Artful Making

Artful Making

Artful Making is a term Rob Austin coined in his book Artful Making – What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work.

Rob describes Artful Making (paraphrased) as follows:

There is an increasingly important category of work – knowledge work – that you can best manage by not enforcing a detailed, in-advance set of objectives. Often in this kind of work, time spent planning what you want to do will be better spent actually doing. In appropriate – only in appropriate conditions – you can gain more value from experience that from up-front analysis.

Managers should look to collaborative artists rather than more traditional management models if they want to create economic value in this new century.

We call this artful making. “Artful”. And it applies well to the fields of product designs, software. New things that involve groups creating, thinking, talking, and collaborating.

This book looks promising and comes highly recommended.

Stay tuned as I am keen to sharing more great metaphors from this book, and how it relates to the knowledge work of software development.

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Tags: agile, Agile Project Management, artful making, rob austin