Cynefin Complexity - a new perspective on old Wickedness

The Cynefin Framework overlaps with earlier work on Wicked problems. Both have things to say about sophisticated software development, and both point towards agile techniques for delivery. DSDM seems to have a trick up its sleeve to meet the challenges of wicked problems.

Something New

The Cynefin Framework - wikimedia commons

In the past couple of years Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework has captured imaginations in the software industry. Snowden proposes that problems and activities exist in one of several domains through which they can be better understood: Simple, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic:

I'm not going to go into the framework in any great detail here. You can find out all about it on Wikipedia, on Snowden's own company, or all over the web.

Snowden recommends operating in the Complicated and Complex domains, and some commentators have suggested that this is the natural mode of software product development. Day-to-day coding sits largely in the Complicated domain, which requires specialists who can apply acquired expertise and perceive Good Practice solutions. Product and project thinking sit in the Complex domain: we make a small change, understand its effect on the product and on users, and modify our plans accordingly. It’s a nice characterisation of agile approaches.

Something Old

Wicked problems were first characterised in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s:

1. The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
4. Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot operation.'
6. Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

This is a great description of software dev:

The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.

The delivery process explores its own requirements, and invariably exposes complexities that the client hadn’t considered.

Wicked problems have no stopping rule.

There is such a thing as too little development and too much, and often a large grey zone around 'just right'.

Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.

Any business requirement has multiple legitimate solutions. Some will be better than others.

Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.

Otherwise an off-the-shelf solution would already exist and the work would be unnecessary.

Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot operation.'

If we fail, (as an internal team or a contracted consultancy) the client won’t have the money or the time to try again. And if they do, it certainly won’t be with us!

Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

No off-the-shelf solution.

A Cynefin perspective on wicked problems

It feels like Snowden’s Complicated/Complex boundary has things to say about wicked problems:

The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.

Emergent characteristics of the Complex domain.

Wicked problems have no stopping rule.

Probe - Sense - Respond applied to stopping as well as to continuing.

Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.

Beyond the domain of Best Practice, into Good Practice and Emergent Practice.

Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.

Hence the need to Probe - Sense - Respond.

Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot operation.'

Big Design Up Front is dangerous - again why we prefer to Probe - Sense - Respond.

Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

Hence no established Best Practice.

A new representation of old observations can be fruitful - Mendeleev’s arrangement of the periodic table is a classic example. I generally find Cynefin frustratingly vague, and Wicked problems provide it with a concrete context that I can understand. The Probe - Sense - Respond approach partially dismantles Wicked Challenge 1 (problem not understood until after the solution) and Challenge 5 (one-shot operation). Of course this is part if the core of the Agile paradigm.

Cynefin also nicely characterises what clients hire consultancies for. Simple problems they can manage by themselves. The Complicated and Complex domains encompass activity where specialists can add expertise and value. Even the Chaotic domain has value for innovation spikes.

Wicked projects and DSDM

Agile approaches meet Wicked Challenges 2-6 very well. They generally address Challenge 1 only in iteration - The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution. This is fine for ongoing product development, but perhaps insufficient for projects with a discrete start (and end).

Waterfall methodologies have a partial solution. PRINCE2 has an Initiation Stage with a go/no-go gate preceding full delivery. At the end of this, the team should have given due consideration to the problem space and to alternative solutions. But PRINCE2's up-front approach to planning, with an expectation of minimal engagement, makes it fragile to unexpected change. It doesn’t Probe - Sense - Respond.

DSDM has a nice trick here - an agile method with an 'Enough Design Up Front' mentality. It directly addresses Wicked Challenge 1 with explicit Feasability and Foundations phases. At the same time, its principles of ongoing client collaboration, iterative delivery and flexible, prioritised scope retain the responsiveness required in the Complex domain.

Wicked problems and #noprojects

In my previous post I suggested that there are three equally legitimate modes of software development: projects, product dev (which I aligned with #noprojects) and support. How do these modes support Wicked problems?

When clients hire consultancies, it is almost inevitably project work. A start date, a fixed budget and therefore an end date. We'd better hope then that projects can satisfactorily address them - I've made a case above that by combining up-front preparation with ongoing agility, they can.

Product dev teams operating in the #noprojects mould are ideally placed to engage with Wicked problems. On the ground on an ongoing basis, they can continue to Probe - Sense - Respond and keep improving the solution. This may make #noprojects a better fit than a project or an external agency, if the company can afford and manage its own team devoted to the product.

