Curation vs Choice
Nigel Baker
Agile Coach, Certified Scrum Trainer and Director, AgileBear Ltd CTO and Founder, ToyboxAI
This is a point I was looking to explore in the prior article https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/what-has-gone-wrong-how-fix-nigel-baker-carqe
However, it would have made the article even more spawling than it was in danger of becoming... and I forgot.
Sorry.
But let's look at this conversation here:
If you recall, (which I am sure you do), we finished the article with a visit into the difference between variation and deviation.
I want to dive deeper into that topic, and I want to start that by discussing my favourite things.
Gosh, isn't YouTube great? The most expensive streaming product I have is the monthly fee of YouTube Premium, to avoid the adverts, and it allows me to explore the type of media I like.
Deeply obscure. Wierd. The sort of material that would get you frowned at in polite society.
Like 1980's UK Christmas TV continuity.
Lots of Christmas Continuity!
Or some deepcut Star Wars (original of course)
or the Terminator theme reimaging as a Western
And so on... the fact is, YouTube gives me CHOICE. I can go explore the edgecases of my interests. I can find things I haven't seen for a long time, I can finds new and exciting things. My world is open.
BUT
My daughters have zero exposure to YouTube. Our household is very (surprisingly) tech-averse. There is content that I do not wish them to see. You are only one click away from some very dark material.
My daughters instead mainly watch the UK's premier public service broadcaster, The BBC - via it's BBC iplayer. (I - like most it seems other UK tech people - slightly worked on iplayer, for a little bit, a long time ago)
iplayer offers a range of carefully chosen material, created by experts in the field, with deep thought into the various ramifications of the content. Both social, emotional, educational etc.
iplayer is carefully CURATED. There is no adverts masquerading as TV shows there...
But even in a curated space, there is space for choice. My daughters pick the shows they watch from this carefully selected content.
Great! Or not.
You see, one of my daughters has a learning disability. (She has a range of disabilities) and this lends itself towards her hyperfixating on A show.
One show.
And watching the show. Every single episode. One after the other.
And then... sometimes The SAME SHOW. Again and again.
Now, if it's Bluey, that's fine. (And BTW, if you take one thing from this article - Watch Bluey. If you are an adult or whatever. Watch Bluey.)
But sometimes there is only so much binge watching I can take.
So we have this marvellous new invention. Curation not just of the type of content, but on the mix of content, and the timing of that mix.
I believe this is called a TV Channel.
Blue Peter is on at 5pm on a Friday. They watch the show before, and the show after.
Wait wait come back! We are heading back into Agile about.... now.
Curtation vs Choice is going to be the big discussion moving forward.
Curation offers expert advice, deep thought, an understanding of the end to end whole, a holistic approach.
Choice offers freedom, it offers contextual appropriateness, it offers empowerment, and it offers deeper flexibility.
Both have downsides... as we can see above. As a child, we only had 3/4 TV channels, and at the time, only two would offer kids shows - I do not want to have to watch Rod Hull and Emu
OR Wizbit
领英推荐
Curation equals control. By others. And the choice maybe wrong or at least unappetising. THERE. IS. SOMEBODY. AT. THE. DOOR.
Hahah this away, haha that away.....
Choice can equal BAD choices. By you. Watching TV all day turns out to be bad for you! You end up sat on a computer for a job, watching obscure eighties videos whilst...
Ahem. I digress.
As always, the balance between the two extremes is key. And I will suggest that balance will tip one way or another due to context. And this contexualness is where the danger lies.
I see at least four areas of concern and balance:
SCALE - This is possibly the easiest to discuss, as it has been generally accepted across the community that there is no one way to do this, and it to take a deep methodology approach of lots of detail, identically applied across the organisation, by management - is fundementally wrong. Even the biggest alleged proponent of this, SAFe, actually admits on it's own website that it is a "knowledge base" to draw from, and not a framework. The rejection of this style of model, complete curation by outsiders and applied thoughtlessly, is apt as this is what was one of the main causes of failure and subsequent rejection by enterprises, and mentioned in that first article. For me, this level should be able light curation, with lots of contextual experimentation (and probably heavy curation around the methods of experimenting.)
