Many of us are working toward the same objectives – improving our organization’s creativity and effectiveness, transforming our workplaces into environments that make us eager to get to work in the morning, maybe even developing ideas that “put a dent in the universe.”

If only we shared ideas the way we develop software – in little chunks, partially formed, and with complete transparency.

Problem is, there are two forces that work against this:

1. The tendency to polish

2. The tendency to protect

First, we polish because we feel that our output is a reflection on ourselves.  This is largely true – people do form opinions based on whether or not I dangle a participle.  But isn’t that the same pattern as being afraid to demonstrate an unpolished prototype (or worse, a paper one)?  Yet in agile, we slowly condition our stakeholders to accept ambiguity and imperfection, in the greater interest of earlier feedback and learning.  And Lean Startup shows us that a faster way to our goal is likely to be one that includes coarse validated learnings to help us make optimal decisions.

So why not apply the same principles to idea-space and our community (by community, I mean those who read blogs such as this)?

Second, we protect because of fear.  As countries, we fear that our secrets will get into the hands of enemies and risk our security.  As companies, we fear that our IP will get into the hands of competitors and risk our edge.  Good thing that the folks that developed Linux, WordPress, and Drupal didn’t feel that way.  In the agile community, we should have no such fears.  We should feel free to apply to our community the same transparency we apply to our teams.

Small ideas germinate and beget large ideas, possibly universe-denting ones.  Let’s get them out there.

Sorry this was kind of a partially formed idea, but having early dinner plans, my blog couldn’t wait for me.