Agility, Improvisation,

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Agility, Improvisation, or Enacted
Emergence? Dr Yingqin Zheng, Dr Will Venters,
Dr Tony Cornford
This research was undertaken as part of
Pegasus EPSRC Grant No EP/D049954/1 www.pegasus.
lse.ac.uk 10 Dec 2007 ICIS, Montreal
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Introduction

• Pegasus Project Exploring practices of GridPP
  the UK particle physics Grid
• Agile systems development?
• Methodology as faked? Fiction? Amethodical?
• Organisational improvisation
• ? Improvisation Paradoxes
• ? Enacted Emergence?

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Organizational Improvisation

• Metaphors
• Jazz (Weick 1992, 1999 Barrett 1998, Hatch
  1999)
• Improvisational Theatre (Crossan, 1998)
• Cunha (1999) the conception of action as it
  unfolds, by an organisation and/or its members
  drawing on available material, cognitive,
  affective and social resources
• Convergence in time of conception and execution
• Bricolage finding solutions from available
  rather than optimal resources

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Improvisation Paradoxes
Situated Improvisation environmental turbulence task uncertainty unplanned-for occurrences task complexity drop your tools visions (Moorman and Miner, 1998, Ciborra, 1996) (Dahlbom and Mathiassen, 1993) (Miner et al., 2001) (Hutchins, 1995, Weick and Roberts, 1993) (Weick, 1993a) (Hatch, 1999, Mintzberg and McHugh, 1985, Hutchins, 1991, Weick, 1993b)
Structured Chaos organized anarchy Persistent structures collateral structure experimental culture aesthetic of imperfection a sense of urgency (Cohen et al., 1972) (Lanzara, 1999) (Cunha et al., 1999) (Cunha et al., 1999) (Weick, 1999) (Crossan, 1998, Hutchins, 1991,Mirvis,1998)
Planned Agility convergence of planning execution plan to improvise mixing the pre-composed the spontaneous magnetic fields artful planning (Moorman and Miner, 1998) (Miner et al., 2001) (Weick, 1998) (Weick, 1993a) (Baskerville, 2006)
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Improvisation-Paradoxes Cont.
Reflective Spontaneity retrospective sense-making ex post interpretation transient constructs emergent order (Weick, 1993b) (Lanzara, 1999) (Lanzara, 1999) (Miner et al 2001)
Collective Individuality (Mirvis, 1998) facilitative leadership trust and kinship fluid communication influence and persuasion hanging out (Crossan, 1998) (Crossan, 1998, Weick, 1993a) (Orlikowski, 1996, Miner et al., 2001) (Hatch, 1999) (Barrett, 1998)
Anxious Confidence (Mirvis, 1998) moods individual skills creativity formative context organizational memory (Ciborra, 2002) (Hutchins, 1991, Moorman and Miner, 1998, Orlikowski, 1996) (Ciborra and Lanzara, 1994) (Moorman and Miner, 1998)
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Particle Physicists and Grids

• Currently constructing the worlds most powerful
  particle accelerator the Large Hadron Collider
  (LHC)
• Searching for Higgs Boson 1 person in 1000
  worlds, or a needle in 20 million haystacks
• 12-14 million gigabytes per year.
• 100,000 CPUs.
• 40PB disk, 40PB tape.
• Worlds biggest Grid

CD stack with 1 year LHC data ( 20 km)
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Background Context

• Building the LHC Computing Grid (LCG)
• Highly distributed, complex and poorly defined
  systems development task.
• Cutting edge hardware and software used.
• New software standards being negotiated.
• Middleware and support software being developed
  in a range of languages.
• Grid must be distributed and proceed at different
  paces because of funding.
• Particle physics has a long tradition of such
  large scale global collaborations (Traweek 1988).

• GridPP (UK Contribution to LCG)
• To a significant degree agile
• Collaboration of 230 people in 19 UK
  universities, RAL and CERN.
• Decisions are made democratically and
  consensually, and implemented by influence and
  persuasion.
• Network rather than hierarchy
• Virtual, federated, overlapping and
  inter-connected.
• Virtual meetings, wikis, blogs, mailinglists

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Research Findings
Situated Improvisation EGEE, LCG, e-science, funding, hardware, software
Structured Chaos No top down authority extensive management structure/communicative channels competing technical solutions
Planned Agility day to day we keep putting one foot in front of the other and different people, depending on their role in the project, are more oriented towards the ultimate goal or more oriented towards the little concrete footsteps that need to be taken...
Reflective Spontaneity pragmatic, getting the job done, fire-fighting monitoring, accounting, sense-making
Collective Individuality -freedom to improvise and innovate -shared goal, trust, facilitative leadership, hanging out
Anxious Confidence -pressure from LHC switch on Yes it will work. -history of cutting-edge computing and large collaborations
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Enacted Emergence

• Enactment (Weick 1977)
• people invent organizations and their
  environments and these inventions reside in ideas
  that participants have superimposed on any stream
  of experience (ibid. p. 196).
• Emergence
• Temporally emergent qualities
• Interactions of existing elements
• In a historical context
• The evolutionary approach of system development
  (Dahlbom and Mathiassen 1993)
• Enactment of sensemaking

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Enacted Emergence
Environment Complexity, uncertainties, visions, pressure, risks History organizational memory of improvisation, history of innovation,
Chaos trial and error, improvisation, bricolage Order continuity, stability, resilience
Individuals competent, confident, creative, committed, pragmatic Collective shared goal, trust, hanging out, emotional bond, facilitative leadership, aesthetic of imperfection
Planning broad direction, retrospective sense-makingsensemaking Unfolding democratic debates, spontaneous actions, natural selection
Practices tinkering, innovation, invention Structure collateral, de-layered, democratic, communicative
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Contributions

• Improvisation paradoxes
• Agility should embody a deliberate or natural
  mixture of structure and improvisation, order and
  changes, intentionality and flexibility,
  spontaneity and reflexivity, collectivity and
  individuality
• Agile systems development in the wild
• Embeddedness of agility
• Large group performance is possible when the
  ambience is right.
• Science vs art
• Enacted Emergence
• Duality between structure and agency