Support mode is a poor fit for Wicked problems. A team focused on support is trying to address discrete issues as they are raised, and is unlikely to give a Wicked problem the all-round consideration and the iterative attention that it requires. We've all seen support teams continue to fix point problems without addressing the underlying root cause. Once they step back and recognise a Wicked problem, the team often drops out of support into one of the other modes - project or product dev, whichever suits them best.

Projects, #noprojects, language and thought

It's a truism that when you learn a different programming language, you learn a new way of looking at code. The language we use changes our abilities to think about what we're describing. The same principle applies to Orwell's Newspeak, the linguistic battlegrounds of social equality, to the fact that arithmetic is simpler in Chinese than in English.

So it's likely that the language we use to describe our work affects how we think about it and how we perform it. Last year for example a client pointed out to me an emotive stumbling block for participants new to agile methods - he found the standard terminology of Scrum alarmingly negative - sprint, backlog, grooming.

I've had roles with an interesting range of employers, on different types of of work. Real-life examples:

• 'Lift-and-shift' of a website from one web stack to another, with no user-visible changes
• Ongoing feature development of a website and its custom CMS
• Development of a social network application, segueing into product support

All of these have been software development for long-lived products, and we've described all this work as projects.

But only one is a project. And the confusion is harming us, as practitioners and as a community.

Project projects and non-project projects

PMI describes a project:

It’s a temporary group activity designed to produce a unique product, service or result.

Temporary duration to meet scoped business goals. If that annoys you because it doesn't describe your work, bear with me for a minute.

By the PMI measure, my web lift-and-shift was clearly a project.

Ongoing feature development was not a project, and while initial delivery of my social network was a project, the current support effort is not. These efforts have existing descriptors - product development and product support respectively. Together they're sometimes classed as BAU (business as usual), distinguishing them from the one-shot (and disruptive) nature of projects.

Note that I'm not suggesting that one is 'better', 'more legitimate', 'more hardcore' or 'more professional'. Clearly these are all crucial software development activities and the language to tell them apart can help us.

Why does it matter?

Simply because the different types of effort have different delivery and (whisper it) governance needs. For the dev team, BAU and support need no spinning up - there's already a product, a UX framework, an architecture, domain knowledge etc etc. And save for occasional 'major' releases there's probably no need to think much about go-live. This makes them fertile ground for a wide range of fantastic lightweight agile techniques. Projects are harder, and often mean a new team, a new set of stakeholders and business domain, new architecture, a deployment plan, handover, training and so on.

For management - the lovely people paying us to develop software - there's a predictable operating expense to BAU (OPEX - the cost of doing business) to maintain and develop an existing product with known business value. Projects are a riskier proposition. They create change in the business - that's the whole point - which means rocking the boat. They take capital expenditure (CAPEX - investment over and above OPEX). The manager has a fixed pot of money and it might go anywhere - Project X or Projects A, B and C, another server, more marketing or straight into the bank to earn interest. She has to have some reason to believe that Project X is worth the investment, which means some idea of what she's going to get, when and for how much.

How our language harms us

We throw around the 'project' to describe all of these activities, and it harms us as individual practitioners and a community.

As an individuals, the language of 'projects' blinds us to difference between the models. After all, it's all programming (or design, or system development or...). We try to apply approaches suitable for BAU to projects, techniques for projects to support, etc. Or we simply get confused why two pieces of work are shaping up very differently. This is not conjecture - I've seen extremely intelligent and skilled engineers declare 'OK but it's all just projects.'

As a community, we're engaged in a divisive debate between estimates and #noprojects / #noestimates. Each side has its impassioned advocates, and they see each other as variously as hidebound or naive.

But the clue's right there in the name. If you're not doing projects, then the #noprojects paradigm might be an fantastic fit. #noestimates might clear a swath of unnecessary overhead - even enable you to make more accurate forecasts!

If you're doing projects, this doesn't apply. Your investors still need...a project and much that comes with it.

What doesn't this mean?

This doesn't mean that projects are waterfall and #noprojects is agile. It might mean that projects sacrifice a degree of agility for a degree of predictability. How far you end up along the agile spectrum may depend on the appetite of the investor and the deftness of the team.

In similar vein, it doesn't mean that there's a hard-and-fast divide between the models. The team doing a project within a product that they support. The ongoing dev effort managed as mini-projects. There are as many ways to blur the lines as there are individual circumstances.

Where from here?

As a software delivery professional, my role is to create clarity and shared understanding. Part of that is agreeing a shared language. So I propose the following.

Within the class of Software Delivery we have three (maybe more) subclasses:

• Projects
• Product Development
• Support

Because they are all Software Delivery, some aspects of all three are very similar.
And because they have different technical and management requirements, techniques that are suited to one are not appropriate for another.

