Little’s Second Law

Little’s Law is a nice idea that tells us we want small batches of work. Smaller, always smaller.

See here for a start. This is from a John Little at Case Western Reserve, and it’s fairly old.

Unrelated: One day the following phrase came to me: “People are remarkably good at doing what they want to do.”

I call it, in fun, Little’s Second Law, and I have mentioned it before.

A friend said: You must talk about this more, but is it not obvious?

This law has two sides. On one we have: Where there is a will, there’s a way. If one really wants to do it, one will overcome any obstacle. These human values of persistence and wiliness are both Odyssean and Protean.

The other side is what I call the Ebet principle. My now wonderful sister was once 12 when I was 15. Her older brother, in his wisdom, would remind her that she (a) should clean up the den, (b) do the kitchen dishes, (c) finish her homework and (d) clean up her room. And by the age of 12, she already knew 1,500 ways to assure that anything her older brother asked her to do would not get done. Usually, I got blamed that she did not do it.

When one doesn’t want to do it, one can often make sure it fails.

As a practical matter, this has one specific meaning (among many others): The ScrumMaster must get the team to want to do Scrum.

We do well to remember these basic laws of human nature.

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