Agile Disruptive GTD

Discovering GTD: A Research Journey

I had discovered Allen and GTD in 2006 whilst working on a Smart Internet CRC research project which evaluated Harvard professor Clayton Christensen's work on disruptive innovation.  I soon discovered that IT analysts had misinterpreted Christensen's research data in his book The Innovator's Dilemma (Harvard Business School Press, Boston MA, 1997) as supporting a technological determinist view of disruptive technology. 
The IT analysts had missed a post-publication debate between
Christensen and Andrew S. Grove, then Intel's chief executive officer,
in which Grove successfully challenged Christensen on the conceptual limits of technology-driven change to explain his hypothesis (see a 2003 speech and Q&A
by Grove at Stanford's Graduate School of Business).  Analysts also
overlooked Christensen's later work that moved away from industry and
macroeconomic-based modelling to consider the misalignment of
communication, innovation and project management systems in firms, and
the vital role of intrapraneurs as sources of internal change.

Christensen's
trajectory raised an important question: How do you translate the
strategic dimensions of disruptive innovation into a firm's tactical
and operational systems?  

The Agile movement in software engineering provided one answer as espoused in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. 
Like Allen, many of its exemplars would create methodologies from
reflecting on their own  practices and project experiences, such as Kent Beck's Extreme Programming or Alistair Cockburn's Crystal method.  Several authors notably Sanjiv Augustine, Michael L. George and Rob Thomsett would also make explicit links between agile practices, disruptive innovation, lean initiatives for cost innovation, and six sigma
approaches to operations.  Thus, IT management seemed to be moving to a
confluence of robust good practices for business environments which
answered Christensen's trajectory.

The Futuristics group of alumni bloggers from Swinburne University's Strategic Foresight program provided independent validation outside the Smart Internet CRC and filled in some gaps.  Josh Floyd provided insight on how individuals could develop resilience to deal with disruptive uncertainties through his work on enactive cognition.  Jose M. Ramos pointed me to the original sources of many Agile practices such as action learning and appreciative inquiry, and his valuable work on anticipatory innovation.  Stephen McGrail and Chris Stewart each gave reflections on their project management experiences.

Which is where David Allen's Getting Things Done comes in.

GTD: The Natural Planning Model

Essentially,
Allen's GTD methodology which he calls the Natural Planning Model
distills 25 years of reflections, practices, strategies and simple
rules to deal with one problem: the "interrupt culture" that fragments
our attention and creates a data glut.  

Other researchers including management guru Peter Drucker in his classic The Effective Executive (Harper & Row, New York, 1967), Bill McKibben in Age of Missing Information (Random House, New York, 2006), Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Rider & Co., New York, 2002), and John Beck & Thomas Davenport's The Attention Economy (Harvard Business School Press, Boston MA, 2001) have reached similar conclusions.

The GTD discussion below is my personal interpretation and is meant to
illustrate what one individual repertoire --- David Allen's in this
case --- might be.  I do not regard Allen's GTD or any of the models and practitioners discussed here as cure-all silver bullets.

GTD's definitions and practices include:

• Open Loops
are "internal commitments" made that are broken or unfinished:
"anything pulling at your attention, that doesn't belong the way it is,
where it is." (Allen, GTD, p. 12).

• Next Actions
are "the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in,
in order to move the current reality toward completion." (Allen, GTD, p. 34).

• A Collections cycle to gather Open Loops materials to be processed.

• Heuristics for the Collections cycle such as the Mind-Sweep for assessing information and the Two-Minute Rule for dealing with immediate items that free up attention.

• A Processing cycle to evaluate, prioritise and action material to reduce cognitive load.

• Heuristics for the Processing cycle  such as a Triggers List for brainstorming (Allen also uses Mindjet's MindManager software); Next Action Lists
that are organised by project, context and actionable/non-actionable
data (e.g. lists for "agenda", "next actions", "waiting for", "someday
maybe"), and then evaluated using a "front-end thought process".

• A Four-Criteria Model for Choosing Actions in the Moment based on evaluative judgment of context, time available, energy available and priority (Allen, GTD, p. 49).

• Allen's good practices on calendar management, email workflow, filing
systems, organising your office, procrastination, emotional self-management and
decision-making.

The heuristics are practices that support the Processing cycle and remove the common obstacles that Allen and his coaching team have encountered.

• A Reflective cycle implemented as the Weekly Review practice (Allen, GTD, pp. 45-46).


• A Six-Level Model for Reviewing Your Own Work: a framework
to situate actions and decisions within.  Allen offers six levels:
50,000+ feet (Life); 40,000+ feet (3-to-5 year vision); 30,000 feet
(1-to-2 year goals); 20,000 feet (areas of responsibility); 10,000 feet
(current projects); and Runway (current actions) (Allen, GTD, pp. 51-53).

The above summary represents what I perceive as the "core" of Allen's GTD or Natural Planning Model.

Agile Disruptive GTD

Synthesised,
the research work described above suggests a tentative answer on
how to translate Christensen's strategic view into tactical and
operational contexts.  Individuals, small teams and organisations face
the need for accelerated decision-making in disruptive, hazardous and
uncertain conditions.  A repertoire of individual and small team
practices might provide the foundation to build organisational
resilience.  Agile Disruptive GTD might be the marketing label for this
research synthesis.

But there's a deeper level.

For
individuals, the embodied practices can be found in the contemplative
traditions, energetic movements and martial arts.  It won't generally
be found in Western corporate strategy or military thinking that
misperceives disruption as coercive power or a challenger-incumbent
polarisation that can be resolved by brutal force.  David Allen, Kent
Beck, Alistair Cockburn and other practitioners have instead looked to
the Hindu and Taoist epistemologies, or ways of knowing, in aikido, ba gua, karate, tai chi, kundalini yoga and qigong for subtler understandings.  Experiential work, practice-based research and meta-reflection offer several ways forward.

Those
who do should thus discard the Agile Disruptive GTD label for the
pseudo-trendy acronym that it is.  Attaching yourself to Agile
Disruptive GTD, Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 or whatever other model that is currently the Digerati's favourite misses the point.  As Bruce Lee observed when defending his Jeet Kun Do
martial art against traditionalists, those who do might become trapped
by "dead forms": patterns of attachment, rigidity and repetition that
are often based on an individual's adherence to cultural assumptions
and others' models.

Instead, Lee counselled the Taoist
injunctive of a "form that has no form" as the ultimate strategy to
overcome disruptive conditions: mastery through self-transcendence and
disciplined execution that discards "dead forms" to always remain
aware, open and free to change.