Simon Baker has written a superb post, capturing the elusive nature of empowerment.
He mentions “an environment that tolerates mistakes to cultivate learning”. For me, this is an essential part of innovation; of the Lean metaphor that suggests a Software Development team is more like a Product Development team (designing new cars) than a Production Line (churning out the same thing repeatedly).
In a Production Line, we try to minimise variance (think Jidoka and Continuous Integration and Deployment).
In a Product Development team, we try to maximise learning opportunities, which means experimenting (think risk, innovation and doing things no one’s done before).
“There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes.”
— Richard Buckminster Fuller
Are mistakes in Software Development really mistakes? Or just experiments from which we learn something new? And if they keep happening… what didn’t we learn?
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