I’m enjoying these posts by Adam Mastroianni. He’s a scientist arguing with academia. In this essay, he talks about Big Science and Little Science. I see parallels between Little Science and Agile project management. We run short, little experiments. Not every experiment is successful but we always learn something.
Let’s build a fleet and change the world
After all, I didn’t come aboard to administer the ship but to explore the ocean. And the best way to explore is to have many ships going in all different directions, not one ship that can only go in one direction. Some of those ships will end up going in circles or crashing into reefs or getting blown over in storms. People on one ship will often think the people on the other ships are wasting their time: “You’re heading to the Gulf of Aden? You fools, there’s nothing to learn there!” But if one ship discovers something—a new island, a new kind of fish, a new passage between continents—and sends out a signal, now everybody knows about it.