Agile — Poacher Turned Gamekeeper
I know from talking to my network I'm not the only one that's experiencing this phenomenon. Hiring managers, recruiters, engineers, leaders, we’re all seeing it. Agile has got itself into a funny place, roles have become commoditized, boxes are being made and people are getting frustrated at being stuck in them, creativity and agent empowerment are being lost, form without content is becoming too strong a goal, periphery and ancillary are at times absurd and cynicism towards platitude is growing.
The problem is hard to articulate, it's multi-faceted. Take form without content, for me, this is all about empty frameworks, a bit like a motorway without cars. There’s no end to them and they're increasing all the time, new books get published, followed by courses to codify and sell more. I understand why people need models, we don’t do well with uncertainty but a comprehensive strategic goal is never agility in itself — a framework will not improve your business's bottom line unless your business model is to sell a framework, a framework offers no outcomes, a framework will not solve staff engagement, a framework will not tell you the opportunity or problem, a framework will not solve a deficit of capability.
The last point is particularly important, they’re often used, and rightly so as a spearhead of explicit knowledge, a road to cultivating tacit. But the most prescribed are a significant abstraction on top of quality design and engineering, too much so. The underlying knowledge necessary to be anything other than a master of the framework won't develop if the focus is on the means of the means. In truth, they’re a symptom of dysfunction, a statement that we either don’t trust or don’t have the necessary capability in our teams to move beyond prescription.
Some of the baggage that is being carried along the periphery now is just a bit odd. Psychological safety for example; the term I believe originated from a study at Google. We need to learn from the past that simply extrapolating success stories is not a recipe for success in and of itself, the Toyota experience has proven this. Agency in Google will be very different from agency in an older tech-naive, Westrum rated pathological organization. As someone whose wife is a CBT practitioner and having struggled on and off with anxiety I find the concept as damming as it is terrifying.
Building resilience is a professional, personal, and in some cases, private pursuit (writing shite blogs I hear is a great cure) leaders would be better learning phronesis or focusing on their skills and knowledge, character development, and learning the necessary humility to ensure a collegiate, collaborative, and growth-oriented work environment, one that welcomes the truth regardless of the message it carries. To me, it's like saying we need to find a codified way of overcoming a toxic environment, its a good intention, but if you’ve ever worked in a toxic environment you’ll know it's not an ailment that needs a third party tonic to solve, generally speaking, it needs the right action and espoused values. If you don’t see this from leadership you cant expect an Agile Coach to solve it, the bravest may be able to martyr themselves and bring light to the problem but they don’t have much power, especially to change personnel, so this problem is being owned in the wrong place, it's futile and risky, like wondering onto a meditation app and discovering first hand the centuries-old “dark night of the soul”.
My career has taken me through a time when the Agile manifesto brought wonder into the work environment, it opened our minds to new possibilities and a tidal wave of learning, new perspectives, new ways of working, and above all an ethic of open-mindedness. At times, perhaps just a few, it enabled me to experience flow.
“This upswelling of life occurs from the interactions with others when structure and practice become unnoticed and all that is conscious is the act of doing”
The Flow System.
Oddly enough those times were probably some of the busiest, most stressful of my career but by far the most fulfilling. This feeling brought with it achievement and positive outcomes but it wasn't because of what Agile is now. At that point, Agile was really a statement of intent, one that said we would be humble as a team, learn and strive to do things in the most optimum of ways, there was very little prescription but masses of constraint. You were as likely to be managing engineers, as managing the SDLC, as building a backlog, as tailing logs, as facing into the exec, as working through analytics to improve your product. Now, these roles have become commoditized, specialization making the conveyer belt of recruitment much easier to manage.
Across enterprise and startup, there is a cynical sale of carbon copy roles as the secret to autonomy and empowerment. Unless all the problems are solved and we can rest on our laurels it seems to me this is the antithesis of the original intent and a polar extreme to enabling a creative team environment. It can cause waste and we seem to be closing our minds instead of persevering to find better ways.
Part of the problem I think is that the world progresses at a different pace, people are always at different stages of learning. I would imagine the experience of living through the decline of Waterfall is very different to coming into the industry cold now, some of those lessons just won’t be learned again. There was a time when engineering practices were poor by today's measures, branching, testing, CI/CD, synonymity between architecture and teams, these are all ubiquitous now. Process was once used as a means to manage the absence of these solutions, to help deliver the dreaded monolith, the one that took two days to build. Naive organizations that lack cumulative intuitive experience or that haven't invested the effort to build an understanding of the emergent knowledge of the last decade suffer most “easy bewitchment by heuristics is a sign of immaturity” and they fall into this trap.
It's not that Agile per se is bad, it really isn't, I’d go so far as saying good agile methods are the only way complex work should be approached. But the word has lost its meaning, it seems at times to be more self-service than servant leadership, once a word becomes a portmanteau you know it's being oversold. Ultimately its success will become its demise and new fashions will arise, no one likes the mainstream for long.
My own view is that it's time to tone down use of the word and look to specifics, it's a body of knowledge and a necessary one at that but we need to focus more on the definition of terms, more on the outcomes. The form should be a basic entry point for an acceptable level of tacit knowledge to play in the field, it has to be a staple understanding of leadership to be able to shape, create and point teams at the problem domain, to align them to their strategy and know the right methods to use, the right team science, structure, the implication of communications on architecture and the necessary interfaces to maintain trust, transparency, and situational awareness. In the absence of this, what was once a philosophy, a love of learning has just become what it once disdained, certainty theatre, close-mindedness, and therefore poacher turned gamekeeper.
