Hey, everybody. Kumar Dattatreyan here with Agile Meridian joined by Glenn Marshall and we are here to continue our discussion on the permaculture principles and their similarity to, and actually their inspiration, the inspiration that they had on the XSCALE ecosystem principles. And I believe we're up to principles 9 and 10 in this episode. Is that right, Glenn? That is correct. Right. And so we will start with principle 9, and we'll start with permaculture principle 9, and what that says is use small and slow solutions.
And so maybe a brief, what does that mean to you from a permaculture standpoint, Glenn? It brings to mind, small scale farming as opposed to massive industrial-scale farming and how a series of small farms will have a lot of diversity and a lot of difference and variation, whereas, large industrial farms, of course, are monoculture, hundreds of thousands of acres of a single crop, 100 of 1000 of of cows, for example, that sort of thing. And, you know, we do know from agriculture that there are serious consequences for that.
You need a ton of fertilizer, for example. and they're, you know, very specialized. And and kind of for fragile. If you only have cows, for example, and this doesn't happen with cows so much, but chickens, you know, bird flu will decimate you if you only have one specialty, for example.
It's interesting because, you know, obviously, we have a huge population on Earth to feed. and so permaculture argues for small farms and small scale and slow over fast. And, and I just wonder how realistic it is, you know, feeding the what is it? Seven or eight billion. I don't even know how many humans there are on the planet anymore. It seems to keep growing every year.
I have that concern as well. I do wonder about the cost per unit of output as well. But when you start to go down that path, if you're serious about optimizing food for the entire planet, you'll recognize that meat is a dreadfully inefficient way of using agricultural land. and to your to your first point about population, It is growing, but, it's gonna start dropping very, very fast, very, very soon. China's population has peaked, for example, which is pretty shocking. but, of course, they had the one-child policy. but all all major developed countries are experiencing declining populations. And the only way that some countries are increasing is through immigration. Right.
Well, it seems to me that the small and slow is a more sustainable model. obviously, everything about permaculture is about more sustainable sustainability and more, more effective use of resources, and more effective use of agricultural planting techniques, not planting things that require a lot of water and resources or if when you do and if you do planting complementary crops that will preserve the soil and preserve the, preserve the balance in the soil. Right? So you don't need to put a lot of fertilizers and things like that in. But this also requires from a permaculture perspective, a lot of planning, a lot of thinking, a lot of coordination and alignment between nations inside of nations and between nations to to make this work. And so, again, that's beyond the scope of what we're talking about. But, I wonder if there's a future in which we can actually put these practices to to play and see how they can help the planet be more sustainable and, you know, still have enough food to feed the population?
Well, you bring up a good point. I think all of the principles applied across the board to all farms are not going to work. However, soil depletion is a thing, and it's and it's serious, and it's a problem. And, industrial farming has historically not paid much attention to that, and the soil is not in good shape. This can be easily dealt with through agricultural principles through something as simple as crop rotation. There are large crops that you could have. You just rotate them. So it's not hard to do some of these things. another phenomenon is no-till agriculture where you don't plow. That has a lot of nasty downsides and large farms are not doing that. The whole organic movement as well. So Yeah. So, some things are definitely applicable.
And there's a statistic that the world will run out of topsoil in 60 years. There you go. 60 years. It's not within my lifetime unless I live to be 120, but it's within my kids' lifetime 60 years. Right? And what does that mean for the food supply? Are we depleting ourselves out of, a way to feed the population? You know?
And so the parallels, of course, to the organization, the organizational culture, the companies that we coach in principle 9 of the ecosystem thinking principles, it says take time to simplify and automate systems Simple automated solutions cost less than big manual ones, taking less work to maintain business advantages. So help me draw some parallels between permaculture and principle.
Use small and slow solutions to the ecosystem thinking principle of taking time to simplify and automate; simple is better than complex. I don't think the tie in is as quite as strong as it's been on some of the other principals, but there are some connections there. who would disagree with automation, particularly if you're talking about information technology. clearly, that's better, less fewer errors, and so on and so forth. but let me give another example. look what happened with COVID big, highly optimized supply chains, but also a single point of failure. They were super big, and they had a single point of failure.
And now there's been a major movement away from massive, widely dispersed supply chains. To some more local ones and definitely some more diverse ones where there are multiple options in case you run into a problem with a country halfway around the world. So I think that's a good example of being too big and too complicated. And when you get really big, you have to add all kinds of things on top of the bigness to keep the bigness working.
So there is a thing about economy of scale. I get it. nobody's going to make a chip manufacturing plant in their backyard. But but definitely, there are times when we have gotten carried away from it, with it, rather. And, really, what you want, is a phrase from agile, the simplest thing that would possibly work at notions like minimum viable product. Just get something out there, find out what the need is, make it simple, and get it out there, rather than over-engineering it and making a needlessly large product or a factory or whatever it is.
