The dangers of default disdain

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Those who create do so with an unspoken bias and for good reason. A right-handed can opener, the placement of letters on a QWERTY keyboard. Anything manufactured starts out as a guess about its end user and their motivations, and these motivations are carved into the design. Those who create technology have the awesome power of establishing standards—setting the presets—to steer their systems. The larger the scale of the system, the more assumptions the designer has to make. And, unless these presets can be modified, the system is limited.

If you think about it, defaults are an incredibly necessary invention, because they go to work when we do nothing.

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What is Agile*?

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The name Agile* is connected to a concept I want to promote in my work as a geoscientist: agile interpretation. What the heck is agile interpretation?

It's borrowed, or stolen if you prefer, from the agile software development philosophy. The idea is that you take an idea or strategy and, above all, stick to it. It drives everything that happens next. Then you do something, anything. This is anti-perfectionist and quite counter to many people's intuition (including mine). Then you iterate, as quickly as possible.

This might sound obvious, but it's not how most projects work. Most projects, of almost any kind, build a plan, preferably with a Gantt chart, then slowly but surely execute that plan, then... fail. Or if they don't fail, they at least are late and over-budget. This is not agile.

Unless you're building a nuclear reactor, I think it might be wiser to start small but bold, do good things quickly, fail often, and become adaptable and resilient. This is agile.