And perhaps we can re-frame the #noprojects debate. Rather than pushing dogmatic points on two 'sides' that now appear illusory, we can ask when are #noprojects and #noestimates approaches beneficial? What new tools can #noprojects and #noestimates thinking add to the seasoned software pro's armoury? And framed like this, might they even find applicability in the projects domain?

Naked Lunch and the shared backlog

The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork"

William Burroughs, Naked Lunch

A minor incident ordering coffee

So I've noticed this lovely little coffee shop with an intimate atmosphere, comfortable seating and wifi. Win! I have to make a meeting after lunch, but there's no queue so I order my coffee and take a seat. Ten minutes later and still no coffee - it turns out that they'd taken a large order just before I walked in. I end up pouring my cup out into a takeaway cup and running back to the office. Luckily the client is later than me.

How did this go wrong? I expected usual coffee shop dynamics to apply, with a visible queue as a rough indication of how long I'd have to wait. But with table service, no queue...

A minor incident ordering takeaway

My wife and I are in a mood for takeaway. We spot a local Nepalese restaurant on a local online service, order and pay. It comes back and tells us that our food will be delivered in 1 hour. Damn. Normally I'd ask how long it will take before placing my order, but the website has removed that step from the workflow. And we're hungry!

Your project should be a Naked Lunch

Both times the assumptions that I use to regulate my order were violated. In the coffee shop, no visible backlog. On the online order form, no delivery time information. It worked out well for the suppliers - an order when I wouldn't have otherwise. But it's a very short-term win - I won't order takeaway online again and I'll be more cautious next time I visit that lovely little coffee shop. I need clear information to make an informed decision, to have confidence in my supplier.

It's almost facile at this point to suggest that the same applies to your project and your stakeholders. If you want your client to come back, they have to be confident that you're sharing the information they need to make informed decisions. And that means sharing openly. Backlog, risks, delays - the good and the uncomfortable. They have to see exactly what's on the end of every fork.

Fear and Learning

An interesting news story emerged this week: A fifth of hospitals are under-reporting mistakes that lead to avoidable patient deaths. To address this the government has launched a microsite on Patient safety in the NHS ranking hospitals by their safety data. It includes a category of 'Open and honest reporting'.

Increased openness - A great idea?

In 2005 Martin Bromley's wife died in hospital following a routine minor operation. Drawing on his experience in the airline industry, Mr Bromley managed to instigate an investigation with a focus on learning rather than blame. As a result, the investigation uncovered 'communication problems' that initially appeared to be within team, but were in fact a systemic issue across the healthcare system (sounds like they did a great job of popping the why stack).

Mr Bromley went on to found the Clinical Human Factors Group, a charity campaigning to prevent exactly the kind of avoidable deaths that are being under-reported. The BBC's Today programme interviewed him (go to 01:09 - available in the UK until Tuesday 1 July), and Mr Bromley's thoughts on the new website are worth quoting at some length:

My concern is that what we're trying to develop...is a culture of learning...where you balance learning and accountability. My concern here is that we might be naming, shaming and by implication blaming. What we really see is in organisations that do have a strong learning culture is a genuine desire to hear the bad news, a genuine desire to learn and I'm not convinced at the moment that simply naming, shaming is going to bring out the best.

Opening yourself to criticism makes you vulnerable. You have to overcome an emotional cost, and there's a risk of losing face in the organisation. Even critiquing a colleague can feel risky. In the NHS it can only be harder, where simple errors can have grave consequences. Mr Bromley fears that this new site raises the stakes, so makes open internal reporting less rather than more likely.

However taking and giving criticism are also some of the most powerful skills you can learn.

And so to Agile

A learning culture isn't directly part of the Agile Manifesto but it is a very congruent value. Of course it's embodied in Scrum's retrospectives. Retrospectives endeavour to create a safe environment for continuous improvement by focusing on the team rather than individuals. Scheduling retrospectives at fixed intervals, not in reaction to a crisis, makes them a routine learning opportunity rather than an investigation (with inevitable overtones of blame), and creates an opportunity to address small weaknesses before they become big problems.

The issue of vulnerability as a blocker to learning is also highlighted by Liz Keogh in her blog entry on How to run Safety Checks. If you don't know the technique it's worth a read. The bottom line: people can only open themselves up to this kind of learning if they feel safe.

Do we feel good about this?

Agile development is better at fostering a learning culture than healthcare? Yay us!

