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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Foreword

by Kent Beck

This is a dangerous little book.

I first met Pete when I was writing about a software development method I called Extreme Programming. The name was a problem - fearful managers would never sign off on it. But when we started calling it Agile, it sold like hotcakes.

The trouble is, anyone can call anything Agile. The adjective is all people want. So, in recent years, Beth and I have been writing about the Forest and the Desert.

Forests have plentiful resources but hidden dangers. You have time to help your colleagues, and they to help you. If you stray off the path, though, thorns and worse await. From the Desert it’s hard to believe in the Forest. It sounds like a made up story. But from the Forest the assumptions of the Desert sound equally absurd.

Both do valuable work, both are self-reinforcing, but the Forest empowers creative community across the organization in a way that seems like ludicrous luxury in the Desert.

So … what makes the difference and how can you change the one into the other? That’s what this book is about. Here’s my biggest lesson from reading it – to embrace change is the human condition. Anything less is bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy may seem everywhere on the rise, even inescapable as wealth and power tighten their grip. But that’s an illusion. Wealth and power can only control systems, and all systems are subject to change.

This book is a how-to guide for changing a bureaucratic system into a creative community. Doing so is extreme in the sense I originally meant. The most extreme programming develops the software of human civilization. That’s what makes this book dangerous. And so beautiful to read, it made me cry.

Kent Beck,
February 2025

Introduction

The oldest, deepest, and shortest book on agility in existence, the agile way is a guide to creative community for individuals and organizations experiencing 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 in which 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. And then 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 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 concerning its journey at the hands of the current author and its line by line correspondence with 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 becomes agile person, agile people, or just “agility”.

1. The River (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 the 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 full 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 water floats all boats
Agility benefits the community.

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 our own.
Embracing change, we lead change
Like a ship 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 may be all there is to it.

Yet there are three qualities
The agile manifest and cultivate:
Connection, adaptation, and simplicity.

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

Strength without an open hand,
Flexibility without a coiled spine,
Ease without a quiet heart,
Spell the end of agility.

6. Open Hand (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)

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

So the agile continuously adapt their forms
To the flow of forms:
Yielding to straighten,
Emptying to fill,
Testing to learn,
Melding to fit,
Venturing to gain.

8. Quiet Heart (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 imbalance and distrust.
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. Discretion (lxxxi/lvi)

Words are often untrue;
Truth is often unspoken.
Promises are hard to honor;
Honor is slow to promise.
Answers seldom enlighten;
Enlightenment seldom answers.

The agile don’t offer words
When words won’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 keep the virtue within honor.

10. Integrity (xxix/xxii)

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

Some will lead where others follow;
Some own what others owe;
Some win what others lose;
Some make rules others obey.
Agility only controls the motivation
To compete, hoard, and exploit.

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.

11. Without Competing (xxxiii)

Where soldiers defend hierarchy
The agile defend harmony.
Where philosophers increase knowledge
The agile increase awareness.
Where princes control their empires
The agile control their 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 each have utility but, alone, per Kafka, “the revolution evaporates leaving behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy”. Agile organizations emerge by xiang: connecting people through 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 inequity to tighten your grip,
That’s like aiming your bow at the sun.

13. Interdependence (xii/iii)

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

Agility distributes management and ownership
Until those who provide them can’t exploit them.
It controls politics by not centralizing decisions;
Responsibility by not delegating to managers;
Accountability 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,
Waste and corruption might disappear.

Such idealism treats symptoms
Where practical solutions treat causes:
Sharing resources and rewarding outcomes;
Measuring throughput and prioritizing 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 their subjects
As priests on their believers,
Each claiming to be wiser,
Nobler, and closer to heaven,
To keep people in their power.

18. Systems (xxxix/xxxii)

If a prince was truly ordained by heaven,
All natural systems would be subject to his commands;
Sweet rains would fall
To effortlessly quench his every thirst.

As nature has no one true form,
No system can truly control it;
Power can only control systems
And all systems are subject to change.

So agile leaders only use their power
To empower people to trade and share
Like streams flowing into a river,
And rivers into the sea.

19. 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.

20. 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.
As each solution creates new problems,
Root out hidden causes and thoughtless habits
At the bottleneck.

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

21. Nurture And Nature (liv)

Trust begins 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,
Connect nurture to nature.

22. Ecosystem (li)

As nature quickens each form
Harmony nourishes it and adapts it to others,
So that each supplies each other:
Nurturing, parenting, teaching,
Engaging, maturing, decaying and consuming each other.

Just as living forms propagate and supply each other nourishment,
Not by command, but by nature,
Harmonious cultures share without centralizing,
Serve without obeying,
And learn without believing.

