Agile Development Blog

Kanban is great. I value that it seeks immediate fixing of problems, which is referred to as continuous improvement. I love that.

I value that teams are prepared to “Stop the line” and not allow process or defects to continue unscathed. I love that too.

I wonder what Ferris would say about "Fixes that Fail"

But for all that, I haven’t seen clear Kanban practices for long-term trending that would help us identify or capture those “Fixes that Fail” or “Unintended Consequences.”

I am concerned that the emphasis on immediate improvements may fail to capture what long-term negative impacts may be lurking. I worry about a “not seeing the forest for the trees” effect.

So what does my concern about Kanban have to do with Ferris Bueller?

It is admittedly an odd connection. Specifically, it refers to a classic line in the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Ben Stein, Ferris’s history teacher, asks the class, “Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act: raised or lowered tariffs– anyone? anyone?” trying to get at least one student to respond. Classic line from a classic movie, though most people believe that the line was about a fictitious act.

Fast forward a few decades. In a recent New York Times Sunday Business section,  Stein wrote an article on economics entitled, “The Smoot-Hawley Act Is More Than a Laugh Line.”

Smoot-Hawley, unbeknownst to Ferris Bueller and most of us, in fact RAISED tariffs in an effort to protect the US economy from an influx of foreign goods during a challenging national economic downturn.

At the time, the “immediate fix” of the Smoot-Hawley Act seemed like a good one. Ultimately, however, the pundits of the time declared that it wasn’t enough to save the country from the economic ravage we now know as the Great Depression.

Today, economists are reconsidering the supposed low or non-correlation of the Smoot-Hawley Act and the Great Depression. Did that immediate fix actually have a lot more to do with the Great Depression than had been understood? Hmmm. Something to reflect on for future possible fixes. The debate is absolutely there. An immediate fix (like Kanban fixes or Smoot-Hawley fixes) may be one of the “Fixes that Fail” or have “Unintended Consequences” that can only be seen  through a longer view lens.

The value of this long-term reflection, whether in Kanban or in economic fixes, on such a small fix can have far-reaching impacts on our overall systems.

As Stein points out in his article, economics is not physics. For my part, our analogous comparison is that software development is not manufacturing. We need to walk the walk of systems thinking by being ever vigilant to seeing the entire system, the whole. And that means acknowledging that we will absolutely have delayed feedback loops on our fixes. Longer term reflection and retrospectives can help us make more informed “immediate” fixes as we move through ever challenging world of software development and delivery.