Getting Juniors to a 'ha'

"Shu-ha-ri is a Japanese martial art concept that describes the stages of learning to mastery it translates to "first learn, then detach, and finally transcend." shu: "protect," "obey"?

The first time you cook a meal you follow the recipe step-by-step (Shu), after you've cooked the meal a few times you are starting to understand the reasoning behind the steps and the interplay between the ingredients (ha.) After some time you've cooked the meal often enough that you don't even need the recipe any more and you're adding your own twist to your signature dish (ri.)

Follow the rules, understand the rules, break the rules.

There was a great post recently by Rob Bowley on Agile is Dead.?

Every time, it's similar: what's described as "agile", and not working, bears little resemblance to the values, principles, and practices championed by the original creators of the Agile Manifesto

How does this relate to Juniors?? Juniors obviously need to follow the rule book (Shu) as they don't yet have the experience, the battle scars or context.

A key tenant of Agile is continuous improvement - do more of what works and less of what doesn't.? Fast feedback loops are fundamental but there is a potential risk around changing without understanding the why and the value of that thing you are changing.?Teams can stop planning, skip the stand-up, move the retro to monthly as everything is ok, etc.

Juniors have the incredible potential to carry the torch of XP and Agile practices but to do so they need the why, the first principles, an understanding of the original intentions.? That's the aspiration with SummitToTech, not just be a "pipeline" but cultivate the critical thinking to ask why and counter cargo cult by helping them on their journey (ri.)

This is a series of posts for the launch of S&A Academy's SummitToTech, you can find the rest of the posts here.