Dead Cat in the Well

During my SAFe SPC training, I was pleased to hear from one of the Instructor "It is not the process that is the problem most of the time. It is always a person or persons who are the problem and implementing SAFe or Agile or Scrum or anything will not fix the issue." I was pleased with her honesty. I immediately said "Dead cat in the well". The story goes as.....

Once upon a time there was a village. The village relied upon a well for its water consumption. One day a cat fell and died in the well. The water was stinky and made the villagers sick.

A Sage came passing through the village. The villagers sought his advice. The sage told them to drain all of the water in the well and clean it up with water not from the well and drain that water too and wait for a few days till the new water oozes. This water will be safe to drink from then on. The villagers thanked him for the advice and wowed to follow it. The Sage went by his way.

He came back a month later just to find the villagers more sicker. He asked one of the villagers to bring him a glass of water from the well. In the water he found a cats hair. He immediately went to the well and looked into the waters. He found the dead cats body in it.

The villages followed the advice of the sage. But did not think they needed to remove the problem before making improvements to improve the situation.

Same like many companies. They keep the issue and make improvements around it over and over and over. I think we are the only species, that does not learn from our mistakes.