The Terminator and aging WIP

This probably fits the category of random thoughts, but hopefully you get some insight out of it!

This weekend I started rewatching The Terminator series. Not sure if the rules of spoiler alert are valid for a 40 years-old movie, but in any case they are, be warned. The story of the first movie is a multiverse inspired story that goes in circles, a kind of "the chicken and the egg" sort of thing…

A soldier, Kyle Reese, is sent back from future to protect the future mother (Sarah Connor) of a hero (John Connor) for the time Reese is, a leader of the humans survivors fighting back a distopic world controlled by intelligent machines who rebelled against humanity some time back. Humans were making tangible steps towards winning, so the machines develop a new concept, a Terminator (a cyborg), who is desgined to change future outcomes by preventing the origin  of what played out to happen.

So, Reese is sent back to protect Sarah from that nearly unstoppable killing cyborg so that humanity can have a chance of surviving by Sarah conceiving John. But here's the plot twist: Kyle happens to be the father of John, who's in fact conceived during the process of counteracting the Terminator pursuit for Sarah's death. Reese ends up deceased in the replay of acts, and oddly enough it doesn't look like he knows he's (or would be?) the father of John to begin with.

Call me weird, but here's something that came to my mind when thinking about stuff in having the story still on my mind:

Now, I don't personally believe on the idea of multiverse, but I happen to find it an useful way to think and reflect about things on a practical level. It also happens to be the case that quite some stuff in the real world work a little bit in circles and around the notion of trying to influence future outcomes, just like the plot of the movie.

Take the interplay of aging WIP and cycle time as a simple example. We worry about cycle time because of how flow enables product development and how it increases our chances to optimize for value. But we don't want just to be "victims of our own circumstances", and the "Terminator" sort of tool we can practically use to help us better control things is (monitoring and acting upon) aging WIP. Keeping a low WIP tends to help items to not age. Again, a "the chicken and the egg" sort of thing…

But here's the punchline, the ultimate connection with the plot of the movie:

The best way to control undesirable future outcomes is to prevent certain possible tracks to play out at all, just like what The Terminator was designed to do going back to the origin of the birth of the human-hero, John Connor.

It's even right there in the principles of the agile manifesto: Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amountof work not done – is essential.

In that sense, be like The Terminator when it comes to defer start of work that is too unclear upfront, not clear enough what we could achieve, and not enough good options of what and how to learn whether the value will be there. But also be like Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor when it  comes to preserve the current track of things (or history) when we are sufficiently sure it's worth a bet on (or we are willing to, given our circumstances).

Whenever the latter, aging WIP is still an useful tool to reflect on whether we are being too careful. Or perhaps we should say too pretentious in thinking we truly know how things will play out before letting things get out in "the wild" (i.e., used by customers), so that we can watch behavior to validate our assumptions.

By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect, I'm happy to engage and interact. If I can be of further utility to you or your organization in getting better at working with product development, I am available for part-time advisory, consulting or contract-based engagements.