Wait a minute. That's 20% of hospitals under-reporting errors, ie 80% doing a faithful job. When we get to figures like that in IT, we can start thinking about feeling smug...

Bruce Lee and the Agile spectrum

I've been lucky enough to have practiced a range of the published Agile delivery methods: XP, Scrum, Kanban and now DSDM. And I've been doing this for 10 years now. Time enough to form some opinions.

Right now I feel that these techniques sit on a spectrum of Agility:

Winging it Too few controls Delivery at risk	more Agile <-----	Agile	-----> less Agile	Not agile Too many controls Delivery at risk
Co-hacking	Kanban	Scrum & XP	DSDM	Trad PM
Intimate communication Shared commitment Inexpensive Unconstrained Uncontrolled	Foster a Co-hacking-like work-style Owned externally to the delivery team 'Bottled lightning'		Agile-friendly governance Work-style-agnostic	PRINCE2 &c
	Focus on rapid delivery of highest priorities	Focus on inspect-and-adapt continuous improvement of product and team

Co-hacking

Hacking is a complex knit of ideas. Getting things done. Rapidly. Dirtily if necessary. On the one hand unconstrained sparks of genius. On the other, spikes that become rabbit holes and technical debt. Doing it your own way. No constraints, no controls.

At its best hacking is a beautiful sweet-spot for any creative professional. It's what Picasso did with his brilliantly innovative lithographs of bulls, an act of creative discovery without a known end-point. Co-hacking is simply my term for two or more practitioners working together - a pair of coders, throw in an IA etc. It sounds the team developing BBC Playlister worked this way.

Co-hackers have the Agile Manifesto almost down to a tee. Individuals and interactions - check. Working software - check (we hope). Responding to change - these guys can pivot on a dime. Customer collaboration? The customer's probably part of the team, so can't provide an independent steer. Even if there is an independent customer, she may not have much pull with the team

So as sweet as that spot is, co-hacking is not Agile. It's not controlled to deliver business value. But it is an important part of the spectrum.

Kanban

I was a Scrum practitioner when I first learnt of Kanban. It scared me. I understood the value of single piece flow. I appreciated the tremendous flexibility for the product owner in on-the-fly re-prioritising. But no fixed points? No obvious planning horizon? No opportunity to take stock? Challenging stuff!

Of course this places huge reliance and trust in an ongoing conversation between the customer and the team, and it engages the team to find their own feedback mechanisms. All this while letting the customer to re-prioritise at will.

So Kanban is perhaps unbeatably agile - more so than the rest of the spectrum.

More agile. Not necessarily better.

Scrum & XP

When I moved from XP to Scrum, they were already pretty similar. They've only got closer over time. Scrum teams routinely adopt XP technical practices - chiefly TDD but also pair programming. XP, which started with 3-month 'short' iterations, has converged on the Agile 2-week de facto standard, and has adopted retrospectives.

Scrum bills itself as a general-purpose Agile project technique suitable for all types of project, though you'll be hard-pressed to find it used outside the software industries. XP is explicitly intended for software delivery and includes technical practices. So it makes sense to consider XP a software-specific specialisation of Scrum (or vice versa - I don't mean to imply any precedence here).

Scrum & XP foster a co-hacking environment, with just enough governance to ensure that they keep delivering value. "Go make me some of these. Come back in 2 weeks to show me how well you've done." They're the 'bottled lightning' version of Co-hacking lightning, harnessing it to meet product goals.

And on the spectrum? They both provide time-limited iterations. Opportunities for the client to feed back and re-prioritise, and for the team to retrospect its own performance. For all the reasons that Kanban initially scared me, this structure provides a safety framework that is inherently a little less Agile.

Less agile. I didn't say worse.

DSDM

DSDM takes a very different approach to Agile. The other methods foster an Agile work-style with minimal governance, DSDM creates Agile-friendly governance but is agnostic about work-style.

Uniquely on the Agile spectrum, DSDM offers an up-front project timescale and cost. Just Enough Design Up Front and Timeboxes based on MoSCoW prioritisation (DSDM's approach to flexible scope) enable DSDM to offer the business a high-confidence timescale and cost, and fail-fast discovery if these are at risk.

Any responsible business considering a new project needs some confidence around cost and time to assess project value (Glen Alleman reiterates this point on his blog Herding Cats, and in doing so does us all a good turn). If you're offering software services as a third-party consultancy or agency, you'll definitely need some way to generate these figures.

But this confidence comes at a cost: a plan.

