The Dave Snowden meme is still having a profound affect on the Agile Community following his involvement at XP Day 4.
Another Dave Snowden meme is to think about Categorisation and Relationships.
Which is the odd one out? A Cow, A Chicken or Grass.
Chances are you chose Grass. This is because you have chosen to categorise them according to your taxonomy of life. An equally valid choice is the Chicken because the Cow and Grass have a relationship with each other whereas the Chicken does not.
Dave suggested we should elevate relationships above categorisations.
When doing analysis (learning), it is important to consider both. Relationships are equally as important as categorisations. This means that my background in relational system design gives me an advantage.
Thinking about this, we should push this even further. Categorisations and Relationships are a static view of the world. We should also consider a dynamic view of the world where the categorisations and relationships change over time. We should also consider that for a particular context a different taxonomy should be used for used for the categorisation.
This different use of taxonomy explains the difference between the relational and object oriented paradigms. The relational paradigm uses a taxonomy that works on data. The object oriented paradigm works on a taxonomy of functionality (behaviour) and data.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this but I'll keep on mulling it over.
Posted by chrismatts at December 9, 2004 11:59 AMMy instinctive answer to the question in Dave Snowden's tutorial was "Cow" because I guessed that the answer would either be "Chicken" or "Grass". I wonder what that says about me? That I prefer neither categories or relationships but being an awkward git?
Dave commented that studies have shown high correlation with culture. Individualistic cultures generally see the chicken-cow pair, group cultures generally see the cow-grass pair. I think he specifically mentioned Americans versus Asians and Africans.
Posted by: Michael Mahemoff at December 9, 2004 3:04 PMI'm guessing that there isn't as much familiarity with chickens these days as there used to be. If you have raised chickens you would know that they eat any grass they can find. So it comes down to your experience when you select the odd one out. I chose grass because cows and chickens eat grass.
Posted by: Wayne Allen at December 9, 2004 3:24 PM