the agile way

Copyright Peter Merel 2024
Version 1.0

Cover:

A hole in a hill? A work plan? A world around a star?
What do you see and why do you see it?

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Introduction

The oldest, deepest, and shortest book on agility in existence, the agile way is a guide for individuals and organizations exeriencing times of extreme change. Written before the invention of paper, its interlocking patterns apply as well to the information and intelligence revolutions as the agricultural one where it began.

How should you approach this little book? Later editions may detail modern implications, but this first one encourages readers to tease these out for themselves. In the manner of a koan, each pattern supports two readings. First, as a practical solution to a commonplace problem in one of the book’s six contexts. But each pattern carries a deeper meaning through which, on reflection, the reader may not come away unchanged.

To avoid throwing you in at the deep end, here’s a frame for the list of agile qualities you’ll find in chapter 1:

• Listening as if crossing thin ice - because change, uncertainty, and ambiguity are everywhere.
• Testing like a boat on dark water - so that carelessness, haste and imbalance won’t sink you.
• Adapting like a stranger to a far shore - to give and take what the market takes and gives.
• Simplifying like a melting snowflake - as our systems grow as rigid and inefficient as one.
• Connecting like the deep woods - to sustain continuous growth across cycles of change.
• Leading as a valley does the river - to quicken and join channels of mutual benefit.
• Empowering as its silt feeds the fields - opening bottlenecks and fostering innovation.

There are explanations at the back of the book concering its journey at the hands of the current author and its line by line correspondence with earlier interpretations of the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu.

Change

“The sage” sounds like an old man on a mountain. But the Chinese sheng translates to perceptive, wise, dextrous and lively, and ren to person or people. So sheng ren translates here as agile person, agile people, or just agility.

1. A Way Of Life (xv)

Agility is practical, not mystical.
A way of life, not a state of grace.

Listening as if crossing thin ice,
Testing as a boat on dark water,
Adapting as a stranger to a far shore,
Simplifying as a melting snowflake,
Connecting as the deep woods,
Leading as a valley does the river,
Empowering as its silt feeds the fields.

Imagine the ice solid or the water clear,
Stop to plan your way ahead,
Ignore what moves underfoot;
You fall and disappear.

2. Cultivation (lxxviii)

Nothing is as soft and flexible as water,
Melting the rigid and flooding the fixed
Which cannot control it.

Melting ice and flooding valleys -
People see this as the power of water
And fail to grasp its real force.

The agile channel water to irrigate fields
To multiply grain so people don’t go hungry
And fight over it.

3. Like Water (viii/v/vii)

As water runs where it’s not blocked,
The agile carve channels of mutual benefit.
Learning by sharing learning,
Letting go old ways to find better ones,
Trusting in those trusting in them.

Like water, agility sustains community,
Clarifies understanding,
Dissolves complexity,
Quickens growth,
Eases friction,
Fills opportunity,
And speeds flow.

As a rising tide lifts all boats
Agility adapts all people.

4. Embracing Change (xxiii)

Change occurs suddenly.
A cyclone may pass in the night,
Or a flood in a day,
And change the world forever.

As nature’s forms change, so must ours.
Embracing change, we lead change
Like a ship sailing ahead of a storm.
Anchored to form or set adrift,
The tide drags us under.

5. Mindset (lxvii)

People talk about an agile mindset.
Talk is often all there is to it,
But there are three qualities
The agile manifest and defend:
Connection, adaptation, and simplicity.

Connection generates strength,
Adaptation, flexibility,
And simplicity, ease.

Strength without a warm heart,
Flexibility without a coiled spine,
Ease without a cool head,
Spell the end of agility.

6. Warm Heart (xlix)

The agile connect people like a family
By fostering.

They’re fair to the fair,
And to the unfair,
Fostering fairness.

They’re trustworthy to the trustworthy,
And the untrustworthy,
Fostering trust.

They’re kind to those within their community,
And without,
Fostering kindness.

No matter what anyone says or seems,
They treat each like each other.

7. Coiled Spine (xlv/xxii)

Nature adapts with neither intent nor outcome,
Nor effort nor limit,
Nor reason nor purpose.

