Change & Progress. But Not Really.
When I was in college, I majored in Audio Visual & Multi-Media Communications. I really enjoyed that stuff.
I still do.
I also had to also take some crappy other courses to get my diploma. So I did. As you might expect, I don’t remember much of any of those courses, or really even what I took. But as I’ve been progressing through my career, one little nugget of wisdom has stayed with me.
I don’t recall what class it was in, but that really doesn’t matter. We were looking at an advertisement from the 1930’s or 1940’s. Possibly the 1950’s, but I recall it being older than that. It featured a new technology… It was a print ad, published in some magazine or newspaper that’s also not important.
The ad was for a new sofa, one that was easier to clean because you could just hose it down with water, and let it dry. This new fabric technology that would save time. No more hours of shampooing the fabric, or scrubbing, or vacuuming. Let me try and describe the ad… Basically, there was an oval background with a young woman standing in front – just off to the side – of a couch. The woman was holding a garden hose, clearly showing how easy it was to clean this couch.
I know this because of how she was standing, smiling, clearly having a good time.
This isn’t the ad I’m referring to, but it’s one that came up with a quick Google search, and hopefully allows you to get the idea. http://elite.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/1957-ad.jpg
We were discussing how this new technology, to make the couch so easy to clean would reduce the amount of time the young woman would have to spend cleaning. She’d be freed up to do all sorts of other leisurely activities, instead of spending her time cleaning. We were talking about how technology enables us to do things that we never thought possible.
What caught me off guard was when the professor pointed out that it was a woman doing the cleaning in the ad… What if it had been a man?
Preposterous, I thought.
After all, this was an ad from a time before most men and women shared household responsibilities. What madness was this kookie professor trying to get at? If this was a modern ad, sure, it could be a man or a women. But from the 1930’s, or 40’s, or 50’s?
And then the discussion turned to new technologies that do make things better, but remain constrained by a belief of some kind. In this ad, it was that only a women would be doing the cleaning. In spite of the technological advances to make this fabric so easy to clean, the possibility of the young woman not being the one who would be doing the cleaning wasn’t even imaginable.
I wonder what we assume, in 2015, that we can’t change either. What do we just accept as the way things are.
What is our “women do the housework” paradigm?
There’s a discussion going on in the Agile software community about #NoEstimates. I’ve found this very interesting to follow and take part in. Before I get too far down this road, let me say that for me, #NoEstimates is all about looking at why we do certain things the way we do, and asking if there’s a better way to do it. I’m certainly not going to claim to have the answers.
There are those who insist that the only way to responsibly deliver a project is with estimating the work up front. Maybe. But I’m not so sure. I’ve seen too many projects which have been estimated up front fail, because the number of things not included in the estimate blows the project up, taking it over budget, and way off schedule. And what’s worse, is that it’s often not the right thing that gets built, simply because the estimate was done a year – or more – ago, and the market has shifted to make whatever it was no longer relevant.
Just like the creators of that ad couldn’t imagine a time when women wouldn’t be the ones cleaning and doing the housework, there are those who can’t imagine a time when we won’t be estimating software projects up front.
My point is simply that a lot of good can come from questioning and exploring things that we take for granted, which are the status quo of today.
At one point, we thought the world was flat. At one point, we assumed that women would always do the housework. At one point, we thought we needed detail estimate of software projects before we started development.
Questioning and exploring alternatives to what we think we know today can lead us to places we can’t yet imagine or dream.
If you want to read more about #NoEstimates, here are two fantastic places you can do exactly that: