the social systems approach

I just started reading ‘Human Behavior in the Social Environment’ by Gary Lowe & Irl Carter. It has been sitting under my bed for a month or so, and now I’m kicking myself for not pulling it out sooner.

The authors offer systems thinking for conceptualizing social action and interaction in an integrative manner. This is opposed to the narrow focus of most fields related to human behavior, which generally analyze all occurrences based on a primary unit of analysis – individual, group, culture, society…

The social systems approach, on the other hand, can encompass both holistic (group/ top-down) and atomistic (individual/bottom-up) views at once. It gave me some peace of mind that they mention the confusion that occurs when observing the behavior of individuals, ‘where the relation between the part and the whole is always an issue.’ So its not just me who’s confused by that:-).

Interestingly, they went on to talk about ‘energy’ in social systems, where both information and energy are exchanged between parts of a social system. They describe social energy as ‘the systems capacity to act, it’s power to maintain itself, and to effect change.’They discuss synergy and entropy in social systems:

Synergy: “Synergy refers to increasingly available energy within a system derived from a heightened interaction amoung its components.” Ruth Benedict has used the term ’social synergy,’ i.e. “the amplification of goal-directed activity where there was a fit between the individual goals of persons sharing a culture and the goals of the culture” (Lowe & Carter citing Maslow, 1964: 153-64).

Entropy: “Entropy is the tendency of an unattended system to move towards an unorganized state characterized by decreased interactions amoung it’s components, followed by a decrease in usable energy.” Systems theorists have been tripped up by the fact that human systems have inherently different properties from physical systems, particularly with regards to entropy. Some believe that the law of entropy does not apply to organic or social systems. Schrodinger offered the confusing concept of negenthropy where organisms ‘build up’ based on negative entropy rather than run down, while Gyorgyi proposes synthropy as a term to describe the innate drive of living matter to seek wholeness and to protect itself.

Which takes us back to the different levels of analysis in the social sciences…does group ‘wholeness’ degrade or enhance individual wholeness? Agile seems to do a very good job of aligning the goals of the individual with the group (and vice versa), and so reducing internal divisiveness and conflict (friction) and increasing flow of energy (synergy) or movement towards a common end goal.

Agile metrics?

I was talking to my mother today (mothers day:-)) about a number of things. The most interesting quote to come out of the conversation was ‘they ate all my pansies,’ but perhaps the most interesting idea was about the need for reliable measures when introducing a new process. Mum was telling me about Six Sigma – a methodology coming out of the manufacturing industry which aims at process improvement based on statistical measures of quality. This makes me wonder two things:

• Can the Six Sigma methodology (based on manufacturing ideals) be successfully applied to agile software development?, and
• Has anyone created an objective measure of the quality of agile projects?

I don’t know enough about Six Sigma to answer the first point.

The second point involves measures of quality, above and beyond simply measuring whether the project is completed within resource constraints. One of the main measures of software quality seems to be customer satisfaction. Is anyone measuring this?

On the other side of the coin we have the satisfaction of the development team. This can affect many things. DeMarco & Lister for example, in their book ‘Peopleware’ mention how managers and companies generally don’t measure turnover in calculations of worker productivity, despite the fact that the loss of a team member can significantly affect both productivity and software quality.

I know that there are scales available in organizational psychology that measure worker satisfaction in a way that relates it to likelihood of burnout/turnover. I’m not sure how reliable they are, however.

Hmmm…I have not really been interested in metrics up to this point, but it does seem like agile could benifit from exploring some different measures of software quality, including some of the satisfaction measures coming out of the social sciences.

Blog Initiation

I finally gave in and signed up for a blog on wordpress. I think this will be a temporary solution to my current homelessness (laptop stolen :-/ = no special place to keep my notes), and perhaps I will soon manage to find/afford a permenant home for my web self.

Did I mention that I was looking for a job?