Geschichten von der Neigung

Foreword

The Manifesto, as is the nature of manifestos, described what ought to be. The present volume concerns itself with what actually happened. The distinction, while philosophically predictable, has been educational.

Since the publication of the Manifesto in 2001, its principles have been adopted — in whole, in part, or in a manner loosely inspired by a rumour of the Manifesto’s existence — by organisations across the former Imperial territories and beyond. Some of these adoptions have been instructive. Others have been cautionary. A small number have been both, often simultaneously. The Standing Committee has collected the following accounts in the hope that they may prevent certain errors from being repeated, while acknowledging that they almost certainly will not.

The title requires brief explanation. In the Anglo-Saxon methodology from which our approach diverged, teams maintain a chart showing the downward slope of remaining work over time — what they call, with characteristic directness, a “burndown.” We found this metaphor needlessly aggressive. Work is not fuel to be consumed. It is terrain to be descended, at a reasonable pace, with appropriate footwear and periodic rest. Hence: the Slope.

— K. Wittgenstein, Vienna, March 2026

I. The Slope That Went Upward (Prague Office, 2019)

The implementation team at a municipal insurance administration in Prague was among the first outside Vienna to adopt the Viennese method formally. Their initial slope was a model of the form: forty-three items of work, descending in an orderly fashion over twelve weeks, the angle neither too steep nor too shallow — what the textbooks call a Gemütliche Neigung, or comfortable gradient.

By week four, the slope had flattened. By week six, it had begun, unmistakably, to ascend. The team lead, a methodical woman named Dvořáková, submitted a report to the Standing Committee noting that the original forty-three items had become sixty-one, not through any failure of estimation but because the client — the municipal authority itself — had adopted the Manifesto’s Principle II with an enthusiasm that could only be described as Bohemian. Requirements changed not weekly but daily, sometimes between the morning coffee and the afternoon coffee, which in Prague are separated by approximately forty-five minutes.

Dvořáková’s proposed remedy was to cease updating the chart entirely, on the grounds that measuring the slope of a line that only goes up is an exercise in demoralisation rather than administration. The Standing Committee, after deliberation, agreed. The project was delivered nine months late, functioned adequately, and the chart was framed and hung in the office kitchen as a reminder that certain metrics, once they have ceased to measure anything useful, acquire a purely decorative function.

The Prague delegation later submitted a formal amendment to Principle II, requesting the addition of the clause: “though not all at once, and ideally not on the same day.” The amendment was tabled for discussion and remains tabled.

II. The Affair of the Two Standups (Kraków Branch, 2021)

The Kraków office of a mid-sized logistics firm attempted to implement the Viennese method’s guidance on face-to-face communication (Principle VI) alongside a pre-existing Scrum practice inherited from a previous management regime. The result was that the team held two daily meetings: a fifteen-minute standup in the morning, conducted in English according to the Scrum framework, and a forty-five-minute seated conversation over coffee in the afternoon, conducted in Polish according to Viennese method principles.

Within three weeks, the morning standup had become purely ceremonial. Team members reported the same status they had discussed the previous afternoon. The Scrum Master, a contractor from Düsseldorf, grew increasingly agitated that no impediments were ever raised, not realising that all impediments had been resolved over coffee the day before, usually by the simple mechanism of the relevant parties agreeing to ignore whatever process was causing the impediment.

The situation came to a head when the Scrum Master proposed eliminating the afternoon coffee session as “redundant.” The team responded by eliminating the morning standup. The Scrum Master filed a formal objection, which was discussed at the afternoon coffee session in his absence, and resolved.

The Kraków office subsequently reported a thirty percent improvement in delivery throughput, though they acknowledged this figure was approximate, as they had also stopped maintaining the velocity chart during the same period and were estimating retrospectively.

III. On the Question of Titles (Vienna Headquarters, 2020–2023)

Principle V of the Manifesto states that individuals should be provided with “a title commensurate with their dignity.” This guidance, intended as a gentle corrective to the Silicon Valley habit of calling everyone an “engineer” regardless of function, produced unexpected consequences when adopted by the Austrian civil service’s digital transformation office.

The office began with four roles: Developer, Analyst, Architect, and Manager. Within six months, the titling committee — itself an innovation — had expanded this to seventeen, including Senior Developer, Lead Developer, Principal Developer, Distinguished Developer, Developer Emeritus, and Consulting Developer (External), each with a precisely defined salary band, reporting line, and set of responsibilities that differed from its neighbours by distinctions visible only to the titling committee itself.

The Architect track proved particularly generative. By 2022, the office employed Solution Architects, Enterprise Architects, Domain Architects, Integration Architects, and one Cloud Architect who, by his own admission, had not written a line of code since 2014 but whose title had accrued sufficient institutional mass that removing it would have required a reorganisation nobody wished to undertake.

A visiting consultant from Zurich observed that the office had more architectural titles than actual systems to architect. This observation was received politely and filed under “External Perspectives (Helvetic),” a folder that the office maintained for comments from Swiss colleagues, whose directness was respected in principle and disregarded in practice.

The titling structure was eventually simplified in 2023, reducing the seventeen roles to nine, a process that took longer than the original expansion and required the formation of a second committee to review the work of the first.

IV. The Galician Interpretation (Lviv, 2022)

The Lviv software cooperative “Halytska Systema” adopted the Viennese method in early 2022 under circumstances that made its emphasis on graceful adaptation (Principle IV) less a philosophical preference than an operational necessity. The cooperative’s initial project plan, drawn up in January, had been rendered obsolete by March by events entirely outside the scope of project management methodology.