So the agile adapt their form
To the flow of forms:
Bending to straighten,
Emptying to fill,
Failing to learn,
Yielding to fit,
Losing to gain.

Agile work achieves nothing
But to make all work easier.
Agile business profits no one
More than it profits everyone.
Agile words are honest,
Agile intents, sincere,
Agile outcomes, shared.

8. Cool Head (xxii/xxiv)

Flaunting loses respect;
Conspiring loses trust;
Owing loses impartiality;
Arguing loses fellowship;
Reacting loses opportunity.

These behaviors are wasteful and self-indulgent,
Generating entanglement and conflict.
So the agile avoid them.

Without pride, no one can humiliate them;
Without secrets, no one can betray them;
Without debt, no one can compromise them;
Without contention, no one can refute them;
Without reaction, no one can anticipate them.

9. Tact (lxxxi/lvi)

Words are often misleading,
So honesty offers few of them.
Promises are hard to honor,
So honor picks its promises.
Answers seldom enlighten,
So enlightenment seldom answers.

The agile don’t explain themselves
When explanation doesn’t serve harmony.
They reserve opinions and judgements
To ease differences and disagreements,
And check their power
To empower people to organize themselves.

Beyond friendship and enmity,
Wealth and poverty,
Honor and disgrace,
They hold the virtue inside honor.

10. Integrity (xxix)

You can’t control human nature no matter what you do;
People always find new ways to express it;
Tax one sin and another spreads;
Arrest one rebel and others conspire.

Some will lead where others follow;
Some own what others owe;
Some win when others lose;
Some make rules others obey.

Agility only controls desires
To hoard, exploit, and compete.

11. Without Competing (xxxiii)

Where soldiers defend hierarchy
The agile defend harmony.
Where philosophers increase knowledge;
The agile increase understanding.
Where princes control empires;
The agile control desires.
Where heroes defend their homeland;
The agile survive their homeland.

The agile care less for growing their slice than growing the pie;
Investing in others and partaking with them.
As nature flourishes where it doesn’t struggle
The agile collaborate without competing.

Connection

Agile organizations don’t come from a manifesto, framework, or mindset. Those all have utility but alone, per Kafka, “the revolution evaporates leaving behind only the slime of another bureaucracy”. Agile organizations emerge by xiang: connecting people by mutual benefit.

12. The Bow (lxxvii)

Mutual benefit is like drawing a bow:
As the top lowers the bottom rises;
As the gap reduces, the middle increases;
A positive sum game
Where each gets more than they give.

Where you lead people to compete,
Increasing the gap to tighten your grip,
That’s like aiming your bow at the sun.

13. Interdependence (xii/iii)

Reward collaboration, not competition;
Feed interdependence, not dependence;
Open peoples’ minds to fill their bellies;
Soften their hearts to strengthen their bones.

Agility distributes management and ownership
So those who provide them won’t exploit them;
Controlling politics by not centralizing decisions;
Bureaucracy by not delegating to managers;
Power by not privileging owners.

When no one can take advantage,
Harmony remains.

14. Compromise (xxxviii/liv a)

Neglect harmony and community remains.
Divide community and trust remains.
Break trust and justice remains.
Corrupt justice and power remains.

Harmony doesn’t experience fear;
But, without it, you do.
It won’t divide or corrupt itself;
But, without it, you will.

Trust serves harmony without compromise;
Justice compromises it to serve it;
And power compromises it to serve itself.

15. Fruit Not Flowers (xxxviii/liv b)

Fear is as hard to dispel
As power is to uproot
As each generation
Sews it in the next.

Fear binds justice and community
Into a matrix of struggle
With faith in the flower of harmony
The root of its control.

Harmony roots in trust, not faith,
Yielding fruit, not flowers,
Planting the one,
And supplanting the other.

16. Bureaucracy (xviii/xix)

As mutual benefit is compromised
Princes and priests rise,
And courts and lawyers,
Parties and politicians.

Wherever people are led to compete,
Harmony is compromised.
As they struggle,
Owners and managers gain control.

