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Figure 2-25. The yin-yang of idea and execution.
In planning my trip to Isle Royale, I read and made lists. But I also tried things out. In our back-
yard, I burned myself on the pocket stove, then learned how to foil the wind. In the living room,
I modeled an “emergency poncho” for my wife. She laughed until she cried. Thinner than a dry-
cleaning bag, it would have been ripped to shreds by foliage. Then she found me a real poncho.
And in the bathtub, I tested the water filter, because as noted earlier, learning by failure feels like
a game until someone gets larval cysts in the brain. We learn too late when we put too little do
in our plan, and vice versa.
We should take these lessons online to plan-build sites and systems, because the binary opposi-
tion of agile-waterfall is just as much a myth. The Agile Manifesto backs “responding to change
over following a plan” but makes a point of saying that both have value. Yet Agile is used often
as a platform for proclaiming the wireframe is dead. Meaning shifts from intent to interpreta-
tion, and plans go out the window. We all know death by documentation sucks, but to pivot and
sprint into an Agile death spiral isn't a whole lot of fun either. Fortunately, the plan-build pen-
dulum is now swinging back to the middle thanks to a succession of expensive unplanned disas-
ters.
The timing is good. As the complexity of our ecosystems grows, we will need plans and proto-
types more than ever before. To wrangle strategy, structure, and schedule in our heads is ab-
surd. We must put ideas into the world so we can see them. Architects have been doing this
forever.
It's part of the timeless way of building that Christopher Alexander draws upon to generate the
built outside Tokyo in the 1980s, Alexander used many tools to extend cognition. First, instead
of simply interviewing students and teachers, he invited them to co-create a pattern language - a
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