The Freedom of Agile Discipline

“The purpose of discipline is to live more fully, not less.” – Master Po, "Kung Fu"

Truer words were never spoken. Master Po’s Daoist wisdom predated the Agile Manifesto by 150 years, but he would have made a great Agile leader. Lack of discipline in anything we do creates waste, and waste is the enemy of anyone in the business of creating customer value. But teams that can recognize their lack of discipline have taken the first step to righting the ship. Let’s look at how discipline can break down and how it can be rebuilt when teams embrace an Agile mindset.

A few years ago, I coached a team that had quickly solved a problem with a seemingly reasonable solution. Their customer wasn’t getting value from an internal service provider, so they built a work-around to accommodate the situation. Their definition of discipline: they moved quickly to a simple, self-service solution that would solve for the customer’s top complaint. Problem solved. Far from it.

At the monthly Innovation Council demo, my team proudly walked in, demonstrated their solution, and promptly got their backsides handed to them. Walking out, they felt like they had been sucker-punched in the dark. It was a low point for the team, but out of this humbling moment came a commitment to a better definition of discipline.

Rewind a few minutes. The Council, which was comprised of a diverse mix of company officers, saw the team’s solution for what it was: a band-aid, and a cowardly one at that. It didn’t address the root cause of the problem: their customer and the internal resource weren’t operating as a team. After a few minutes of wound-licking and council member cursing, I challenged the team to learn from what happened.

Through a retrospective, they identified their mistakes and committed to a more courageous path through the root of the problem. The team eventually succeeded because they were able to step back from failure and identify the errors in the mindset they employed. They sought feedback and adjusted. This was their first win. In this case, the retrospective was the tool they applied, but the tool is not the mindset. Mindsets guide behaviors.

Breaking the problem down into better user stories was a start. That led to more granular, low-fidelity experiments to test deeply emotional moments in the life cycle of their customer’s experience. It wasn’t easy; there were a lot of tears, contempt, misunderstanding, and prejudice to navigate. Just over a month later, their MVP started to take shape. It gave the much-maligned resource the opportunity to show his talents and value, and the customer responded enthusiastically. In another month, they had a robust, scalable product that moved their target metric farther than anyone had dreamed possible.

The team saw that they were thinking too big, too early. That created the waste of the rejected solution and all the time the team spent on it. Instead, they committed to rethinking their learning process. They employed the tool of the user story to define their customer, then wrote stories for the resource and approached her as a customer in a two-sided market. Later, as their MVP grew in fidelity, they identified a third customer that had needs essential to the other two; and they wrote user stories for him as well. These stories allowed the team to focus on small bits of value for each customer. Consequently, they were able to experiment every week to test if they could move their customer along a longer value trail. Through it all, they were employing the behavioral mindset of delivering value regularly; and perhaps paradoxically to the outsider, their pace was accelerating by doing less, more often.

Enthusiastically, the team embraced a dynamic outcome mindset, tactically guided by their customers behaviors. They saw that their first solution was heavily influenced by biases they brought to the project from day one. This “output” approach might work for constructing houses and cars, but not for building new value in a sea of ambiguity. An outcome mindset led them to embrace the tool of a two-week sprint cadence with a demo at the end for their product owner-sponsor, followed by a team retro. This forced a regular reflection on what they were doing and if it was truly moving their customer down that value path. The product owner-sponsor’s questions and mentorship raised the level of discourse and left the team nowhere to hide. The retro baked-in their behavioral optimization. Sprinting brought the whole thing together. It enabled the team to reach a high level of disciplined performance. Learning and value creation was expected across all three customers in every sprint. And the only way to pull that off was to work in small pieces, experiment early and often, and deliver a regular flow of value insight. The Agile mindset that they adopted would settle for nothing less.

My proudest moment as a coach of that team wasn’t the victory lap after their successful final share-out with the Innovation Council. It was a day, months earlier, when I stopped by their space and observed them in a very serious-sounding conversation. Asking what was up, they said, “We’re doing a retro.” I was instantly curious. The sprint review was next Thursday; that’s when we did our retro. I asked them if I could help. One of the team members responded with a brief synopsis of a behavior that had been slowing the team. They were employing a retro to correct the behavior.

I apologized for interrupting and left them to carry on for themselves. Freedom is the unshackling of oneself from chaos and the embracing of discipline. Walking away with a smile, I reflected on how their discipline was helping them live more fully, not less.