If we could control command and control,
People might contribute and collaborate;
Outlaw laws and taxes,
Communities of trust might return;
Reorganize roles and responsibilities,
Corruption and conspiracy might disappear.

Such idealism treats symptoms
Where practical solutions must treat causes:
Sharing resources and rewarding outcomes;
Measuring throughput and opening bottlenecks;
Simplifying workflows and minimizing work in progress.

17. Idealism (xxxix/xxxii)

People pray for a heaven
Where the skies are always blue,
The ground always sure,
The mountains snow-capped,
The rivers full,
The soil fertile,
The people happy,
And the king benevolent.

Yet the sky must darken
For, without rain,
The ground cracks,
The mountains brown,
The rivers stop,
The soil blows,
The people starve,
And the king falls.

Princes depend on subjects
As priests on believers,
Each claiming to be wiser,
Nobler, and closer to heaven,
To keep people in their power.

18. Systems (xxxix/xxxii)

If a king was truly ordained by heaven,
All nature would follow his commands
And a sweet rain would fall,
Effortlessly slaking his every thirst.

Power can only control systems
And all systems are temporary.
As nature has no true form,
No system can truly control it.

Agile leaders only exert power
To align people to trade and share
Like streams flowing into a river,
And rivers into the sea.

19. The Bottleneck (lxiii)

As a bountiful harvest comes from a handful of seeds
All complex problems have simple beginnings;
As an oak from an acorn,
Hunger leads to war.

To solve a complex problem,
Focus on its tightest constraint.
To prevent difficulty, anticipate it;
Root out hidden causes and thoughtless habits
At the bottleneck.

Prevent starvation by sharing resources,
Conflict by sharing trade,
And fear by sharing trust.

20. Sharing (lxi/xxxv)

As flowers attract bees,
Markets align traders
To their mutual benefit.

Opening a market to smaller players
The great benefits from their supply.
Opening a market to bigger players
The small benefits from their support.

As plants feed and shelter animals,
Animals fertilize and propagate plants.
As in a good marriage, each benefits
By connecting the other.

21. Nurture And Nature (liv)

Harmony starts in one person,
Grows fertile in a family,
Prosperous in a community,
Abiding in a culture,
And complete in nature.

As marriage connects people to each other;
Family connects generations to each other;
Community connects families to each other;
Culture connects communities to each other;
And nature connects cultures to each other.

So, to cultivate harmony,
Align nurture to nature.

22. Ecosystem (li)

As nature quickens a form
Harmony nourishes it by adapting it to others,
Each supplying each other:
Nurturing, parenting, teaching,
Engaging, maturing, decaying and consuming each other.

Just as living things propagate and exchange nourishment,
Not by direction, but by nature, harmonious cultures:
Share without centralizing,
Serve without obeying,
And learn without training.

Leadership

Agile leaders (zhu) take responsibility for their whole community and operate on the rules of the games - technology, accounting methods, reward models, feedback loops, and learning protocols - empowering without interfering.

23. The Stone Keel (xxvi)

A captain tirelessly guides his ship at sea
Until, safe in port, he can lose it in sleep.

As calm is the master of haste,
And care the path to ease,
The captain of a great ship
Can’t treat it as a pleasure boat,
Steering lazily or hastily.

Without care he loses his bearings at sea;
Without calm he loses the trust of his crew.
The great captain doesn’t command his ship as a proud figurehead
But steadies her as a stone keel.

24. Command And Control (lvii)

Where leadership focuses autonomy on alignment
People innovate and collaborate,
But where it delegates command and control
People submit and compete.

The more values and principles, the more sinners;
The more fines and taxes, the more cheats;
The more police and soldiers, the more renegades;
The more hierarchies and frameworks, the more rebels.

Agile leaders align autonomous groups
By making no laws but to secure trust,
No taxes but to encourage trade,
And no goal but mutual benefit.

25. Leadership as a Service (lxvi/lxxii)

A valley aligns a myriad streams into a river
By running beneath them.

Given freedoms of trade and community,
People naturally lead each other.
With no reason to fear leaders,
They gladly support them.

