improvement in throughput.

For example, if software testers are the most capacity constrained team in our organisation, won’t instead helping software developers complete their work faster only cause more work to pile up in front of the testers?

So, science also applies to managing organisations. It allows us to predict the likely effect of any action.

However, Feynman cautioned the need for clarity: “I must also point out to you that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong.”

We may believe Scrum will improve collaboration. If so, what does ‘collaboration’ mean? What aspect of Scrum do we believe might be helpful, and why? And, how will we know if we were right?

The takeaway? If we cannot precisely predict the likely impact of our change, then our change is more likely to end in a milky eruption than improvement.