Yes there is still a Prioritised Requirements List (Backlog to the rest of you). Yes, the client still owns the priorities. But the very fact of having a project-length plan creates a resistance to changing that plan. Particularly the introduction of new high-priority capabilities, which will violate the plan. Then change control comes into play, something mercifully absent in the rest of the Agile spectrum.

So DSDM is distinctly less agile than Scrum, XP and Kanban. But not worse.

What about Bruce Lee?

Bruce Lee originally studied Wing Chun. By 1960 he was disillusioned with the artificial boundaries imposed by the martial schools so he founded a martial art philosophy: Jeet Kune Do.

I have not invented a "new style," composite, modified or otherwise that is set within distinct form as apart from "this" method or "that" method. On the contrary, I hope to free my followers from clinging to styles, patterns, or molds.

So you use the right tool or technique for the task. This kick exists in Kung Fu but not Karate? Use it anyway. You need a grapple from Hapkido? Go for it. It seems like the simplest wisdom.

Applying this view simply to the Agile spectrum: pick the methodology that best fits your project. Your customer has fluid requirements and a high level of engagement? Kanban may be just right for you. They need to know a cost and a date before they can commit funds? DSDM may be a better fit. Neither is inherently better and it doesn't matter which is more Agile - they're each a better fit in different cases.

Jeet Kune Do projects

The PM and/or Agile methodologies present themselves as 'whole'. XP is a great example, with a range of practices that support one another: unit tests, refactoring. If you don't employ them all, XP warns that you're heading for disaster (Matt Stephens entertainingly parodies this as a ring of poisonous snakes). Similarly with most methodologies, if you're not following enough of their directives you're not 'doing' Scrum/DSDM/whatever/delete as necessary. You're headed for the rocks.

This is good advice for neophyte Agile practitioners. Each methodology presents a coherent project delivery toolset. If you follow the teachings of a well-reputed school, you'll probably come out OK and start learning how it all fits together.

But this approach also encourages experienced practitioners to pick a school and stick to it. This is clearly nonsense - the existence of multiple successful Agile schools proves there's more than one way to skin a cat. Any given school is probably not a perfect fit for a given project situation, so we should expect more of the experienced practitioner.

Jeet Kune Do projects mix it up. Your client requires up-front commitment? Give them DSDM Foundations. They need an MVP in 3 weeks? Re-configure as a Scrum backlog and use some appropriate tool to track progress - burn-up perhaps. The team wants to operate with WIP limits. No problem. Minimum quality guarantees? Use a Definition-of-Done, or a defined Quality Level or Pair Programming or...

A JKD project practitioner makes herself aware of what the project needs from moment to moment. She knows the teachings of multiple Agile schools, of various Masters both great and small (Fowler, Keogh, Uncle Bob etc), perhaps even schools outside the Agile family (PRINCE2 et al). She understands what each tool gives her, which others support it and where to let go.

And one day, if I work hard, I'll be as good at Agile project delivery as she is.

Agile methods in Prussian military doctrine

The Agile Manifesto was written in 2001. Prussian military doctrine, developed in the early 19th century and refined between the 20th century's world wars, anticipated key elements of agile methods:

• Requirements as needs rather than instructions
• Devolved authority

It also anticipated large organisations' difficulty adopting genuinely agile approaches.

Bear with me here.

The history

In 1806 Napoleon defeated Prussia at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt. Prussia became part of the French Empire until the formation of the Sixth Coalition in 1812, which finally defeated Napoleon. This led to a major rethink of Prussian military doctrine with two goals:

1. Institute a way to counter an individual genius like Napoleon
2. Punch above their weight when facing larger enemies

The new approach was dubbed Auftragstaktik - Mission tactics - by the old guard who preferred traditional command management.

There are dubious claims of Auftragstaktik's success at the battle of Königgrätz (1866). Germany certainly built their capability after the First World War and whatever else is true of them in the Second World War, they fielded an astonishingly successful military. Auftragstaktik was key to this success.

Auftragstaktik described

Over to Gerhard Muhm, a Colonel in the German campaign against the Allied advance through Italy.

From my first day as a student officer the expression "Auftrag wiederholen" ["Repeat the mission"] rang in my ears. Our superiors wanted us to "repeat the mission" that had been assigned us to be quite sure that we had understood it. And they always said "Auftrag" ["mission"] and not "Befehl" ["order"]
.
And so it was through the entire Italian campaign. I always was given an "Auftrag", never a "Befehl". And I always did the same with my subordinates to whom I always passed on the "Auftrag", in the well-worn traditional "Auftragstaktik" of the German Army.