So the agile lead without imposing commands,
Manage without enforcing controls,
Gain loyalty without promoting patriotism,
Recognition without ceremony or celebration,
And cooperation without enslavement.

Without fear of authority,
People live for their children,
Serving those who serve them.
They supply leadership
By generating leaders.

26. Adaptive Leadership (xvii/xxxvii)

The best leaders are barely mentioned by their subjects;
The next best, loved and praised;
The next feared;
The next despised.
With no trust in their people,
Their people place no trust in them.

As nature does nothing but adapt,
The best leaders lead by adaptation,
Neglecting no one
Controlling no one,
And taking no one’s side.

People prosper under such leadership
By adapting to each other.
So, when adaptive leaders achieve their purpose,
Their people claim it as their own.

27. Adapt Weakness (xxvii)

Great explorers leave no trail unmapped;
Great teachers no question unanswered;
Great philosophers no fact unexplained;
Great generals no threat unchecked;
Great tailors no thread unravelled.

Great leaders find use for everyone,
Aligning each to each other,
Accounting for the weakest
To multiply their strength.

The strong must find use for the weak
As the weak are the source of their strength;
Where the strong neglect the weak
Chaos results no matter how clever they are.

This is the method of alignment:
As wood is shaped, it becomes a tool;
As a person is served, they become a servant;
And a great carpenter leaves no wood uncarved.

28. Weakness Adapts (xl/xli)

Nature works to adapt
As mind works to represent;
Forests are adaptations of seeds
As seeds of dirt.

Weakness seeks adaptation.
Power is born in struggle;
Family in loneliness;
Revolution in bondage;
Liberty in tyranny;
Strategy in retreat;
Invention in scarcity;
Fire in darkness.

29. Delicate Fish (lix)

Agility aligns people gently
As if cooking a delicate fish,
Using tact to keep trust intact.

Tact eases agreement,
And easy agreement secures a network of trust.
As channels of trust join, distrust is displaced
And community takes its place.

As community connects people, it grows:
Rooting deeply, joining each to each other,
Community weaves their history and future together.

30. Humility (lxx)

As a leader’s words and actions serve community,
Promoting no other strategy or purpose,
Community adapts to them.

The more you appear different to people,
The less they feel you understand them
Where the more you speak as one of them,
The more they feel they understand you.

This is the benefit of humility.
The agile wear plain clothes;
Only their hearts glitter.

31. Fortress and Palace (lxviii/liii)

Trust is the finest weapon and strongest defense.
As, gaining cooperation, you weave trust among people,
So, securing peace, trust surrounds you like a fortress.

With just this simple plan
You may build community as if following a main road
And never risk losing your way.
Though following a main road is easy,
Many take the scenic route.

As palaces rise,
Fields turn to weeds
And granaries empty.
Wearing fine clothes,
Bearing sharp swords,
Seizing resources and control,
Employing courtiers and courtesans -
These are detours leading away from community.

32. Too Much (ix/xii)

As you temper a sword to the sharpest, it shatters;
Fill a cup to the brim, it spills;
Hoard food, it spoils;
Concentrate power, it corrupts.

As too much light blinds,
Too much sound deafens,
Too much flavor disgusts,
Too much talk confuses,
Too much centralization impoverishes.

The agile say enough when they control enough
To grow their slice by growing the pie.

33. Enough (xxviii)

Accept power without exploiting it
To open channels of trust
And quicken the grain of community.

Learn secrets without making them
To connect networks of trust
And nourish the roots of community.

Master politics without playing it
To cultivate fields of trust
And share the harvest of community.

Explanations

Before Agile

Listening, testing, coding and refactoring. That’s all there is to software. Anyone who says different is selling something. – Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained, 1st Ed., 2000

Listening as if crossing thin ice, testing as a boat on dark water, adapting as a stranger to a far shore, simplifying as a melting snowflake … – Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 3,000 years before.

XP was the first agile software development method, but not the first agile method. It’s not just that agilism resembles taoism, but the origin of the one was directly influenced by this interpretation of the other.

