In his Slideshare presentation on The Agile Method Ecosystem Agustin Villena makes the useful comment that Agile development functions much like fractal systems in nature: like the branching patterns of trees or the contours of a coastline, Agile delivery relies on a nested set of progressively more refined feedback loops. In its most simplistic terms, there’s the business planning cycle, the sprint planning cycle, and the daily standup cycle. We can’t take too seriously the importance of these interlocking cycles of interaction, primarily because they rapidly generate a high amount of complexity – more than can easily be handled by the typical ad hoc level of comunication quality that exists among stakeholders, project leaders, dev teams, and other contributors.

For whatever reasons, when it comes to human relationships we seem to want things to be simpler than they are. As any good fractal diagram illustrates, that’s probably not the most useful way to approach problem-solving. It’s probably best to assume a breathtaking degree of complexity and then be pleasantly surprised when unexpected simplicity arises.