Why small changes work?

Although I am not sure if the Agile manifesto principle were written with anti-fragility in mind…But it does reflect the anti-fragility of small changes.

 From: The Principles of Agile Manifesto

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

 The fact that you can make only small changes in a short time is implicit.

 As shown by Nassim Taleb in his book Anti-fragile : as the size of the change/event increases the impact of that change increases non-linearly. He provides a very specific example of Société Générale sell off of shares worth $70 billion on a single day in 2008, and causing a loss of $6 billion. Had they chosen to sell $7 billion worth of shares the loss would have been minimal. Even 10 such trades by different banks would not have caused such a big loss.

The following graph shows the non-linear relationship of size of change and its negative impact.

So think about your failed sprint, which failed because of the size of the change you intended to implement. There is an inflection point at which the change will result in a catastrophic effects if it fails.

Something that product owners in Agile teams need to think about:

What is the size of change which you can easily recover from ? That should be the size of your increment

Let me know what you think...share your examples of this phenomenon.