Agility, Improvisation,
or Enacted Emergence?
Dr Yingqin Zheng,
Dr Will Venters,
Dr Tony Cornford
This research was undertaken as part of Pegasus
EPSRC: Grant No: EP/D049954/1
www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk
10 Dec 2007 ICIS, Montreal
www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk
Introduction

Pegasus Project – Exploring practices of GridPP: the UK
particle physics Grid

Agile systems development?

Methodology as faked? Fiction? Amethodical?

Organisational improvisation

 Improvisation Paradoxes

 Enacted Emergence?
www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk
Organizational Improvisation


Metaphors

Jazz (Weick 1992, 1999; Barrett 1998, Hatch 1999)

Improvisational Theatre (Crossan, 1998)
Cunha (1999): “the conception of action as it unfolds, by an organisation
and/or its members drawing on available material, cognitive, affective and
social resources”

Convergence in time of conception and execution

Bricolage – finding solutions from available rather than optimal
resources
www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk
Improvisation Paradoxes
Situated
Improvisation
environmental turbulence
task uncertainty
unplanned-for occurrences
task complexity
drop your tools
visions
(Moorman and Miner, 1998, Ciborra, 1996);
(Dahlbom and Mathiassen, 1993)
(Miner et al., 2001)
(Hutchins, 1995, Weick and Roberts, 1993)
(Weick, 1993a)
(Hatch, 1999, Mintzberg and McHugh, 1985,
Hutchins, 1991, Weick, 1993b)
Structured
Chaos
organized anarchy
Persistent structures
collateral structure
experimental culture
aesthetic of imperfection
a sense of urgency
(Cohen et al., 1972)
(Lanzara, 1999)
(Cunha et al., 1999)
(Cunha et al., 1999)
(Weick, 1999)
(Crossan, 1998, Hutchins, 1991,Mirvis,1998)
Planned
Agility
convergence of planning &
execution
plan to improvise
mixing the pre-composed &
the spontaneous
magnetic fields
artful planning
(Moorman and Miner, 1998)
(Miner et al., 2001)
(Weick, 1998)
(Weick, 1993a)
(Baskerville, 2006)
www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk
Improvisation-Paradoxes Cont.
Reflective
Spontaneity
retrospective sensemaking
ex post interpretation
transient constructs
emergent order
Collective
Individuality
(Mirvis, 1998)
facilitative leadership
trust and kinship
fluid communication
influence and persuasion
hanging out
Anxious
Confidence
(Mirvis, 1998)
moods
individual skills &
creativity
formative context
organizational memory
(Weick, 1993b)
(Lanzara, 1999)
(Lanzara, 1999)
(Miner et al 2001)
(Crossan, 1998)
(Crossan, 1998, Weick, 1993a)
(Orlikowski, 1996, Miner et al., 2001)
(Hatch, 1999)
(Barrett, 1998)
(Ciborra, 2002)
(Hutchins, 1991, Moorman and Miner,
1998, Orlikowski, 1996)
(Ciborra and Lanzara, 1994)
(Moorman and Miner, 1998)
www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk
Particle Physicists and Grids

Currently constructing the worlds
most powerful particle
accelerator… the Large Hadron CD stack with
1 year LHC data
Collider (LHC)
(~ 20 km)

Searching for Higgs Boson – “1
person in 1000 worlds, or a
needle in 20 million haystacks”

12-14 million gigabytes per year.

100,000 CPUs.

40PB disk, 40PB tape.

“Worlds biggest Grid“
www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk
www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk
Background Context

Building the LHC Computing
Grid (LCG):

To a significant degree agile…

Highly distributed, complex and
poorly defined systems
development task.

Collaboration of 230 people in 19
UK universities, RAL and CERN.

Cutting edge hardware and
software used.


New software standards being
negotiated.
Decisions are made democratically
and consensually, and implemented
by influence and persuasion.

Middleware and support
software being developed in a
range of languages.

Network rather than hierarchy

Virtual, federated, overlapping and
inter-connected.

Virtual meetings, wikis, blogs,
mailinglists


GridPP (UK Contribution to LCG)
Grid must be distributed and
proceed at different paces
because of funding.
Particle physics has a long
tradition of such large scale
global collaborations (Traweek
1988).
www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk
Research Findings
Situated
Improvisation
EGEE, LCG, e-science, funding, hardware, software…
Structured Chaos
No top down authority; extensive management
structure/communicative channels; competing technical
solutions
Planned Agility
“day to day we keep putting one foot in front of the other …
and different people, depending on their role in the project,
are more oriented towards the ultimate goal or more oriented
towards the little concrete footsteps that need to be taken...”
Reflective
Spontaneity
-pragmatic, “getting the job done”, fire-fighting
Collective
Individuality
-freedom to improvise and innovate
Anxious Confidence
-pressure from LHC switch on; “Yes it will work.”
-monitoring, accounting, sense-making
-shared goal, trust, facilitative leadership, “hanging out”
-history of cutting-edge computing and large collaborations
www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk
Enacted Emergence

Enactment (Weick 1977)



“people invent organizations and their environments and these
inventions reside in ideas that participants have superimposed on
any stream of experience (ibid. p. 196)”.
Emergence

Temporally emergent qualities

Interactions of existing elements

In a historical context
The evolutionary approach of system development (Dahlbom
and Mathiassen 1993)

Enactment of sensemaking
www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk
Enacted Emergence
Environment
History
Complexity, uncertainties, visions,
pressure, risks
organizational memory of improvisation,
history of innovation,
Chaos
Order
trial and error, improvisation, bricolage
continuity, stability, resilience
Individuals
Collective
competent, confident, creative, committed,
pragmatic
shared goal, trust, hanging out, emotional
bond, facilitative leadership, aesthetic of
imperfection
Planning
Unfolding
broad direction, retrospective sensemakingsensemaking
democratic debates, spontaneous actions,
natural selection
Practices
Structure
tinkering, innovation, invention
collateral, de-layered, democratic,
communicative
www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk
Contributions
 Improvisation paradoxes

Agility should embody a deliberate or natural mixture
of structure and improvisation, order and changes,
intentionality and flexibility, spontaneity and reflexivity,
collectivity and individuality
 Agile systems development “in the wild”

Embeddedness of agility

Large group performance is possible when the
ambience is right.

Science vs art
 Enacted Emergence

Duality between structure and agency
www.pegasus.lse.ac.uk