Doing Agile Your Way

Speaking of writing my upcoming book “Tech-led Culture” (which we were last week)- I find myself having to pull back quite a bit when it comes to tone.?

A book is not a place to be indignant. Neither is this newsletter in a sense by virtue of how open and public it is. So I set up this private corner on Patreon instead and thank you to those of you who found it on Twitter and signed up. If you fancy seeing some of my exclusive hard-hitting member content be it opinions or rants you can find it here: patreon.com/user?u=83255576 . Some people asked me about mugs or T-shirts with some of my most infamous titles over the years - “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM. But they should” or “Agile by heart not by McKinsey PowerPoint” and I had to say I will get back to them about it when I’m clear if that’s ok to do.?

I already know it won’t make me any more popular with those specific companies -and others that identify with them- than it did when it meant I had to part ways with Forbes when I refused to change the titles of these articles but I have to say I am as bedazzled about the outcry today as I was a few years back when they came out.?

Is this genuinely controversial though? Is it really? “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM” is a business adagio so common I would be surprised if anyone never heard it before. It means nothing else other than “stop sticking with what you know” and the risk-averse attitude towards innovation and size that some of the incumbent organisations have. Equally, mentioning McKinsey in that title was just to match an already existent general mnemonic of a “McKinsey PowerPoint” but it is obviously interchangeable with any of the big names of any of the other big consultancies and it simply refers to how execs at times prefer the perceived security of a big consultancy or integrator when it comes to big transformations and that they trust them above and beyond their own judgement.?

This isn’t to say IBM doesn’t make amazing technology or that McKinsey/Big Consultancy slides are always the wrong way to scale a transformation, just that their name and methods must have become entranced in the vocabulary of a certain type of behaviour and experience for them to have become well-known corollaries in the business world.

But if we’re honest, with some exceptions, none of the big new winners, be they digitally native elite performers or one of the handful of successful incumbents, none of them was sticking to the same tech provider and implementing Agile in the exact way that anyone’s PowerPoint advised, but instead, they had an open appetite for innovation and took risks, experimented and arrived at versions of agility that work for them in particular and genuinely speed them up and make them performant.?

This is no reflection on these particular companies but on the fact that any regimented implementation of Agile with no appetite for internalising it by understanding its most basal concepts and changing mentality is doomed. Any highly corseted and process-driven flavour. Any of the frameworks no matter how convinced their author is of their validity. There simply is no one-size-fits-all. No real comparable “best practices”. No shortcuts. No hacks.?

When Agile worked out you can bet there was immeasurable courage and passion involved. That no one hoped to follow a blueprint but instead took the risk of forging their own path. That no one believed there are exact steps and moulds but instead were willing to hold on to principles for dear life while testing all else and finding what actually gives them the business benefits they were after.

They weren’t brainwashed by the promise of religious Scrum, SAFE or any other collection of cult-like mindless ceremonies forced down the throat of overworked and mistrusting, unengaged employees with no buy-in and no change of mindset. They didn’t become unquestionably seduced by someone else’s Dev/Ops/Sec pipes’ models and SRE practices that made no sense to their own business and above all, they didn’t ignore the HumanDebt and the wellbeing of their own teams but put people at the centre. ?

The people asking about those T-shirts don’t want to say anything other than the modern software-making world equivalent of Sinatra’s “I did it my way”. ?

I may not put those article titles on a T-shirt after all but you can expect a line of “Stop ignoring the HumanDebt - It hurts your people and will kill your business” or “Cut the excuses. Do the Human Work” paraphernalia and hopefully one day we’ll need different messaging on mugs that say “My EQ is bigger than my ego” or “I heart Continuous Improvement and the Human Work”.

Beyond making a stance through merchandising though, the fact remains that a lot of us would have fared better if they had indeed done it their way and stopped waiting for the giants to tell them what to do because living and breathing agility will never happen by being too afraid to even change suppliers leave alone think for yourself. ?

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