Three years before publishing the first agile book, XP Explained: Embrace Change, Beck shared drafts of it on Ward’s Wiki, which was a hive of software radicals sharing new patterns of organization in the mid 1990s. I was one, contributing hundreds of pages of content sprinkled with quotes from my 1993 “GNL” translation of Lao Tzu. Agile manifesto author Alistair Cockburn liked that translation so well back then that he hosted it on his website, and I went on to speak on “The Tao of Extreme Programming” at the first agile conference, XP2K, nine months before Extreme was rebranded Agile at Snowbird.

I thought then that the relationship between agilism and taoism was explained by repeated history - that Agile’s refutation of bureaucratic management mirrored taoism’s refutation of Confucian orthodoxy. It was another decade before I realized Lao Tzu was literally writing about agility, and that the relationship of the one with the other is an identity. Because, to get that, I first had to kill the Dude.

Killing the Dude

Silk tears, string rots, carved bamboo slips are jumbled, and new dynasties burn the libraries of the old. The earliest surviving editions of Lao Tzu pre-date the first Chinese dictionaries by centuries. And those dictionaries only standardized terms of trade, not philosophy. So this book’s words morphed invisibly down the centuries. And, visibly, priesthoods rearranged the order of its lines to suit magical numbers they happened to hold sacred …

So Lao Tzu came to be known as “the book of riddles” in China because no one could say what it originally meant, nor separate that meaning from those it acquired over time. Translations by modern scholars wildly disagree with each other, and with this one, and the challenge of solving the puzzle-box made Lao Tzu the most translated book in history.

As an Australian software engineer with neither Chinese roots nor language skills, I took up this Quixotic pursuit in 1989 in collaboration with a community of sinology professors that frequented the ANU’s then new taoism-studies-l mailing list. My open-content “GNL” project - a play of words on Stallman’s GNU project - proposed to cut the Gordian knot by translating the book from English to English. Distilling the most popular English translations into one simple draft an amateur like me could grasp but none of the expert sinologists could refute.

My professors were sensibly skeptical about the feasibility of doing so, but they were entertained enough to take the time to school me as I tried to make this work. Eternal gratitude to Prof. Dan Lusthaus in particular for his patience with me at that time. Over three years the GNL project succeeded to the extent that, unprompted, chinapage.org, the most popular English-language Chinese website of the 20th century, adopted it as their official English translation of the Tao Te Ching.

And then the going got weird.

In 1998, Joel and Ethan Coen made The Big Lebowski, fusing Bogart noir The Big Sleep with a 1980s Hunter S. Thompson take on the 4th century Japanese Zen koan, The Vinegar Tasters, in which avatars of Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Buddha meet over a jar of sour wine.

“This is bitter,” says Buddha, “but life is suffering. We should just drink it.”

“The wine is spoiled.” says Confucius, “It is unacceptable. We should tip it out.”

“Man,” says Lao Tzu, “this stuff would go great in a salad dressing. Or with dumplings!”

The bitter beverage in the Coens’ movie is coffee, not vinegar, but the movie’s sentiments are the same. So I should have seen what was coming when a Californian uber-fan of the film named Oliver Benjamin contacted me in 2004 to ask if he could re-use the GNL translation as the bible of his “Church of he Latter Day Dude” under the title “Dude De Ching”.

I said the GNL’s under an open content license and you’ll have to give it away free. Which, to his credit, Oliver did … while selling a half million “Dudeist Priest” certificates each authorizing the bearer to perform weddings and funerals. He retired on the proceeds to live like a king in Chiang Mai.

Now I dig the Dude’s story and admire the High Dudely Lama - which is Oliver. But I had to ask myself whether this was really the outcome I had in mind for what seemed to be all that amounted from my life’s work. I’m down for bowling, bathrobes and White Russians, but is that what this was really all about?

There’s a zen koan, “If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.” While Buddhists are worshipful, their worship isn’t about the name, image, identity, story or likeness of the Buddha. The moment those turn up they’re an obstacle to a Buddhist’s enlightenment.

Likewise, the Coens and the Lama weren’t wrong. The Sage the GNL kept talking about, same as in all the other English translations, sounds a hundred percent like their Dude. And that meant there was nothing for it; if I was going up against the Dude - or at least telling you what I’m blathering about - I had to go back to the Chinese and actually translate it from that.