Leadership

Agile leaders (zhu) may or may not carry authority, but take responsibility for the whole community and operate on the rules of the games - technologies, accounting methods, reward models, feedback loops, and learning flows - to empower without controlling.

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 lead his ship like a jade figurehead
But steadies her like a stone keel.

24. Command And Control (lvii)

Where leadership brings autonomy into alignment
People innovate and collaborate;
Where it commands and controls,
People submit and compete.

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

Agile leaders align autonomous groups
By making no laws but to secure mutual trust,
No taxes but to encourage mutual 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 supply each other leadership.
With no reason to fear leaders,
They trust and support them.

So the agile lead without enforcing commands,
Manage without imposing 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,
And supplying 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 agile leaders achieve their purpose,
Their people claim it as their own.

27. Adapting 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;
So great carpenters leave no wood uncarved.

28. Weakness Adapts (xl/xli)

Nature works to adapt
As mind works to represent;
Forests are adaptations of seeds
And 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 together, distrust is displaced
And community takes its place.

As community connects people, it grows:
Rooting deeply, suiting 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 seem 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, building 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 profit 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 control impoverishes.

The agile say enough when they have 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 earlier.

XP Explained was the first book about agile software development, but not the first agile book. Three years before publishing XP Explained, Beck shared drafts of it on Ward’s Wiki, a hive of software radicals sharing development patterns in the mid 1990s. I was one, contributing content with quotes from my 1993 “GNL” translation of Lao Tzu. Agile manifesto author Alistair Cockburn liked that translation so well that he hosted it on his website back then. And I spoke on “The Tao of Extreme Programming” at the first agile conference, XP2K, nine months before Extreme folded into Agile at Snowbird.

I thought then that the relationship between agilism and taoism was history repeating - with Agile’s refutation of bureaucratic management mirroring Lao Tzu’s refutation of Confucian orthodoxy. I wrote about it that way in the third XP book. It was another decade before I realized Lao Tzu was literally writing about agility, and the relationship of the one with the other is an identity. Because, to get that, I 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 over the centuries while, visibly, priesthoods rearranged the order of the text to suit the magical numbers they held sacred …

Eventually Lao Tzu became known as “the book of riddles” in China because no one can say what it originally meant, nor separate that meaning from those it acquired over time. So translations by modern scholars wildly disagree with each other - and with this one. The challenge of solving the old 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 on the ANU’s then new taoism-studies-l mailing list. My open-content “GNL” translation - a play of words on Stallman’s GNU project - aimed to cut the Gordian knot by translating from English to English. Distilling the most popular English translations into one simple draft an amateur like me could grasp but none of those expert sinologists could refute.

The professors were sensibly skeptical about this, but entertained enough to take the time to school me as I tried to make the approach 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 the GNL as their official English translation of Lao Tzu. Of course the open content license may have had something to do with it too …

Then the going got weird.

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

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

“This 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 was coffee instead of vinegar, but the movie’s sentiment is the same. So I should have seen what was coming when a Californian uber-fan of the film named Oliver Benjamin reached out in 2004 to ask if he could re-use the GNL as the bible of his “Church of he Latter Day Dude” under the title “Dude De Ching”.

I told Oliver about the open content license and he agreed to give the book away free. Which, to his credit, he did … while selling a half million “Dudeist Priest” certificates each authorizing its bearer to perform weddings and funerals. Self-styled High Dudely Lama Oliver retired on the proceeds to live like a king in Chiang Mai.

I dig the Dude’s story and admire the Lama, but I had to ask myself whether this was really the outcome I’d had in mind for this book. I’m down for bowling, bathrobes and White Russians, but was that all this was supposed to be about?

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

The Coens and the Lama weren’t wrong; the Sage the GNL talked about, same as almost all the other English translations of Lao Tzu, sounds one hundred percent like the Dude. 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 wouod have to go back to the Chinese and translate it from scratch.

The Chinaman is not the issue here.

My expertise is in building systems, coaching teams, and helping organizations accelerate throughput, workflow, and learning-flow. What could I bring to a translation from Chinese that generations of sinologists and native speakers had not? Translating English to English was in my wheelhouse. Chinese was not. Or at least it wasn’t until two new translations completely changed what I thought I was doing.

The first was from Sanskrit scholar Prof. Victor Mair. Mair is best known for his archaeology of the cryptid mummies of China’s Tarim basin. Red-haired caucasian giants wearing tartan and witches’ hats and riding the first domesticated horses into China from the West about 2000 BCE …

In 1990 Prof. Mair published an English translation of the oldest editions of Lao Tzu then known - a pair of silk scrolls that had been unearthed at a place called Ma Wang Dui. I liked Mair’s translation just fine, but what stood my hair on end was his discovery of deep philological connections between these editions of Lao Tzu and the Bhagavad Gita. That’s the root text of Indian Yoga. Reviewing those systematically, Mair concluded that either one of these books is a bad translation of the other, or both come from some lost, probably pre-literate, earlier tradition.