The tactical concept followed by the German Army was the "Tactics of the Mission or Task" in contrast to the "Order-type Tactics" ["Befehlstaktik"] in use with other armies. The difference in conception and execution between these two tactics is fundamental: the first exalts the soldier's intelligence and capability, the second tends to damp them down, making the soldier a passive executor of the orders of others.With Auftragstaktik a mission is ordered and the officer is left with the freedom to carry out the mission assigned to him, and so he feels responsible for the actions which are suggested to him by his intelligence, his enterprise and his capabilities.

Similarities to agile methods

The similarities are startling:

• Tell the team what you want them to achieve, not how to do it
• Then let them use their experience and expertise to get on with it

There's another striking similarity: the communication of military intent. Auftragstaktik requires the communication not only of the substance of the mission but of its underlying purpose. To understand the intent of the Auftrag, German offices were trainied to operate two levels higher than their current rank. This typically led to short orders, clearly stated.

Compare with a Role/Action/Goal user story:

As a: General commanding the defense of Italy
I want: Your company to defend a line as far South as possible
So that: ...

What's the goal here? To slow the Allied advance? To halt it? To hold a specific city? I can only guess - thank God I'm not a German Colonel in that war and I'm not trained in strategy to the level of Major General. I need a well expressed Goal in my user story if I'm to meet my stakeholders' needs.

And there we have a powerful core of agile methods:

• Requirements as needs rather than instructions
• Devolved authority

Agile versus large organisations

I suggested that Auftragstaktik also anticipated large organisations' difficulty adopting genuinely agile approaches.

Modern English-speaking armies call Auftragstaktik "Mission Command". At this point I'll quote Wikipedia directly:

the British Army in 1987 announced an intention to adopt 'Mission Command', yet an internal 2004 British Army review of command and control in the Iraq War in 2003 clearly shows that they had achieved the reverse: British orders were substantially more detailed, and subordinates generally more constrained than twenty years earlier, indicating that there is more to Auftragstaktik than process.

In organisations with a culture or expectation of following orders, the freedom to implement either Auftragstaktik or agile project management is severely constrained.

Credit where it's due

This blog entry leans heavily on two sources:

• Wikipedia's page on Auftragstaktik
• Gerhard Muhm's memoir online

The comparison between Auftragstaktik and agile methods is mine.

e-Learning industry, get your act together!

I've lately had cause to examine e-Learning authoring tools on the market. I've found that the entire market - the e-Learning culture - is broken. It's stuck around the turn of the century, and badly needs to catch up to the lessons of the last decade.

Hey, chill out Guy! Are you really taking issue with the entire industry?

Well it’s not just me but kind of. Yeah.

A challenge for you

If you are of the e-Learning faithful, I expect none of my arguments below will persuade you. So here’s an uncomfortable fact about my own department, that I expect is true of yours too.

Our colleagues in the business come to us for online learning only when they have to. We have dozens and dozens of e-Learning modules, built to a very high standard of learning content and immersive interactivity. But the only ones that get high user numbers are the mandatory ones.

If this is true in your company, then there’s something wrong with the resources that you’re providing. The industry has sold you more and more ways to improve your content – PowerPoint conversion, synchronised narration, templates, enhanced interactions – and elective users stay away.

If I am wrong, if you organisation produces non-mandatory e-Learning modules that your colleagues proactively and enthusiastically seek out, then please get in touch. My boss will pay you for your secret sauce!

If not, then something is broken.

How did I get here?

I've been an internet professional for about six years now. I joined a large media corporation as a software engineer and gradually became a technical project manager. Turns out, this particular corporation puts a huge emphasis on things like information architecture and useability - I honestly believe that many of our engineers understand user experience better than a lot of user experience professionals out there.

A few of the things I've learnt:

• The site your users spend the most of their time on is somebody else’s, so your navigation and user interaction have to be simple and obvious, fitting the broadest best practice on the web

• Standards-compliant sites win - you want as many people as possible to use your site, right?

• Links and URLs are core elements of the web - sites that freely link to other sites provide a richer and more valuable experience for the user

• All the great sites respect these rule of the web - Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon - even (to a degree) Facebook

And of course...

• Content is King

e-Learning software - what do we need?

I'm hard at work in our e-Learning department, not commissioning or authoring courses, but devising an approach to update our course commissioning workflow and technology.

Back in June I blogged about some of the user research we commissioned. In the first part of this year, I also did a fair bit of research online into what the most effective learning material looks like. So I've recently been able to complete a vision document for the new product.

