@moo, you have a very interesting insight by the name of your topic. I’ve taught Agile classes and I can see where some memory projects are like that. It concerned me.
I started on a quest to memorize Bible passages. Jumping in and following the advice of others left me with little success. The project changed scope and I encountered much difficulty. Then I created a great complete all-in-one universal system. That too failed, just like having too much paperwork because it was bloated and hard to keep in mind.
So, in an Agile fashion, I started building up my memory system iteratively with lots of feedback of tests for several sessions of scriptures at a time. I learned and the system built up organically from the ground up. The top-down type of systems take a while to organize and apply to a book when it may not be the best type of system. But I listened “to the customer” and the text gave me the requirements. I managed them in short sprints and that has let me understand many more aspects of good mnemonics.
But just like Agile, you need some basic principles to follow and not so much of a plan. One of the Agile values in the manifesto reads “Working software over comprehensive documentation” and seems to be your goal which in other words would be to have “memorized stuff over lots of loci.”
I think I’ll chew on this for awhile. But I’ve found much benefit from doing the bottom-up approach of iterative system development as opposed to the top-down approach of applying a large mnemonic methodology.
If you want to review my thinking from a few months ago you can read my post on my System 7711. I’m still learning so if you’d like to offer a text to work on, maybe we could come up with some Agile mnemonic principles!