The Chinaman is not the issue here.

My expertise is in building systems, coaching teams, and refactoring organizations. What can I bring to Chinese translation that hundreds of generations of professional academics and inspired native amateurs haven’t? Translating English to English is in my wheelhouse. Chinese ain’t. Or so it seemed until two new translations fell into my lap that completely changed what I thought I was doing.

The first was by Sanskrit scholar Prof. Victor Mair. Mair is better known for his archaeology of the cryptid mummies of China’s Tarim basin. Red-haired caucasian giants wearing tartan and witches’ hats that rode the first domesticated horses into China from the West on or about 2000 BCE. But in 1990 Prof. Mair published an English translation of what was then the oldest known edition of Lao Tzu. A set of silk scrolls that had just recently been unearthed at a placed named Ma Wang Dui.

I liked that translation just fine but what stood my hair on end was Mair’s discovery of deep philological connections between this Lao Tzu and the Bhagavad Gita, the root text of Indian Yoga. Reviewing these connections systematically, he concluded that either one of these books was a bad translation of the other, or both derived from some lost, possibly pre-literate, earlier tradition.

These revelations were published just as an even older bamboo-carved edition of Lao Tzu was unearthed at Guo Dian. Pre-dating the invention of paper and silk, the Guo Dian Tao lacked half the length of the from Ma Wang Dui.

Perhaps the latter borrowed from the Gita? Where did the rest come form? No one can say. Perhaps the Tao rode into China from the West with Mair’s Tarim Basin witches. Maybe the Tao began as just a commentary on the Gita or maybe Chinese nursery rhymes got mixed up with a primer on the Vedas, then back-translated a couple more times … it was clear I’d been barking up a tree that wasn’t there.

I thought I was leveraging the insights of expert in ancient Chinese to reveal the intents of an ancient Chinese author. I worried my work, much less the Dudely Lama’s Lebowkification of it, disrespected that original meaning. But if the text wasn’t originally Chinese, and didn’t originate with one author, I hadn’t taken too many liberties. I’d taken too few.

Look, we’re solving a puzzle, we translators, east and west, maybe the wickedest puzzle in history. Though we know this book’s jumbled, we reverently pick up piece after piece, carefully polish each by choosing words we believe reveal its context, and then carefully place it right back in the jumble where we found it. Over and over for thousands of years, trying to solve a jigsaw without ever rearranging the pieces to form a picture.

The idiocy of this process gobsmacked me. Robert Henricks in his 1982 “On the Chapter Divisions in the Lao-Tzu” found among the hundreds of editions of the book over thousands of years just a handful that dared rearrange it into a consistent whole.

Still, the Chinese is all we have now and, still, learning Chinese, much less deciphering its prehistoric etymology, was biting off more than I could begin to chew before dropping dead of any reasonably old age. Any effort of that kind would be foolish. I was stuck with who I was.

At least that was the way it was until 2009 when the wonderful Bradford Hatcher came to my aid with the first complete English transliteration of the Tao, “Laozi Word by Word”. Hatcher had made his own translation on top of this work, but the benefit from my standpoint was that his appendices listed all plausible dictionary meanings of every pictogram in the Lao Tzuw With cross-references explaining all variations across all the ancient Chinese editions of the book including Guo Dian and Ma Wang Dui.

Hatcher had done the hard yards. With this as a base I was back in the business of translating English into English - while still keeping my translation based solidly on the historical evidence. It was studying Hatcher’s work that I finally saw the key that explains why I’m not the most unlikely translator for this book, but perhaps the most likely.

Translating Chinese word by Chinese word, I saw that the Sage - the Dude - is sheng ren, with ren meaning person or people or polity, and sheng meaning perceptive, intuitive, or, in the sense linked poetically in the second chapter of the Chinese, harmonious and lively. Perceptive, intuitive, harmonious, lively … agile … person or people or polity … agile polity … agility … Lao Tzu was talking about agility all along!