Next question: build-or-buy? Obviously it would be fun to build our own authoring tool, that does just exactly what we want. But if I'm honest, buying something off-the-shelf will be cheaper, much quicker and a great deal less risky. So lately I've investigated a large number of e-Learning authoring tools.

Oh dear.

Page-oriented or Slide-oriented

A few product features are available over and over again:

• Outputting a Flash presentation

• Converting from PowerPoint

• The ability to play on iPads and Android tablets through special software or...

• Playout on iPads and Androids with HTML5

These characteristics are common across almost all the authoring systems available, from niche players to the biggest names in e-Learning. Next to these, the features that distinguish one product from another are scarcely relevant (desktop vs cloud, stock photos of 'actors' with hundreds of poses and thousands of emotions, etc). This is the industry paradigm.

These features push what I call a slide-oriented view of e-Learning content.

• Page-oriented: Consecutive pieces of content in the course load as separate web pages

• Slide-oriented: Consecutive pieces of content load as consecutive slides in a player, within a single page

Page-oriented content is how the majority of the web works. All those web hero sites I mentioned earlier: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon and Facebook. The top 10 websites in the US and in the UK work this way. That's a pretty strong recommendation.

Slide-oriented content is my description of content that emulates PowerPoint. I'm particularly concerned with e-Learning here, but it includes some other experience-based websites and even some corporate sites.

A deep-seated mindset

From my research online, and discussions with my e-Learning production colleagues, I think this reflects some deeply held beliefs in the e-Learning community:

• You have to control the user's learning journey - you can't allow them to visit any slide (or page) in any order.

• Keeping all your content within a slide container is somehow 'immersive' - re-loading a web page would break the spell.

• e-Learning content is not web content - it's something different, with different rules.

• PowerPoint is a really great model for online learning.

The first two of these are exploded by all the best websites out there. Think of any website you love - it allows you to browse from page to page, unconstrained. And those pages re-load in your web browser - they don't seamlessly re-load in some container within the page. (OK I'm sure someone will identify a determined exception.)

Why do you keep coming back? Because you can find what you want easily, go where you please, and because someone emailed you a great link to some really great content - just that little bit there that's really interesting/funny/relevant, not the start of a 10-minute presentation to wade through. Maybe it piqued your interest and you checked out the rest of the site. Maybe it didn't.

That's how the internet works. It's been pretty successful.

But e-Learning content isn't a website, and it follows different rules. Really? Here are the best and biggest e-Learning sites I know: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Khan Academy. All of them follow page-oriented, not slide-oriented design.

Do you use Wikipedia? Do you find it off-putting when the page re-loads - does it break your learning spell? Would it be more powerful if it forced you to read the whole page in order, before moving on to the next page of its, not your, choosing? Those seem to be the priorities of the e-Learning industry, in contravention of everything we know about the web.

As to PowerPoint, I simply can't fathom why the industry considers it a great pedagogical model. Death by PowerPoint isn't just a saying - it was a key contributor to the Columbia shuttle disaster, killing seven astronauts on re-entry.

Flash is great, except when it sucks

Flash is great at two things: games and video.

There are JavaScript and HTML5 games out there, but there's no doubt that Flash games dominate the online arena (with apologies for time lost wasted enjoyed from those links). Flash provides a really powerful toolkit where graphic design, interactivity, music and speed can come together to create woefully addictive games.

And Flash is still the only mainstream way to deliver video online. YouTube has an HTML5 trial, but due to a format war between the major browsers, Flash is still more compatible all-round.

Flash sucks when it's used for navigation and for presenting content. I can be quite specific about this...

Flash sucks for site navigation

Custom navigation tools: Your internet browser comes with a variety of built-in tools for navigation. These have been developed over 20 years (wow!), with various browsers vying to invent new tools and keep one step ahead of each other. The best of these have stuck, and you use them daily without thinking about it.

Flash breaks all of these. Instead, e-learning vendors have to create their own ‘players’ with their proprietary navigation: play buttons, forwards, backwards, menus etc. None of them are quite alike, so it’s an extra layer that sits between the learner and the course content.

Two broken tools are particularly egregious: the URL and the back button.

The URL: By encapsulating the entire 'experience', Flash stops me from bookmarking a page, or copying a link and sending it to a friend. To find a page that I’ve visited before, I can generally just start typing something like the title in my browser’s address bar - the browser remembers which pages match and help me find them again. The Flash course stops me from doing this.

If I want to get to a specific piece of information in the course, I have to wade through from the start. If I’m very lucky, the courseware might provide some kind of table of contents...hidden away somewhere in the custom player. Using HTML, it would be an intuitive design pattern.