Yeah. And another way to maybe think about the relationship, you know, between these permaculture and the ecosystem thinking principles is, you know, permaculture is obviously small and slow, small farms, sustainable farming methods, rotation of crops, preserving of topsoil, elimination or severe reduction in pesticide and fertilizer use all those things. Right? And the analogy might be, you know, you have a company with 200-person teams working on these huge projects that require lots of resources, lots of people, the 200 people that are working on the project, of course, plus all the people that support them, all the business analysts and so on and so forth. That's big, and they may only release once every 18 months. And so you've got these big releases with lots of bugs and lots of errors in the code and so on and so forth where the opposite, the, the simply the simple version of that would be small, empowered teams that are using automated systems to develop test and deploy their code, automated systems that integrate that code with other teams and the work that they're doing. those are much more efficient. The errors are much more easily and readily found and fixed. Maybe that's a better way to think about the relationship between these two.
I think it is, and that gets into the whole open-source movement. in various sectors of the software industry, commercial software simply doesn't exist. Linux, of course, is is is pretty much running the data center these days. you know, that's free software. Now, of course, you can get warranties with it, and so on and so forth.
The example I often use is UNIX, which was invented by 2 very bright guys, I admit, in a lab, but just two guys. That was it. Yeah. They made an operating system and that, of course, exists in in Linux today. and UNIX variance is the source of all major computing environments today except for Windows, although it was influenced as well. But, the Mac, the iPhone, the Android, they're they're all running this as well as in the data center.
so Tesla, these small units, in fact, are resilient. They're fault tolerant, but they can scale through replication. So it's it's just that it's not a monolith, I think, which is the point here. Yeah. That's that's great.
Alright. Let's move to principle 10. So, on the ecosystem, sorry, on the permaculture side, it states use and value diversity. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. do you wanna take a stab, at describing what that means? I mean, beyond the words that I just said.
There's an there's an angle there that I'd like to drill in on it, and it was at all scales in all ways. So it's not just diversity, for example, with with with the crops. But it's diversity as you scale up, as you have networks of other things working together. diversity in culture, diversity in diversity in everything in every way at every level. And it was a powerful concept. And, really, that's kind of the way the world works. there's diversity everywhere. of course, companies, for example, chip manufacturing companies, have to scale. But there's risk there when you only have a single when the economy of scale forces you to have a very small lack of diversity, frankly. So, it's it's a powerful notion. And I think this one applies more strongly than principle 9.
Yeah. I agree. So diversity and permaculture, to your point, you mentioned it right. It's not just about the crops you planted and so on and so forth. But it's really you if you take a step back and look at the ecosystem that is the earth. I mean, there's incredible diversity in spite of what humans have been doing to it over the last few 100 years. But it's still incredibly diverse. we're making it less so. Right? There are zones where, especially in the ocean, it is devoid of life, right, because of the things that we've done. But another topic, I don't want to go down that path, but in terms of the analogy to organizational culture and the principle, there is use and value experimentation, experiment to reduce risk, adapt each product to the changing constraints of your business streams and markets. So, where do you see diversity and this idea of experimentation? Where's the synergy there?
I like to make a slightly different point for me before I answer that. diversity is a sign of health. you may need to be big, for example, at the chip plant, but that's not really healthy, and there's risk and exposure there. So we really want to go and have as much diversity as we can. And in terms of experimentation, that's a great way to get diversity. You have a product. You are trying to go and come up with some new features. You're not sure how you're going to do that, or you want to try a couple of experiments. Perfect. That's a way to introduce diversity.
It's also a way to introduce innovative thinking. The critical point in terms of experimentation for me is as long as you show up, you put a good faith effort into it, and you follow some basic practices around an experiment There's no such thing as failure. Failure is just actually not failure. It's just data. We tried that. It didn't work. Don't do that anymore. That is actually very valuable. And having that culture and that mindset that, you know, it just data is is very, very powerful. And all kinds of wonderful things come from teams that are not teams and organizations that are not afraid to experiment, including diversity.
Yeah. I like that. You know, in terms of scale, permaculture, of course, is much broader, right, and focuses on diversity across whole systems. species, social and ecological realms, genetic variants, and so on and so forth. Ecosystem really is about helping organizations think of the specific products and services that they provide the markets and adapting to those markets, making use of maybe new niches within the marketplace and creating products and services to serve those niches. Again, to your point, through experimentation. And so that's where I see an alignment between these two.
But also, within the organization itself, treat the organization as an ecosystem. finances there to service, financially with the various parts of the organization, legal, and so on. And we want to, and we wanna integrate them more tightly rather than have them explode like as often the case. Right. Yeah. That speaks to the mindset, right? Within the mindset, it needs to change that these aren't siloed departments within an organization. They need to think about how to integrate their work with other departments and divisions in the company, rapid prototype experiments, learn from failure, and so on. Yeah. They're they're they're valuable parts of the organization, and they can best deliver their value by connecting in an ecosystem-like fashion.
Right. Alright. Awesome. I think, anything else, anything we missed about either of these 2, I don't think so. these are these are relatively straightforward. there, there is one thing that made me gloss over, and that resilience and adapting quality through experimentation and diversity makes you resilient and, of course, healthy. So, there are multiple benefits to experimentation. The world is always changing. If you're not experimenting and moving with it, you're falling behind.
That's a good point. Alright. Well, we are almost at the end of our permaculture principles. We've got two more to go, eleven and twelve, And then we will decide where to go after that in terms of educating you all on XSCALE. So thank you for watching. We will see you in about a month. Appreciate you joining us this evening.
