Jurgen Appelo has a nice post about the efforts to speed up the change in the management processes. While I don't share their goal for several reasons, it's still a good goal in principle.
My experience is that management processes in mature domains are well suited to service the needs of the domain. In inmature domain, management processes are good targets for improvement.
In building launch vehicles, manned space craft, weapons systems, commercial aircraft, the management processes are tailored to the need. They are disciplined, rigorous, methodical, and may appear to outsiders to be slow and plodding. These domains have heavy software requirements and many of the agile principles are in place, along with the management processes to get maximum benefit for them in the context of formal contracting.
In this domain, we get in trouble when we DON'T flow the processes and try to skip steps, replace known working methods with new and untried ones.
But there are many domains where management needs to be overhauled, and Jurgen and company are on a quest to do just that.
The Analogy Trap
Jurgen mentions the "attractor" as the analogy of the management processes that need to be changed.
That management is Attracted to a set of processes and those processes need to be changed. The picture above is labeled an attractor but it is in fact a picture of the path followed by the underlying equations of motion of a dynamic system. It is the artifact of this dynamic system.
Why is this an issue? Well it's simple. Jurgen mentions changing the attractor - replacing it with a new attractor.
It is NOT the attractor that needs to be changed, but the underlying equations that create the attractor that must be changed to produce a new attractor. These equations represent the dynamics of the system. When the analogy is flawed, we loose the ability to actually drive the change. We give away the connection between cause and effect. And then we're disappointed when something doesn't happen.
The garden as a self organizing system is one such analogy that produces less than expected results of good tomatoes, when we let them do their own thing.
In systems (complex or not) the equations of motion that produce a set of paths when captured over time produce pictures like the one above. These equations are deterministic, they are complex, they can emergent, and they are almost always represented in some space other than our familiar 3 dimensional world of X,Y,Z coordinates. The sample picture is in phase space not Euclidean space.
A simple example is the spherical coordinates of our world - the surface of the earth. If we were to start walking in a direction and hold our heading - or flying would be better - we'd end up in the same place we started. A spherical coordinate system returns us to the same place in the coordinate system after a 360° transformation - a 2π rotation.
The picture above is in a Phase Space, rather than a geometric coordinate system. The generation of the path in phase space is a common method in physics for showing complex relationships between the processes - a nice approach for management processes.
But the attractor does not attract in the sense of a force, pulling on an object - in the classical physics sense.The statement in the Wikipedia link is technically not correct. ... points that get close enough to the attractor remain close even if slightly disturbed. Those points follow their equations of motion they don't know that they are creating a pretty picture of the attractor, they are just following their deterministic path, guided by their equations of motion.
This is the key concept that should invert the analogy of Jurgen for the betterment of his quest. There is not attractor there are equations of management that must be altered.
The attractor is the path followed by the particle (in Jurgen's case, managers and management processes) while traveling inside the system (the management system). The picture is a plot of the path of the object moving, guided by the equations of motion. In the field I grew up in, the Path Integral describes how particle move between two locations guided by the forces that act on them.
So Back To The Analogy
For an analogy to work - or at least work well enough to be useful - it needs to inform a new understanding from previous understandings. But it has to be correct in the original space. The suggestion that a new attractor should be sought needs to be replaced with the search for a new set of equations of motion to generate the attractor - the picture above.
I got a book for Christmas, Feynman, Ottavini & Myrick. It's a graphic book of the life and accomplishments of Richard Feyman. Feyman was the father of a particle physics theory that won him the Nobel prize. He has great advice (starting on page 157) about when speaking about sticking to the real science when trying to explain something in populist terms. Once you bend the real science in an attempt to explain it in populist terms, the explanation looses its integrity and the resulting understanding looses its integrity as well.
My favorite no integrity populist book is the Tao of Physics, which was a wildly popular in the 70's trying to explain the parallels of particle physics and Eastern Mysticism and was based on completely crap (I was a particle physics grad student at the time).
Why the quest for integrity in the analogy? Once the underlying integrity is lost, the resulting benefit of he analogy is lost as well. That's the point.
Jurgen's analogy between management processes and attractors is useful - and has integrity - for management transformation. But it needs to be inverted to be useful. The underlying equations of motion are (or may be) flawed in the domain Jurgen seeks to improve. The attractor is just the picture of the path taken by those equations over time. Change the equations - get a picture of the new attractor. Changing the attractor requires changing the equations. Not the other way around.
Seek new equations and the picture will change.
If the picture becomes more attractive in the populist sense, then mission accomplished.