What the Lviv team contributed to Viennese method practice was a radical expansion of the concept of Fortwursteln — the art of muddling through with dignity. Where the Manifesto had envisioned this as a response to shifting requirements or unclear specifications, Halytska Systema applied it to conditions the Viennese framers had not contemplated: intermittent electricity, team members occasionally unavailable for reasons unrelated to annual leave, and a client whose own priorities were restructuring on a timeline measured in days rather than sprints.

Their slope, when they bothered to chart it, resembled less a gradient than a seismograph. They delivered working software nonetheless. Their retrospectives, conducted whenever circumstances permitted, were notably brief: “We are still here. The software works. Next item.”

The Standing Committee received their field report with the observation that the Galician interpretation, while departing significantly from the method’s assumed operating conditions, was arguably the purest expression of its underlying philosophy. Sektionschef Roth, who had by this time relocated to Vienna, noted in the margins: “This is what we meant. We simply did not know it yet.”

V. The Retrospective That Lasted Three Days (Salzburg, 2023)

Principle XII calls for honest reflection conducted with gentle irony rather than Prussian bluntness. The Salzburg office of a pan-European insurance group took this instruction to heart in a manner that exceeded all expectations, including their own.

The quarterly retrospective began on a Tuesday morning with the customary review of what had gone well, what could be improved, and what should be done differently. The facilitator, a junior project manager named Gruber who had attended a Viennese method certification workshop the previous month, introduced a format he called “The Three Coffeehouses,” in which the team would rotate between three discussion areas, each themed around a different Manifesto value.

The first coffeehouse — Civilised Conversation — produced forty-five minutes of productive discussion. The second — Working Arrangements — produced two hours of increasingly philosophical debate about what “functioning” meant in the context of a system that technically met all acceptance criteria but that no one liked using. The third — Graceful Adaptation — devolved, by Wednesday afternoon, into a wide-ranging examination of whether the team’s difficulties were methodological, organisational, or existential.

By Thursday morning, the retrospective had attracted participants from two neighbouring teams who had wandered in, drawn by the smell of coffee and the sound of someone reading aloud from the Manifesto’s minority opinion. The discussion had by this point moved beyond any actionable scope and into what one participant later described as “a kind of group therapy, but with better pastry.”

The retrospective produced no action items. It did produce a shared understanding that the team’s problems were fundamentally structural and would not be resolved by any number of process adjustments, a conclusion that, while not useful in the conventional sense, was at least honest. Gruber’s manager suggested that future retrospectives be timeboxed. Gruber replied that timeboxing was, per Principle III, an ideological commitment to an arbitrary number of hours, and that time was a convention. He was not invited to facilitate the next retrospective.

VI. The Client Who Read the Manifesto (Budapest, 2024)

Most implementations of the Viennese method proceed on the assumption that the client has not read the Manifesto and has only a general understanding of its principles, usually summarised by a consultant as “like Agile, but more relaxed.” The Budapest engagement of a Viennese consultancy was notable as one of the few recorded cases in which the client had not only read the Manifesto but had memorised substantial portions of it, including the minority opinion.

The client — a deputy director at the Hungarian State Railway’s digital division — opened the project kickoff by quoting Principle I’s observation that perfection is an aspiration for cathedral builders and the deceased, and suggested that, in the spirit of the Manifesto, the team should not trouble itself with detailed requirements. “We will know what we want when we see it,” he said. “This is the essence of graceful adaptation.”

The project team, who had been relying on the usual dynamic in which they would gently educate the client about iterative delivery, found themselves in the unfamiliar position of having the methodology used against them. When the team requested sign-off on a specification, the client quoted Principle IV about negotiation over contractual enforcement. When they proposed a fixed timeline, he invoked the section on plans being lovely things that reality has never consulted. When they raised concerns about scope, he read aloud from Dr. Hasek’s minority opinion — “it will take longer than you think, cost more than you budgeted, and the result will be different from what anyone intended” — and asked whether the team was disagreeing with its own Manifesto.

The project was eventually delivered under a structure the team described in their report as “negotiated ambiguity,” in which neither scope, timeline, nor budget was formally agreed upon but all three were continuously discussed, adjusted, and renegotiated over a series of dinners that the client insisted on hosting. The final system worked adequately. The invoicing took longer to resolve than the implementation.

The Standing Committee added a note to its implementation guidelines: “The Manifesto should be shared with clients selectively and with appropriate context, as one might share a bottle of pálinka — in moderation, among friends, and never on an empty stomach.”

Afterword (Dr. J. Hasek, Prague)

I have read the above accounts. They confirm what I wrote in 2001: that all organisational methods converge on the same mediocrity, that it will take longer than expected, and that the result will differ from the intention. The only surprise is that anyone continues to be surprised by this. The stories are, however, well-told, and the one about Budapest is genuinely funny, though I suspect the humour was unintentional on the part of all involved.

Supplementary Note (Sektionschef Roth, Vienna, formerly Lemberg)

The Galician account (Section IV) is accurate in its essentials, though I would note that the phrase “departed significantly from the method’s assumed operating conditions” understates matters considerably. I would also note, for the record, that my relocation to Vienna was itself an exercise in Fortwursteln, and that the Standing Committee’s observation about the Galician interpretation being “the purest expression of the underlying philosophy” was my own contribution, written in the third person for reasons of institutional propriety.