Chapter 5. Making a Mess

The way most software development managers think about projects is based on the Newtonian science that permeates modern life. That's a big reason why the manufacturing mindset is so natural. But software development is a messy problem, not like manufacturing at all. Complexity science, or simply complexity, can help with problems like that.

Complexity began with chaos (weird science, by all accounts), but has become a way to understand how real people solve real problems. Those problems are almost always messy if they're interesting. Solving them looks nothing like what the textbook—or the methodology manual—says.

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