Just as Mair’s revelations were published, a still older bamboo-carved edition of Lao Tzu was discovered at another Chinese archaeology site, Guo Dian. Pre-dating the invention of paper and silk, this one lacked half the length of the Ma Wang Dui scrolls. Assuming the Guo Dian was not cherry-picked by some lazy grave robbers, where did the other half of he book come form? Maybe the Tao rode into China with Mair’s giant witches. Maybe it began as a commentary on the Gita mixed up with a few folk songs. Maybe the whole mess has been back-translated a couple more times we don’t know about.

In any case, it was clear to me I’d been barking up a tree that isn’t there. I thought I was leveraging the insights of experts in ancient Chinese to reveal the intents of an ancient Chinese author. I was worried my work, much less the Dudely Lama’s Lebowskified gloss of it, would obscure its original meaning. If this text wasn’t originally Chinese, however, or if it didn’t originate with just one author, it seemed I hadn’t taken too many liberties with it. I’d taken too few.

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

The wrong headedness of this process suddenly gobsmacked me. Robert Henricks in his 1982 “On the Chapter Divisions in the Lao-Tzu” found that, among hundreds of editions of the book, only a handful dared rearrange it into a consistent whole.

Still the Chinese is all we have and, still, learning Chinese, much less deciphering its untracked etymology, was biting off more than I could hope to chew before I dropped dead of a reasonably old age. Any such effort would be foolish and I was still stuck with what I had.

At least until 2009 when Bradford Hatcher came to my aid with the first ever complete English transliteration of the Tao, Laozi Word by Word. Hatcher had made his own translation on top of this work, but the great benefit was that his appendices listed all plausible English meaning of every Chinese pictogram in the Lao Tzu. With cross-references covering all variations across all the ancient Chinese editions including both Ma Wang Dui and Guo Dian.

With Hatcher’s work as a base, I was back in the business of translating English into English but still keeping this work directly connected to the historical evidence. So it was in studying Hatcher’s transliteration that I found out I wasn’t in fact the most unlikely person to translate the book, but uniquely qualified to do so.

In Hatcher I finally noticed that the Sage - the Coens’ Dude - is Chinese sheng ren. Ren meaning person or people or polity, and sheng perceptive, intuitive, or, per the rhyme of the second chapter of the Chinese, harmonious and lively. Perceptive, intuitive, harmonious, lively … Lao Tzu was literally writing about agility. And, of all its translators, I’m pretty certain I’m the only one with three decades field experience working as an agile coach.

Rendering sheng ren as Sage, some enlightened hermit, takes away the book’s application to everyday humans. If it isn’t about a long-haired mystic, but advice for ordinary people, it becomes a simple way to help us all work together when push comes to shove.

How Lao Tzu rode to the West - and what he found there

As with most religious figures, most likely there was no historical person named Lao Tzu. The name means only “old philosopher” or “old philosophy”.

Still there are many stories about the man. In 500 BCE, Han dynasty Grand Historian Ssu-Ma Chi’en wrote of Lao Tzu as a Chou dynasty librarian escaping civil war. On a mountain pass smothered in snow, border guard Yin Hsi demands that he record his learning for posterity before traveling to the West.

It took a while for him to turn up there. The oldest Western edition of Lao Tzu is The Monadology of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Inspired by translations sent by a Jesuit mission to China, it informed all Leibniz’s inventions from the calculus to the binary number system and the first mechanical arithmetic computer.

Leibniz’s work made its way to Russia in the curriculum of the Academy of Vienna, which Peter The Great salvaged after Newton’s baseless accusations of plagiarism ended Leibniz’s credibility. That curriculum led to the famed cold-war Russian facility with math, and, according to logician Kurt Goedel, a Russian conspiracy keeps Leibniz’s “Characteristica Universalis” a state secret to this day.

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

Meanwhile, in the East …

Lao Tzu as glossed by Bodhidharma became the basis of Ch’an Buddhism, better known today by its Japanese name, Zen. Japanese efforts to translate the scrambled Lao Tzu inspired the study of koans, insoluble riddles whose frustrated contemplation yields the Zen path to enlightenment.

