Every so often I get myself to a place where I start accepting Agile as a sensible, sound way of doing things, as an effective industry-specific implementation/reinvention of a number of Lean principles, reaching towards one piece flow and pull systems, and coming up with stunning pragmatic countermeasures to the problems that this raises.
And then, almost regularly as clockwork, the Agile movement disappoints me with this kind of thing. Like most simplistic rhetoric, it shows itself up as childish and, worse, failing in its objective through pushing away the very people it seeks to help.
What’s going through my mind as I read that is the contrasting approach of Lean thinking:
The words of Toyota Chairman Fujio Cho, “Go see, ask why, show respect” are now famous as basic lean principles.
No-one taking this seriously would publish anything describing an organisation as “Half-Arsed” even if privately thinking so.
To that, I’d add Jim Womack’s definition of the Lean community: those who sincerely want to make things better. ‘The Half Arsed Agile Manifesto’ doesn’t read to me as written by anyone who meets that definition. Rather than understanding and helping enterprises move closer to the ideal, it seems to be profoundly counterproductive by rejecting any improvement that doesn’t reach perfection.
Just because an organisation doesn’t meet your personal definition of purity doesn’t make it half-arsed. Talking about enterprises in general really does imply that you’re working on assumptions, not specific situations where you have respectfully gone to Gemba and understood. I may be mistaken, but it reads as though written by someone who hasn’t any history in working in enterprises, or hasn’t grasped what that environment is about.
Agile is easy when there are 10 of you in one room. Sometimes its rhetoric comes across as a fantasy that all software is written like that. Perhaps enterprises (or at least some of them – and the more regulated they are, the more true this is) have constraints you don’t understand or appreciate. Go and see. Ask why. Show respect.
Even enterprises without those constraints can’t and don’t change instantly just because you show up with some bright ideas. Embedding sustainable cultural change in an enterprise takes years, and in some cases is near impossible. Respect those working within that slowness to change. Go and see. Ask why.
If an enterprise is on the path towards your ideal, you should encourage them, not mock them. Show respect.
If today is a bit closer than yesterday, that’s not half-arsed. That’s progress. Respect that progress. What are the blockers to moving closer tomorrow? Go and see. Ask why.
Most annoyingly because of the hope it offers, the article it was based on was thoughtful while being provocative. It starts from the premise of “…to be Agile…” and challenges those who claim to be so without assuming it’s universally axiomatic. It also has the maturity of having actually gone to Gemba a few times, and sought understanding.
That’s how to be a gadfly.
Now, the next step is to do the Lean improvement.
Go beyond “We can’t because” and move to the Socratic challenge of “how can you do face to face conversations — or get the same outcome by a different means — when your developers are on Mars and that’s hard to change?” and “Why can’t you have effective communication without being less than 3m apart?” And listen to the answers.
Go and see. Show respect. Ask why.
Manifestos are great as historical definitional, aspirational documents. They’re no good whatsoever as an acceptability threshold.
Agilista writers: up your rhetorical game.
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Martin Burns
Specialism: Transforming complex delivery organisations to be more Lean/Agile.
Mindset: Continuous Improvement Obsessive
Latest posts by Martin Burns (see all)
- Speaking at Lean Agile Scotland 2017 - August 18, 2017
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(Some) Agilistas: Still Not Yet Lean Thinkers by Martin Burns is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Before posting this diatribe, did you go and ask, see why, and show respect? Or did you make the mistake of which you accuse the subject?
My advice is to give up on the Agile movement. If individuals can spoil the message, there’s nothing in it for you, I promise. I suspect you might be able to give up on _all_ movements, but alas, I lack the experience to say this with confidence.
That all said, thanks for being vulnerable and posting the diatribe. It really made me think about my behaviour at work, particularly at how I ridicule steps toward the goals I motivate toward!
First off, thankyou for the challenge, and forcing me to do a little Hansei. Yes, you’re right, I am a little guilty of what I point out in others.
However, I didn’t just dash this off in knee jerk style. The HAAM has been around for some time, and the irritation it’s causing me has been growing for some time as I see it linked repeatedly with – as far as I can tell in 140 chars – mostly entirely straight faced seriousness.
I did some asking around when I first saw it, and was told it was a conference joke. Which is mostly OK – private jokes at the expense current, past and potential clients are almost par for the course – but publishing it without that context just isn’t acceptable.
You’ll also note that I linked Ron Jefferies’ article that inspired it with quite some degree of respect, even while not entirely agreeing with it (which bits I disagree with are a story for another day).
However, I think the point still stands.The Agile movement has an over-representation of people with loud voices, relatively limited life experience and lower social skills that are particularly poor at understanding how they’re coming over to others. And the reality is that that reduces the desired communication impact.
Many members of the Agile movement needs to learn when to turn down the revolutionary, evangelical rhetoric, and when to start catching bees with honey, particularly when they have a loud/influential voice.
Because while you can wish all you want for a perfectly rational audience who see through the speaker to the message with perfect transparency, it’s never going to happen. We all need to get better at being ambassadors for what we’re trying to convince others about.
As long as we’re better tomorrow than we were today, that’s OK.
I almost agree with you entirely. 🙂
The only thing that tripped me up was “The Agile movement has an over-representation of people with loud voices…” That could be read as “there are too many of these people” as distinct from “these people make too much noise”. I think it would be easy for a loud minority to produce the former perception, even when only the latter matches reality.
I’m not in touch with the in crowd, so I wouldn’t know for sure. It just smells fishy to me, like the kind of mistake I’ve made about other groups.
And fully, I think this is impossible to disagree with this: “Many members of the Agile movement needs to learn when to turn down the revolutionary, evangelical rhetoric, and when to start catching bees with honey, particularly when they have a loud/influential voice.”
Thanks for taking the time to clarify. I see I have some reading to do. 🙂
Hi Sheldon
The answer is ‘a bit of both’ (or “I can’t tell either” if you prefer).
The community is a subset of the overall SW engineering industry, which – for all the well documented reasons – has a higher (compared to the total population) proportion of people whose general intelligence levels and self-regard outruns their social skills.
That’s not to be critical of the community or individuals (it is what it is) except in one factor – how it impacts success when trying to persuade other people.
Not everyone in the community is like this (and I have huge respect for many who aren’t), but in an ideal world, the number of people who make counter-productive noise would decrease as they learn to consciously choose their own behaviours and better match them to the situation at hand.
Noise is OK! In the right setting, it can be extremely useful. The original Agile Manifesto was extremely powerfully stated and was needed (and actually, it’s quite well balanced and nuanced – ‘both X and Y are valuable, but tending to X is generally helpful’). But AgitProp Puritanism is a weapon rarely called for, and to be wielded with much care.