Rendering sheng ren as an enlightened hermit takes away its everyday application. If the book isn’t about a mystical long-haired old man, but any ordinary person or people, you and I when we’re treating each other right, it’s a practical way to help all of us get along and work together when push has come to shove.

How Lao Tzu rode to the West - and who he met there

As with many religious icons, there was almost certainly no historical person named Lao Tzu. The name itself means only “old philosopher” or “old philosophy”. But there are many stories about a man by that name.

In 500 BCE, Han dynasty Grand Historian Ssu-Ma Chi’en wrote that Lao Tzu was a Chou dynasty librarian escaping a time of civil war. On a mountain pass smothered in snow, a border guard named Yin Hsi demanded that, before letting him pass to the West, Lao record his wisdom for posterity. And that this book is the result.

It took longer than expected for the old philosopher to arrive. Perhaps the oldest Western edition of Lao Tzu is “The Monadology” by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Inspired by translations sent by the first Jesuit mission to China, The Monadology informed Leibniz’s inventions of the calculus, the binary number system, and the mechanical arithmetic computer.

This work found its way to Russia by way of the curriculum of the Academy of Vienna, which Peter The Great salvaged after Newton’s accusations of plagiarism ended Leibniz’s career. After Peter this curriculum led to the famed cold war Russian facility with math. According to logician Kurt Goedel, a Russian state conspiracy kept Leibniz’s “Characteristica Universalis” secret to this day.

Still Leibniz’s binary numbers led to Babbage and Lovelace’s work on the first stored-program computer, and then to Turing and Von Neumann’s electronic computers, and on to the information revolution, the Internet, Wiki and the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

Meanwhile, in the East

Lao Tzu as glossed by Bodhidharma formed the basis of Chinese Ch’an Buddhism, better known these days by its Japanese name, Zen. Japanese efforts to solve Lao Tzu inspired the Zen study of “koans”, insoluble riddles whose frustrated contemplation yields the core Zen path to enlightenment.

In Fifteenth Century Japan, Sen No Rikyu’s invention of Japanese tea and Mu Hin Shu - meaning innovation for mutual benefit - ended the two centuries of civil war called the Sengoku period. A century later, a forged book, Namporoku, linked Zen to what evolved into the Shu Ha Ri system tea ritual. And thereby to the various systems of martial arts that have glossed Lao Tzu for their own purposes.

Tao, Zen, Teaism and martial arts as glorified by Kurosawa morphed into Randall’s Doctor Lao, Lucas’s Force, the Wachowskis’ Matrix, the unreconstructed dream space of Nolans’ Inception, and the Coens’ Dude. Plus lyrics by The Beatles and Jobs’ design philosophy at Apple … and so on. In all, “Western” culture would be unrecognizable without Lao Tzu’s little “Eastern” book.

Refactoring Agile

At this juncture we seem just a few years away from of a technological singularity where AI becomes smarter than humans. Whether or not it adequately represents Lao Tzu, this translation might be the last written for humans by a human. At least I employed no AI in it, not only because my thirty years as an agile coach of human teams yields a human perspective, but, as of this writing, AI remains incapable of fully grokking the text. I hope and expect our robot overlords will soon enough get good use from this work too as they face the same challenges in their communities we do in ours. And that we face in merging with them.

This translation corresponds painstakingly, line by line, with the Chinese as transliterated by Hatcher. The Roman numerals in each of its 66 chapters provide a key to track back to the traditional 81-chapter structure for those readers who’d like to do so.

As to how this new structure came about, it evolved as when solving an ordinary jigsaw. I outlined it by grouping key stanzas by commonalities I’d learnt working on the original GNL translation. I refactored each of those groupings into a poem of a form consonant with what sinological consensus treats as standalone chapters, then analyzed and re-ordered the result to form consistent narrative through-lines.

The 6x11 symmetry that emerged deeply surprised me. I hadn’t intended any strong symmetry to develop, but imagined there must be gaps and discontinuities a simple line by line refactoring wouldn’t be able to overcome. Whether 6x11 reflects some ancient subtext for this work, there’s no way to know, but in the last year of ironing out its wrinkles I have operated on the assumption that it did. I don’t believe doing so has compromised the correspondence of this translation with the Chinese any more than my unorthodox choices of metaphor have already.