In the fifteenth Century, Sen No Rikyu’s invention of the Japanese Teahouse and Mu Hin Shu - “no host, no guest” - had the effect of ending two centuries of civil war and ushering in the Tokugawa shogunate. A century later, a forged book, Namporoku inextricably linked Zen to Tea and led to Shu Ha Ri, a certification system that spread through the martial arts and eventually the agile software development method too.

Taoism, Zenism, Teaism and martial systems rendered through the lens of Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa made their way to the West again in Randall’s Doctor Lao, Lucas’s Force, the Wachowskis’ Matrix, the dream space of Nolans’ Inception, and the Coens’ Dude. And in Beatles lyrics and Jobs’ design philosophy at Apple … and on and on. Lao Tzue arrived in the end.

From English To English

We appear on the verge of a technological singularity in which silicon becomes smarter than carbon and the rate of progress accelerates beyond human comprehension. This book might even be the last translation of the Tao written by a human for humans. At least I employed no AI in writing it and AI seems today still incapable of fully grokking it. Though I hope our robot overlords also get good use from it as they come to face the same challenges in their communities we have in ours. And that we face in merging with them …

To be clear, although it employs agile terminology and the order of the text is different, this translation maps line for line onto the Chinese as per Hatcher, the roman numerals in each of the chapters here provide a key to compare it with the traditional 81-chapter structure.

As to how this new structure came about, it evolved just as if solving any ordinary jigsaw. Only much slower because the constraints are so much looser and the dimensionality so much higher.

I began by grouping key stanzas by the commonalities I’d learnt working with the GNL version. I then refactored each grouping into a poem with a form consonant with chapters that seem to stand alone. Then I analyzed and re-ordered the result into consistent narrative through-lines, refactoring these over and over until I could see no way to improve them.

The 6x11 symmetry that results has deeply surprised me. I imagined there must be gaps and discontinuities that line by line refactoring wouldn’t overcome. Whether 6x11 reflects the original form of this work, there’s no way to know, but ironing out the wrinkles I operated on the assumption that it does so. I don’t believe this compromised the correspondence with the Chinese, nor that my unorthodox choices of metaphor have done so.

The 6-part scheme conforms with the subtitle of this book - connect, adapt, simplify. With each of these three we have 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 to make the book more accessible in leaving the most philosophically challenging content to its end. And the chapter titles are mine - the Chinese has no chapter titles, nor even chapter markers, and only rudimentary punctuation.

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 find the most significant distinction the duplication could reasonably suggest. As each pictograph admits many meanings, specialize or generalize these duplicate terms so the relation between them contributes 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, which 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 elicit more specific meanings.

Undo Glosses

On review or in a new context it seems older translation choices have taken excessive liberties or lack a clear correspondence with the Chinese. Therefore, Retranslate from scratch, paying close attention to usage revealed by 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, the idea that dictionary definitions exhaust translation possibilities shouldn’t be taken to extremes. Therefore, Examine the effect of trying a novel translation of a word in all its contexts throughout the the text. If the majority of them break apart, start over.

Swap Stanzas

The bamboo editions of the book mark no chapters or stanzas per se, just occasional punctuation, so it was not unlikely historical transcribers got their knots wrong and created accidental transpositions. Not just for adjacent lines, but whole stanzas. And the numerologists did the same 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 flowery orientalism that obscures pragmatic application to an everyday context. Therefore, don’t be afraid to employ words and phrases derived from the modern agile development lexicon if and only if they work as faithful translations of the Chinese.

On The Way

Most English editions of Lao Tzu either leave the word Tao untranslated or render it as The Way. This choice has become so orthodox that any other may seem a kind of heresy. Unfortunately, The Way makes English translations clumsy throughout; it makes the first line of what is traditionally the first chapter - 56 here - hyperliterally, “The Way that can be Way-ed isn’t really the Way”. No translator can be satisfied with that.

I worried this word 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, the tooth fell out.

A golden rain tree loses all its flowers in just a few days. As I curried Josephine, the donkey, our bees bothered the blossoms and the petals floated down around us like snowflakes. It seemed as close as I would 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 into soil to feed next spring’s buds. Moments in a cycle connecting this tree with all the trees in the valley. Over deep time the loam fed roots and lichen, carving veins of mist and wind into the hills around us.

Dig your fingers in the soil and interlace them with worms and fungi. Wake to the hum of a city as its people build it around themselves. See stars older and more numerous than you can count whorling across the night. Watch Lao Tzu wriggling its way through a hundred generations of hands and eyes as a poem writing itself.

What is Tao? Not life as the life you live, nor the distinction between petals and dirt, but a physical flowing on all scales from the whispy tips of Josephine’s ears to streams of stars burning through the darkness to silhouette the flowers.

Peter Merel
Tasmania, 2025

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