TEAM - This is where I get worried. There has been an intellectual error occuring across Agile social media, in this space. They have seen the results from SCALE, and assume the same applies here, at the team level. Practically, this is meaning people assuming Scrum is wrong and must only be partially applied, or not at all. And teams should select their own practices at this level as well. This is dangerous as an idea because Scrum and SAFe are philisophically diametrically opposed. Scrum is also about light curation. Only a few practices are within, with lots of space for contextual choice - we believe there is no one way of developing software - BUT those light practices should be implemented heavy. With discipline, rigor and quality. The reason for this, is we have a range of evidence about these practices compared to ones at scale, and experience with playing this game. And these practices are to help you find your way to develop software. So Scrum is a Meta-framework. It is not how you develop software. It's to help you find that way. This is a mistake that many make. So for the sake of the article, lets call this a medium level of curation and a medium level of choice.
A classic anti-pattern we see, is poorly performing teams trying to be handled by heavy supervisory process on top of them.
Remember, Scaling bad is worse.
ROLES - This is the point I was trying to get to. And like always it has taken me far too long, with too many side diversions!
Roles.
The ScrumAlliance and the Business Agility Institute created a report last year on the state of Agile in the world. This report seems to be a key document in the direction of the ScrumAlliance today.
One of the many points the report makes, is about people looking beyond roles. The classic Agile Coach, ScrumMaster and Product Owner positions becoming part of someones skill set, rather than their main role.
There is an argument here about whether this is good or terrible. We have seen malformed ScrumMasters and rebadged analysts as Product Owners for a long time and seen the devastating results of this. So in that point, I am worried.
We also spent a large time in the last article discussing Agile Coaches and their misbehaviour and misuse - So I can see an argument for that skill set becoming a more integrated part of someone's abilities, rather than a seperate role...
But how does that effect how the ScrumAlliance and others should look to move forward?
The ScrumAlliance has seemingly made a decision to move from a role-based education model to a more skills-based education model.
So, whilst Certified ScrumMaster et al will not be going anywhere, the alliance is creating a range of products in the Skills space to be utilised by ScrumAlliance Coaches and Trainers (internally called "guides") to help others on their own journeys.
So here we come back to Curation vs Choice.
Imagine you are a newly promoted Engineering Manager. A role that many organisations are utilising at the moment.
What should we teach them? Teach them that the role should not exist?
Or ask them to pick from a range of skills topics?
OK - Imagine. You are given a choice of these courses:
Does the customer have the knowledge, ability and time to make these choices? To build this portfolio themselves? From other providers as well? (I made two of the above courses up! They do not exist!)
Secondly, does the guide want to offer those options? If they don't, then that is another potenial avenue of learning missing from the learner. The TV will never show that series, so you never knew what you were missing.
The Scrumalliance (and other organisations that care) needs to understand that it needs to appeal outside it's niche audience. The mainstream products need to be attractive to the mainstream audience.
Curation, can offer a bundle of learning - Crossing across the skills and offering up a bundle, an MVP of all the learning needed across the various subjects.
Do we need an Engineering Manager workshop?
Does it have to be SKILLS or ROLES? Why not both?
The balance of curation vs choice is a question that runs through not just Agile, but through all the surrounding businesses that support and/or feed off of it.
OTHER.
Whenever someone cannot or has not pulled together a completely coherent idea, model, product, process, code or any general piece of logic... you see the magic catch all at the end...
OTHER. The Else of the Linkedin Article world.
Perhaps this is my own offering to the Curation vs Choice Gods. You can decide what should fill the OTHER box. Is it "Business Agility"? AKA Agile in the accounts team? Is it Enterprise Agile? How do we connect the very top to the very bottom? Is it Agile Is Not Right Here - Problems that are clear and do not need emergence or evolution? Or even self-organisation? I think the argument in all these spaces and more are just other examples of the curation vs choice conversation. We are seeing famous people write new books declaiming The Right Way of Doing X.... and all I can confirm that the book is not right.
So to conclude this, there are different levels of curation and choice. And these also tip one way or the other, due to that magic word - Context.
I do not feel we make this explicit enough. I see most people making choices without realising that they are.
Nigel