German XP Days 2011 - How Much Waste Do We Need for Innovation?

This year's German XP Days (see program) included several contributions and discussions regarding agile development on a larger scale and what it takes to become and reliably stay innovative as a software company.

Johannes and me also presented some thoughts on how Design Thinking can help software development teams to leverage observations and user research to come up with more innovative user stories and build the right software for customers.

The feedback from the XP community was awesome and we had great follow-up discussions throughout the conference - and hopefully beyond... However, one question was brought up by several colleagues in the community (see e.g. Holger Rhinow's blog post - he is part of the Design Thinking Research Program at HPI):

How Much Waste Do We Need for Innovation?

"Waste" is a term from Lean Thinking and Lean Production (as practiced at Toyota or Porsche, for instance) and denotes activities and processes that do not add direct value for the customer (value = sth. the customer is willing to pay for).

Innovation approaches such as Design Thinking, on the other hand, foster "real" brainstorming and the creation of ideas in large quantities - many of which might be discarded later, i.e. end up in the waste bin. Moreover, Design Thinking suggests rapid and cheap prototyping to get feedback ("fail early") Again, many of theses prototypes will end up in the waste bin - on purpose...

Now, can these two thinking schools intertwine to solve problems for the software industry that neither one could on its own? I think so, especially in standard software development processes. Just imagine this simple example: Development team A combines Design Thinking and Scrum (Scrum implements many lean principles out-of-the-box). They spend a seriuous amount of time for user research, brainstorming, ideation, paper prototypes, etc. 20 percent of their ideas make it into the final product which becomes a blockbuster - i.e. in lean terms 80 percent waste! On the other hand, team B does it the "old school" agile way with some requirements workshops, user story writing, and backlog grooming. They realize 80 percent of the initial backlog, but the product fails on the market. In lean terms: 100 percent waste...

(to be continued here)