How to re-envision Agile?

I want to start a series of articles about this topic.

Let's define this topic (topic area)

This is easy, but also hard to define. It includes these questions (or problems?).

• What is our real goal? Goals?
• How do we satisfy our customers better?
• How do we all have a better life?
• How do we adapt to change better? And enable our organizations to achieve much higher success by adapting (to everything, not just "change") better and faster?
• Where does agile or Agile fit in?
• Where does Scrum fit in?
• Where does Lean fit in?
• How do we get ourselves to change better and faster?
• How do we evaluate the progress that lean-agile-scrum have made over the last (10 years?)? What do we learn from that?

***

An immediate reaction.

The glass is half-empty. But equally it is half-full. We have accomplished a lot.

There is a LOT more to be done.

Explanation of the Questions

First, Lean, Agile, and Scrum are tools. Important. Not well-understood. Perhaps mystical in some of their properties (and also at the same time, very concrete and practical). Still, tools.

What is always more important is to achieve your goal.

Note: Let's be fair. Humans do not always set good goals for themselves. Perhaps some discussion of that.

So, the questions start with the goal first. What does Covey say? "Begin with the end in mind."

Then I posit two goals (common ones, I think, although not the only ones). (1) Satisfying customers, and (2) leading a better life. The later goes back to the Greek philosophers: what is a good life?

And I phrase it as: How do we all have a better life. My conceit is that we can all win together. That the pie can expand and we can all get a bigger piece (although I would not control that we all get an equal piece).

The fourth question is about Business Agility. Or my phrasing of what the cliche "business agility" really means. A few bullets on that:

• business agility is a means not an end
• why you want business agility is rather important
• one idea is that we adapt to change faster. Which might mean that we start taking some actions, much like a chicken without a head, sooner. Still, acting sooner is often useful.
• another idea is that we adapt better. Meaning that over some period of time, better results occur than by simply acting faster. And in truth, most managers or leaders will rightly say: "I want both, faster and better."

Then, for many of you, the real questions! (Well, are they really the real questions?) How do we do lean or agile or scrum better! Sometimes phrased as: "Dammit! Why can't we learn to do an Agile Transformation as fast and as well as we can bake a cake?!"

Yes, my sarcasm. The sarcasm says what? That getting a lot of people to change in the same way fairly quickly (a decade is quickly to me) -- that was never likely to happen. Not that we did it all that well, but, in my opinion, even if we had done it much better, it was always going to take longer. Gird yourself for a much longer march.

"I am soo impatient! We should have conquered the universe by now! What have we done so wrong!"

Love the impatient in a way! Every innovation starts with: "There has GOT to be a better way!" Someone loses patience. Still, some patience is indeed a virtue.

Again: yes we can berate ourselves or each other some. It would be fair, in a way. Albeit useless and even counter-productive.

My sarcasm here says: We are not the Avengers, we do not have superpowers. We are not Jedi. And our impatience -- well, the world has always been stupid. AND: yes, we can do it better, we can make more progress, perhaps even faster than better. But it will realistically take decades, I think, to complete the changes we have already identified.

Why? Because we are changing things fundamentally. And we do not have people who know how to manage that much change. And there are all kinds of specific details to work out, and confusions to work through.

We also need to change ourselves. (Hat tip to Michael Hamman .) My phrase is: "Hi, I'm Joe. I'm a recovering waterfallic." The Mark Twain quote has been used before:

It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So.”

We have to unload our minds before we can load the new stuff in. A lot of hard work. A lot of letting go of comfortable old shoes.

The last question: We need to do a realistic retrospective on what we have learned the last 10 or 20 or 30 years. What have we done well? What have we done badly? What do we need to do differently (and didn't even notice before that it was missing)?

I want the evaluation to motivate us to do more (or more different) and to do it better. And want to gather and find some comfort in the successes.

If you all must blame some people or groups of people; well, God, please help us face that. But I'd rather we all respected each other, even our enemies, and tried to work together to make the world of work better. So, that's what I want to come from Question 9.

Closing

That's roughly the path I want to set out on. I hope many will contribute. And disagree with me. Or write giving us totally different insights.

As some readers will know, the old old story of the 6 Blind Men and the Elephant is a favorite of mine. I will speak from the knowledge (I think that) I have. But I think no one person sees this whole situation. We need all the contributions, the different perspectives.

My LOUD request: if you are within the sound of my voice, please help us all with this project....which I have loosely defined. Comment on articles and posts. Write your own article or blogs or posts. (And some are already.)

Also, offer comfort to some, who are weary of battling so long. To some who are discouraged. To some who feel they have lost their way. Everyone experiences these things on the long pilgrimage.

Note: Pilgrimage reminds me of Chaucer (such a student of people! So wise! And funny!). And of Santiago de Compostela, which I visited many many years ago. See Camino de Santiago in Wikipedia. Not a bad Wikipedia read in this time of the year. ("The end of the world!" said the Romans.)