When we use analogies to convey a concept, care is needed on several fronts to confirm: The analogy is actually correct. The analogy is connected to the problem or issue we're trying to convey.
This is called The Misuse of Analogy Fallacy, and goes like this - logical error is committed when someone assumes - without any transition of explanation or verification of the facts of the starting proposition - that the same laws pertaining to one situation are equally true in application to any similar situation, as when the descriptive nature of scientific laws (natural laws) is confused with the prescriptive nature of societal or physical laws.
A false analogy occurs when an advocate presents an example of a phenomenon and implies that the example either proves or compellingly illustrates something about another phenomenon. An example might be an argument that access to firearms should not be severely restricted, as access to kitchen knives is not severely restricted and yet, like firearms, they are sometimes used to kill innocent people. This analogy deliberately ignores critical differences between guns and kitchen knives. Such an example might have some value as a figurative analogy (the purpose of a figurative analogy is illustrative and metaphorical) but it is obviously flawed if it is intended as a literal analogy (advanced as a proof).
There is an upcoming agile presentation on the PMI Agile Community of Practice, titled "A Dolt's Guide to Self Organization." One of the slides there suggests that Agile PMs are like Gardener's, they let self organization (anarchy) do useful work while steering the system toward value results.
This is course is makes no sense for anyone who is a serious Gardner. Let's take the English Garden for example - a Garden that is VERY hard to grow here in Colorado - the picture at the top is our typical landscape.
The English Garden is:
- Highly engineered to look like it is completely natural.
- Intentionally organized to with specific color selections, plant positioning.
- Has the appearance of free flowing plants are of course structured to look free flowing, that the vary essence of English Gardens.
All gardening is organized, engineered, and structured. Some better than others. But for the English Garden the outcome is the appearance that it is not organized, engineered, or structured. Too bad the analogy used in the agile talk is not true for many Gardens.
We garden as best we can here in Colorado. Our neighbor is a Master Gardener with her certificate from the Colorado State University Master Gardner Program. Having come from California a few decades ago, where Gardening is a competitive sport, and garden stores have not only Master Gardner's and Landscape designers, they have contests for the best looking garden. Successful gardens are anything but anarchy and self organizing.
I'm not that good at flowering plants, but I have had moderate sized vegetable gardens in California and here in Colorado, with enough plants to feed the neighbors, with nearly everything that can be grown by amateurs. I'm here to tell you, if I let my vegetable garden "self emerge" we wouldn't be eating much of anything.
The only plants we have that require no tending are sunflowers. All others require special soils, precise watering schedules, tending the branches and buds at the proper time during the year, and careful development of soils.
A self-organizing garden is called a weed patch. In any urban setting weeds grow much better than ornamental plants and vegetables. There are examples here in the west of natural wild flower landscapes, beautiful prairie grasses settings (in the photo taken on the road to our neighborhood in the introduction), natural forests all with eye popping outcomes. Only there is there no intervention by mankind. That's the true "self organizing" garden, but it's not called a garden then, it's call nature.
But once you introduce the Gardner into the equation, trying to control the arrangement of plants, then engineering is required.
So if you're willing to live with the true self organized garden, the prairie grasses behind our house, between our back fence and the 2nd cut of the rough on the golf course, then what you'll get is what grows in Colorado High Plains, Buffalo Grass, and native plants. But this is NOT gardening. This a natural plants as they existed before the arrival of the local Boulder County residents, some 150 years ago.
But once you start to shape the landscape in any small way, the unnatural tendencies of weeds, invasive species, and nature destroying your efforts is the result. You must continually shape and reshape the landscape to maintain the desired outcome. An English Garden is rare here, because of the weather and land. Fully engineered natural landscape are the result. This picture looks amazingly natural, but it is not. Here's where to start to learn how to "shape" the landscape to look natural, emergent, chaotic, while also being beautiful.
Agile PMs are like Gardener's, they let self organization (anarchy) do useful work while steering the system toward value results.
Really, been to a Master Gardening class lately? Tried to construct an English Garden, even in England?
It's these inappropriate, many time improper, and sometimes wrong.
Remember the double pendulum example of chaos, that actually has a closed from Lagrangian equation that makes the pendulum predictable enough to write a Java App to draw the seemingly chaotic path, but is only seemingly chaotic? This is chaotic only when the starting angle is above a specific value.
That approach dilutes the proper message of agile. The myth continues.
