The Predictability Paradox

The cap on the whiteboard marker makes a faint squeak against the plastic tray. It’s the third time Brenda has picked it up and put it down. We’re 43 minutes into a two-hour sprint planning meeting for the marketing team, and the air in the room has the texture of lukewarm gelatin. The task at hand? Assigning story points to the user story, ‘As a reader, I want a new blog post, so I can learn about Topic X.’

Brenda, our newly certified scrum master, circles the number 5 on the board. A few people nod. I feel a familiar tightening in my chest. “Can’t we just… write the blog post?” I ask. It comes out quieter than I intended. “It will probably take about a day, maybe a day and a half if the research is tricky.”

Velocity. A word that once meant speed, now a metric weaponized to ensure no actual movement happens at all. We spend so much time oiling the gears of the machine that we never turn it on. We are performing the sacred rituals of agility-the stand-ups, the retrospectives, the planning poker-with the devotion of true believers. We have built a perfect replica of the airplane out of sticks and palm leaves. We just don’t understand why it won’t fly.

Mimicking Form, Missing Substance

This is a cargo cult. It’s a term born from post-war Melanesia, where islanders who saw military aircraft deliver wondrous goods began mimicking the soldiers’ behaviors. They carved wooden headphones, built control towers from bamboo, and waved landing signals on runways they’d cleared in the jungle, hoping to summon the great silver birds with their magical payloads. They copied the form perfectly but missed the substance entirely. The global industrial-military complex was a little more complicated than that.

And that’s what we’re doing. We’ve adopted the ceremonies of a few successful software companies without understanding the culture of trust, autonomy, and engineering excellence that made them work. We think holding a daily stand-up makes us agile. We believe estimating tasks in a Fibonacci sequence will magically make our creative work predictable. It’s a desperate attempt by management to impose manufacturing-floor metrics on a creative studio. It’s a way to feel in control of a process they fundamentally do not comprehend.

The Flavor of Quantification

I once worked with a brilliant flavor developer for an ice cream company, Hans W.J. A true artist. His job was to invent things like “Childhood Saturday Morning Cereal Milk” and “First Sip of Coffee on a Quiet Porch.” One day, a consultant sold his division on a strict Scrum framework. Hans was now expected to break down “flavor ideation” into user stories and assign points. How many story points is nostalgia? Is the aftertaste a bug or a feature? His team spent 233 hours one quarter arguing about how to estimate the creation of a new raspberry sorbet. The result? They shipped three new flavors that quarter: Vanilla, French Vanilla, and Vanilla Bean. Predictable, I suppose.

Process Over Practicality

It’s so easy to criticize this from the outside. I sound like I have it all figured out, but I don’t. I once managed a project where a hardware integration was failing. The team was distributed across three cities, and the main device was on a test bench in an office 373 miles away from the lead engineer. The status light, which held the key to the problem, kept blinking in a pattern nobody could describe consistently over Slack. We held 3 separate emergency stand-ups. We created a dedicated Slack channel that soon filled with conflicting reports. We filled a Jira ticket with 53 comments of pure speculation.

We were trying to solve a physical visibility problem with layers of digital process. The real solution was simple: get a camera. A basic poe camera pointed at the test bench, streaming to a private feed, would have solved the problem in minutes. It was a practical, simple tool for a practical, simple problem. But we were so committed to the process of problem-solving-the tickets, the meetings, the updates-that we ignored the most obvious answer right in front of us. We were trying to estimate the story points of a blinking light.

The Desperate Desire for Control

I’ll confess something else. Just last night I was scrolling through an old photo album on my ex’s social media. I went way too far back, like three years back. My thumb slipped, and I liked a photo. A jolt of pure, uncut panic. There’s no process to fix that. There’s no retrospective that can undo that particular deployment. And in that moment, I realized the appeal of these rigid systems. They promise a world where mistakes can be managed, where human messiness can be contained within the neat columns of a Kanban board.

“I hate the cargo cult, but a part of me understands the desperate desire to build the runway, hoping something, anything, will land and make sense of the chaos.”