The back button: Study after study has found that the browser’s back button is a core tool for web users. If I click it in a Flash course, I'm taken out of the course altogether. Clicking the player’s own back button is a mug’s gamble. How far back it will take me - the previous slide or a whole chapter?

Flash sucks for web content

Accessibility: Assistive technology tools have been built around HTML websites. This provides for a wide range of assistive needs, from browser text zooming to screen-readers and more. Flash can be made to work with some of these, but more often isn't.

Copying: I can easily copy-and-paste from a page of HTML, eg to take notes or to drop a quick quote into an email. Flash breaks this.

I hope you understand that these are profound weaknesses, even if some of the detail might be unclear. You might consider these to be benefits in e-Learning. You consider it vital to control the user journey, rather than letting the user skip through. And since the course is your intellectual property, you'd rather the user didn't copy it.

This isn't how I learn best. I don't believe it's how anyone does. If Wikipedia imposed these restrictions, would you ever go back again? Unless you’re the one with the e-Learning secret sauce, it’s not how your colleagues learn best either.

...and Flash is dead - so it kinda sucks for the future

Over the last year, Adobe has started retreating from Flash on Android (November 2011, June 2012, August 2012). Having been kept off the iPhone and iPad, this signals their demise in the mobile market.

That’s why the authoring tools are jumping through hoops to play through proprietary apps on the iPad or output HTML5. If they used HTML5 to create true page-oriented content, it would be an incredible revolution. Unfortunately it looks like they're simply using to reproduce the slide-oriented experience without Flash.

Empower the user

No software or website can compete in a free market on this basis. Users hate it and will go somewhere else, or nowhere at all. e-Learning only gets away with this kind of quality because it’s built for a captive corporate audience. But poor-quality content is still poor-quality content.

Good quality e-Learning will be e-Learning that users would choose to use, of their own volition. The experience of the internet shows that this means relinquishing control and putting it in our users’ hands - treating them as adults.

1. Ditch the sausage-machine courses that force users to sit through every page, every video, every narration. It’s useless at ensuring the users take in all the material - our user research found that they simply turn off the volume and get on with their email. And it alienates casual users from trying the course at all.
2. Need to ensure your users know the content? Test them at the end instead, with a challenging pass-mark. It doesn’t matter if they can pass the test without reading the course material - the point is to ensure they understand the content, not force them to sit through a lesson they already know.
3. Drop Flash, and embrace the full vocabulary of the internet.
4. And remember that Content is King. If you provide great learning resources, and pull down the barriers to accessing it, you users will come.

One intriguing alternative, and Google

There’s a glimmer of something new. eXe is an authoring tool that produces SCORM-compliant content in pure HTML and JavaScript. It’s an open-source product, so you can pick it up and try it for free. It installs pretty easily too.

eXe comes from New Zealand academia. Combined with its open-source heritage, that means it doesn’t have the slick marketing budget of all the commercial players. Its website speaks to internet technologists rather than eLearning specialists or corporate procurement departments. I think that’s a real shame, because if packaged and marketed well I think eXe has the potential bring the real change that e-Learning needs.

Of course the other potential disruptive player is Google Learn. Learn is if anything rougher round the edges than eXe. I’m formerly a software engineer, and I couldn’t install it easily. So unfortunately I can’t give any feedback about its features or its quality. But of course being Google, watch this space...

What’s the bottom line?

To recap:

1. Flash e-Learning derived from PowerPoint alienates users…
2. ...but it’s pretty much all the market provides

So what’s a corporate learning coordinator to do?

What’s your budget? Whatever you’re spending on the big authoring tools, it’s not worth it. Why not spend it instead on developing fantastic content in eXe? Maybe it needs a bit of CSS work, or a new interaction. That’s a great place to put your budget, instead of into online PowerPoint! At least give eXe a shot - it’s free so you have absolutely nothing to lose.

Create a couple of courses that allow your users to jump in and navigate around however they please. Throw in a pass/fail test at the end if you like. Then do some user testing - did they get more or less out of it than an expensive Flash job? Would more courses like this encourage them to come back of their own accord?

I truly hope we can shake up this industry, and if enough people learn that e-Learning is just one form of web content maybe we can. Of course if you’re an e-Learning vendor I’m offering you the chance to steal a march on your competitors. If anyone built an enterprise tool that did this, my corporation would procure it in a shot. Build it and we will come!

As for me, I think I’m about to have the opportunity to build my own authoring and publishing tool, and do it right...

…just one more thing

If you really are that e-Learning author whose non-mandatory modules are as popular as your mandatory ones, please do get in touch!

Guy