Wu Wei is hard to learn, hard to do, and hard to maintain. But it makes everything else easier. See Driving Metaphor.

Does this relate to the Extreme Way?

Somewhat. As I understand it, both are concerned with Aggressiveness, Communication, Testing and Simplicity. XP seems less concerned with diplomacy, though maybe a little with People Who Dont Need To Know. Wu Wei pages like Conquer With Compassion and Softly Softly Catchee Monkey seem to have less to do with XP.

Don't forget XP interactions with the computer. Listen to what the code is telling you. Understand it and its needs. Don't force your vision onto it; be diplomatic. Let the machine do the work. Seek the points of leverage. -- Dave Harris

Sure, and of course XP could take up activities like the ones I quote if it's applied to politics. Ah, hell, let's have a page: Extreme Politics.

But there's still contradictions in any prescriptive formulation of Wu Wei. Wu Wei is essentially the process of accepting and harmonizing with flow. Just as you can't catch water in a net, there's no set of rules, no matter how flexible, extensive, or subtle, that can capture flow. XP comes closest when it rules that, when there is consensus that a practice needs changing, the practice is changed. Wu Wei reminds us, however, that this rule has its exceptions too. --Peter Merel.

Documentation is a key area in which the Extreme Way is Wu Wei. My company is really big on documentation because documentation is "useful, valuable, important and the right thing to do". And it's very particular about the sorts of documentation that is needed.

One piece is a RACI matrix. (RACI is Responsible, Accountable, Consent, Inform.) The matrix has various columns of people and rows of tasks. At the intersection is an "X" if that person should be R or A or C or I. (No, it ain't grammatically consistent!) On the first project that used this thing, tasks included all sorts of stuff from throughout the 6-month waterfall. The X's were filled in about 4 weeks before the end of the project.

Do the math. Whatever a RACI matrix might do for you, it couldn't in this case. But we have to do something around here
to control projects and improve quality. So we did.

--Kiel Hodges

A common "translation" of Wu Wei is "not doing". When a problem arises, many people feel they have to "do something" about it and they do something that's counter-productive because there are no productive alternatives -- except doing nothing which people don't see as an alternative.

More subtly, Wu Wei is "not doing" is the sense of not "contending, competing, arguing, ranting, boasting, invading, and winning." So you might choose to do something subtle that others would discount as nothing at all.--KielHodges

To put this into a business context, Peter Drucker said that the important thing is not to "do things right" but to "do the right thing", ie. the choice of what to do is more important than how to do. I think the application of Wu Wei would say that there may be No Thing which is right to do at this juncture. [Tim Diggins]

And the Buddha said, "Don't just do something, stand there!" --Daniel Berrigan

(That's why we're called Human Be-ings [Human Being] not 'Human Do-ings')

"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." -Geddy Lee

(He sang it; Neil Peart wrote it.)

And sometimes, that is the appropriate choice!

It's important to distinguish Wu Wei from passivism. Wu Wei is not pushing, nor just standing there, but harmonizing with your partner(s) in order to dance. This distinction is too easily lost. Dig out Sun Tse for an explanation of Wu Wei in action.

As for Buddha, "Wu Wei" spots him a few years. The term itself is taoist, from Lao Tse, coming as a reaction against Kung Fu Tse's concept of Li - order - which Kiel's RACI matrix exhibits in spades. But the notion is older still. You can see plenty of it in the Bhagavad Gita, which antedates Buddha by three millenia.

Not to say Buddha was not a great fool too :-)

--Peter Merel

To be fair to Daniel Berrigan, he wasn't doing nothing when he just stood there. (The government certainly didn't think so as he was jailed for it several times.)
--Kiel Hodges

I take issue with the assertion that the Bhagavad Gita was written 3 millennia before the time of the Buddha--it is usually dated at the time of, or slightly after, the Buddha. See http://eawc.evansville.edu/essays/de.htm where it is dated 500-100 BCE. The Vedas and some of the Upanishads antedate the Buddha, but the Mahabharata (of which the Gita is a part) was mostly composed after the Buddha's death. --Ed Buffaloe

As I understand it the date is in some dispute, with religionists pushing it back and secularists pushing it forward. Victor Mair has championed the filiation of Lao Tse from the Gita; the notion is that either Lao derives directly from it, or the two share some common lost ancestor. My reading of the two makes this seem plausible, but then again I also find it plausible that Chuang Tse created the Tao Te Ching as a political strawman, or that the Tao Te Ching is really just a sex manual, or that it's a book about Go strategy. I also like the idea that the repetitive nature of the poetry suggests its origin as an oral tradition. Whatever - I truly doubt the filiation issues can be conclusively settled at this date. It remains, however, quite certain that Lao and Wu Wei antedate Buddhism. --Peter Merel

This is interesting. I never doubted that the Tao was older than Buddhism. I have read both the Gita and Tao Te Ching several times but never felt there was much common ground between them, and I always assumed that Tao Te Ching was much older. Can you give me the name of Victor Mair's book? I'd like to check it out. --Ed Buffaloe

It's the second ISBN link on the Lao Tse page.