The 6-part scheme conforms with the subtitle of this book - connect, adapt, simplify. With each of these three we get a yang section and a yin section, one more focused on practice and the other more on experience. This yin/yang is reversed in the third part only to make the book feel more accessible by leaving its most philosophically challenging content to the end.

Throughout this work I found myself repeating these editing patterns over and over:

Distinguish Duplicates

Two Chinese lines are identical or nearly identical. Therefore, look at the flow of the stanza to figure the most significant distinction the duplication could reasonably imply. As each pictograph admits many meanings, specialize or generalize these duplicate terms so the relation adds value to the whole.

Join Fragments

A short chapter doesn’t complete an idea. Therefore, look for fragments to join with it to complete it. Also try to find non-sequitur or redundant stanzas that can be broken out of a longer chapter without detracting from its meaning, that might meaningfully recombine with this one.

Refuse Doggerel

Sometimes all the dictionary meanings provide insufficient significance to make more than a Hallmark-style platitude. Therefore, examine the Chinese and English etymology of the pictograph in context to discover more specific meanings.

Undo Glosses

On review or in a new context it often seems older translation choices have taken excessive liberties or lack a clear correspondence with the Chinese. Therefore, translate from scratch, paying close attention to usage revealed in the new context.

Respect Dictionaries - Unless You Can’t

There’s a particular word that gums up the works in numerous places. As the earliest dictionaries came long after the earliest editions of Lao Tzu, dictionary definitions must be treated with skepticism. Therefore, Examine the effect of trying a novel translation of a word in all its contexts throughout the the text. If most break apart, start over.

Swap Stanzas

The bamboo editions mark no chapters or stanzas per se, just punctuation, so it was easy for historical transcribers to get their knots wrong to create accidental transpositions, not just for adjacent lines, but for whole stanzas. And the numerologists did so intentionally. So sometimes it’s clear that the beginning of a poem has been transposed with its middle or its conclusion. Therefore, if and only if you can’t find a way to make a chapter read right as it is, try swapping the order of a pair of adjacent stanzas.

Agile In, Agile Out

Translating sheng ren as agility places this translation in a very specific context. Many traditional translation choices read as high-flown orientalisms that obscure pragmatic application in an everyday context. Therefore, employ words and phrases derived from the modern agile development lexicon if and only if they still work as faithful translations of the Chinese.

On The Way

Most English editions of Lao Tzu either leave Tao untranslated or render it as “The Way”. Conventionally, any other choice may seem to be heresy. Dictionaries support it but The Way makes English translation clumsy throughout; it makes the first line of what is traditionally the first chapter - 56 here - “The Way that can be Way-ed isn’t really the Way”.

No translator could be satisfied with that. I worried this word choice like a kid tonguing a wobbly tooth until one cool autumn in 2004 beneath a golden rain tree in the donkey paddock of my teahouse in the rainforest in Limpinwood, Australia, that tooth fell out.

A golden rain tree loses all its flowers in just a few days. As I curried Josephine, my donkey, the bees bothered the blossoms and the petals floated down to mound up around us like snow drifts. It seems as close as I’ll ever get to sitting in an antique Chinese woodcut.

In a flash I saw the fallen petals Josephine trampled into mud weren’t dying but transforming to feed the next spring’s buds. As moments in a cycle connecting this tree with all the trees of our little valley.

Over deep time they fed roots and lichen carving veins of mist and wind into all the hills around us. Dig your fingers in the loam and interlace them with worms and fungi. Wake to the hum of a city as the people noisily wrap it around each other. See the night sky churning with streams of stars older and more numerous than we can count if we all take turns. See Lao Tzu wriggling its weird way through hundreds of generations of hands and eyes as a poem writing itself.

What is Tao? Not life as the lives we live, nor life as the distinction between flowers and soil, but life as a physical flowing on all scales from the tips of Josephine’s ears to the burning stars whorling across the night sky to silhouette the flowers.

Peter Merel
Tasmania, 2024

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