Rationalism to Empiricism

“Inspection without adaption is pointless in Scrum,” what a beautiful sentence was written by Gunther Verheyen [1]. After reading this, I was thinking about how I can make it more generic and try to explore more about it. What does it mean? Let’s go back to the basics. Empiricism has three main pillars “Transparency,” “Inspection,” and “Adaptation,” and we can’t achieve it if any pillar is missing.

I like the Salience Model for stakeholder management, which uses a Venn Diagram to explain “Power,” “Urgency,” and “Legitimacy” of the stakeholder [2]. Let’s create a diagram for Empiricism similar to the “Stakeholder classes” defined in the Michell et all paper with a slightly different numbering sequence.

I like the example of the thermostat described in “The Professional Product Owner” book [3]. A quick recap of the example is to solve the problem of setting the room temperature constant throughout the day. We can do this by putting the thermostat in the room, which inspects the room temperature at a regular interval and adjusts the room temperature accordingly to achieve the desired outcome. Besides, it is also essential that there is no wet towel on the thermometer, or it is not outside the room for transparency.

If anything among “transparency,” “inspection,” or “adaptation” is missing, we can’t get the desired outcome. Let’s explore all of these cases with the same model. Furthermore, I tried to give names to these cases.

1. Rationalism

Let’s take a look at the first case when there is no transparency, inspection, and adaptation. This is the exact opposite of Empiricism known as “Rationalism.” It is a branch of philosophy that believes that knowledge comes through the use of logic. It is very similar to predict the room temperature in advance and plan accordingly to make its temperature constant throughout the day. Here is a comprehensive comparison of rationalism and empiricism [4].

2. Broken Watch

Let’s assume we took the room temperature only once and then never retook the room temperature. This can happen, then there is transparency without any inspection and adaptation. Although the room temperature may change during the day, however, it is still possible that the temperate is the same as the one taken in advance, but we can’t know it with certainty because of lack of inspection. That explains the name, “A Broken Watch is certain to be right twice a day.”

3. Worthless

In this situation, we only do an inspection and not taking any action based on it. Besides, the inspected result is not sure to be true. In our same room temperature example, it means that we are checking the temperature of the thermometer, but regardless of the current temperature, not taking any action. On top of that, we are not even sure the thermometer is inside the room or not. What worthless that inspection is going to be.

4. Speculation

Can you imagine driving a car without even looking at the windscreen? It is the case when we do adaption without any transparency and inspection. The outcome of this type of behavior is anyone’s guess, and here comes the name of it “Speculation.”

5. Pointless

This name came from the famous sentence and article written by Gunther Verheyen [1] as mentioned at the beginning. In this case, we are inspecting with transparency, but do not take any action based on it, similar to the thermometer of a thermostat, which measures the current room temperature correctly, but do not perform any action aftward. If we discuss in terms of software development, then it is very much like a mini waterfall.

6. Meaningless

In this situation, there is transparency and adaptation but no inspection. This situation is even worst than the “Broken Watch.” What does it mean to have “transparency” but no “inspection”? It is something like our thermometer is capable of measuring is the correct room temperature, but we decided not to inspect and take action in “Speculation.”

7. Illusion

In this case, we put a wet (cold or hot) towel on the thermostat or put it outside the room. Although we do inspect and take appropriate actions based on the inspection, we can’t get the desired outcome because our “inspection” is not “transparent.” This situation is just an “Illusion” to get the anticipated result.

8. Empiricism

This is the only way to achieve Empiricism. It is considered as opposite of Rationalism. Empiricism believes that knowledge can only be gain by experience and evidence. The scientific method is also based on Empiricism, where hypotheses verified by observations and evidence. One of the most used frameworks, “Scrum” is based on empiricism [5].

References

1. Inspection without adaption is pointless in Scrum by Gunther Verheyen https://guntherverheyen.com/2019/02/13/inspection-without-adaptation-is-pointless-in-scrum/
2. Toward a Story of Stakeholder Identification and Salience: Defining the Principle of who and what really counts by Ronald K. Michell, Bradley R. Agle, Donna J. Wood https://www.jstor.org/stable/259247
3. The Professional Product Owner by Don McGreal, Ralph Jocham
4. Rationalism vs. Empiricism https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/
5. The Scrum Guide https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html