Help An Agile Anthropologist Out

Warning: today's article is a collection of self-serving introspective reflections from the trench asking for crowdsourced wisdom - for (hopefully) a more coherent fact-based “why you should do Agile to stay competitive” article that you can share internally and hope it makes anyone read the Manifesto or at least the Phoenix Project come back next week.

Let me first start with a nod to gratitude - there are a couple of challenges on that happening this week (join one, you don’t have to make a public tit of yourself by telling anyone like me if you don’t want to but it will be awesome) and I can’t help but be honest that I have objectively much to be grateful for and this is one of the main reasons to feel this way: I get to think and write of the things that matter most to me namely people, technology and Agile and do so while running a bootstrapping software start-up that designs something that will help with this business of changing the future of work. Living my best life means documenting my thinking about fluffy topics and applying that into a concrete solution that moves mountains while showing to the business that paying attention to these two things is where the coin is. Objectively that’s #winning. 

In my Chasing Psychological Safety I deplore how mired in fluff we are. Over here it feels like we have none of the fluff we need. 

Let me explain. 

As time goes by and more and more of our work is about detangling spaghetti souls of old organizations with new ambitions, and the undervalued humans working for them, we find we inevitably binge on food for thought.

Strange as I still find it,- seeing how to me these are simply two facets of the same topic: the future (and present) of human-centered work-, our dialogue is with very siloed sides of industry - OD, L&D and generally HR on the one side and COOs, CTOs on the other side. Layered with how CEOs and the like want to pretend they delegate to these camps but still want to be involved in the conversation around employees, Agile and digital, the topics that crop up and the way each side approaches them, are infinitely fascinating. 

In the last week alone, we’ve spoken to clients and future clients with amazing insight and some of the themes that were touched on, the kind that have such depth people fall pensively quiet for a split second in the middle of a conference call -those deliciously rare genuine thinking moments- are around what is a team, how does it differ from a family, do people have to have trust in each other, what do we do about hero-developers and why all-stars teams don’t work, what’s for the leader and what’s for the coach, what do we need to do to work “for the good not for the bad” and that our people and our teams feel the same, what’s real flexibility, what’s resilience, how do we grow as individuals while growing as teams, whose job is this - HR or Tech and every other big theme in between come from each of these sides of the organization. 

The fact that there are different fractions is fascinating in itself. It also shows why we think of Agile as either a project management methodology, a software making way, a business doctrine, a religion or a mindset. That’s for those who don’t choose to simply dismiss it and hope it goes away. 

One title I would love to have -but frankly sounds potentially eye-roll-material- is Agile Anthropologist. Because that’s where the heart is and that’s where most of the thinking is happening. Not one part of either business or science is looking at Agile’s effects at either the individual or the group level from an emotional and interaction perspective and that’s bedazzling if we accept it’s the future so you’re welcome (before anyone gets up in arms in comments, that was dripping in self-irony, I’m well aware I’m not doing anyone a favor but it’s a self-serving exercise).

Thanks to tens of hours of breathing and meditation that worked hard to allow me to construct silver linings and stay with the discomfort, I’ve finally managed to catch myself welcoming moments of extreme frustration where I just want to shake some exec and go “FFS wake up! You’re smart enough to know all you need to do is stop wasting any moment not obsessing about your people and KPI on humanity, there’s no time for you impression managing and hiding behind consulting speak!”.

Aside from the danger of an assault charge and much as these moments still raise my blood pressure, they also mean there’s a chance I can get through to the person in front of me and appeal to their passion and sense to change their organization. 

Sadly messaging matters. Even the petulant and impatient child in me has to admit it. In an ideal world, we’d swear, and plead and reason and just keep it real till it reached the core of the other person. In our day-to-day where work means masks and costumes if we do that we give our audience, our leadership, our colleagues even a license to stop listening as it’s not “come-il-faut”  

I’m about to get on stage and speak about Agile, humans, and technology many times in various corners of the world this year and I’ve been agonizing over what the right tone needs to be. 

Some are hip and trendy conferences where the organizers have asked me to be “brutal like always” and even there I wonder if they know what they are asking for, but some are filled with pearl-clutching-old-school professionals who would simply dismiss me as a nutso if I just tell them to wake up or get out. 

Obviously, there is no danger of me sounding proper, corporate-like and conference-monotone on stage when we are speaking about something as important as this and containing my indignation regarding the urgency of getting the dang point if we want to win in any industry will shine through, in particular as the speaking happens with my eye on the clock so I don’t miss a retro or another client talk where our software has a chance to actually change the way thousands of people work. 

I’ll touch on a bunch of things but mainly I’ll focus on the death of sequential thinking, the fact that Agile is like CrossFit for the mind, the fact that if you choose only two things to relentlessly focus on they should be DevOps and teams and how greatness is within reach if we can be daring and pepper every sentence with examples, stats and results. 

Does that sound right? Help me out here, some of the people in the audience will be that CEO that only signed the check for Agile but didn’t get the point, that CFO who wants the 3 years road map, that department head who thinks it’s a fad and “won’t scale”, those team-leads who still waterfall in their heads and all the people who spend time dodging bullets from blame culture and impression-manage like a champ convinced they are impostors and therefore cargo-culture the heck outta #Agile. 

Leave a comment and tell me how to “FFS!!!” shake them effectively and we’ll either all be better off for it or get boo-ed off the stage.