Let there be #Agile

I wrote this on the other series this week but I appreciate everyone here loves speed so let me summarize: LinkedIn is transforming "Series" into "Newsletter" and so it makes little sense for me to keep them separated. Not to mention the two topics "Chasing Psychological Safety" and "The Future Is Agile" are intrinsically connected. I can't imagine anyone reading this isn't aware of prof Amy Edmondson's and Google's work that summarizes that the number one lever to the productivity of teams is their psychological safety - their ability to be open and honest with each other without fear of consequences, their willingness to be vulnerable enough to be vulnerable to admit mistakes as a basis for learning and their probability to remain flexible and become resilient. And what does #Agile need more than empowered people and productive teams?

So if you agree with me that people and in particular Psychological Safety in teams are sine qua non conditions to succeeding with Agile and if you're curious how we get on changing the future of work by bringing the focus back to people through connecting Agile KPIs to levels of Psychological Safety, please subscribe there. (A cool set of discounts headed the way of my subscribers on there as soon as we are live with the consumer site too so double reason)

Which brings me to a couple of things. Last week's article provoked a flurry of reactions and if we elegantly leave some out to spare the blushes of those who offered them, there was thankfully a lot of deep and explorative conversation albeit most in private messages. There's a clear common theme that emerges from all of them: almost everyone, even those utterly sold to a certain verbatim set of practices has a different definition and is intensely married to it. Which splits us.

There's an "Agile" vs" Agility" angle (and it's why from hereon this Tinker Bell will only refer to it as "#Agile" to confirm I'm happy to be called all kinds of prophetic names and burned at the stakes of insufficient knowledge and "wrong opinions").

Then there's the distinction between "Agile" and "DevOps" which I sort of tackled here if you're curious.

And then the delightful comparison between “Systems Thinking” and “Design Thinking” that I’m researching in detail now and I’ll undoubtedly form a polarising opinion on.

And then, of course, there's the distinction between theoreticians and practitioners, each armed with disdain for the other and of course the multiple "to Scrum or not to Scrum"; "is SAFe safe or not"; "the only "true" Agile is..... <insert XP, Scrum, FDD, Kanban, Lean, DSDM or even more obscure own flavours such as Crystal Clear to cite only the classiscs>

And this is without unpacking how it applies to each industry and how some people argue it doesn't suit every part of the organization and should only be confined to software development (preposterous BTW)

Cutting through all this - the personal perspective layer. Each of our professional lives - where we've come from, what we've learned and what we care about, reflects in the way we choose a side in the above debates.

What I find, as a relatively new-comer to "the Agile industry" (don't even get me started on why that exists as a term and how I can't imagine why this conversation is not just firmly contained in the overarching topic of the Future of Work!) is that we are self-defeating divisive and the splits are not only inconsequential but diluting the messaging to the rest of the world who needs one unitary front telling them under no uncertain terms that whatever your own flavour and categorization #Agile has to be the way forward.

In a conversation with my publisher this week I was deploring how many teams and fractions there are inside the different communities and we were postulating this is because it is a relatively new idea considering how major of a thinking shift is required and as a result people have to adhere to strict personal terminology to capitalize but how essentially we must all be as fundamentally emotionally and intellectually as invested in #Agile as the other.

Sometimes I find it outrageous that we can sit here and nit-pick at scholastic versions and various references when there are much bigger jobs to do such as change the mentality of the board of most enterprises or, even more importantly, see how to inbuild an #Agile way of thinking for our kids by changing the way we do education.

I do think a culture of "Us versus Them" is deadly and I can't believe that anyone is happy to keep squabbling over terminology and exact names of processes when we have the next generation's fate in our hands in how we move the needle on this topic. If you think this is an exaggeration then you're one of the ones who want the WoW but haven't changed their WoT and I would urge you to try and fall in love with #Agile. Not a process, not a set of terms, not a certification, not a way to deliver software, not a manner to move internal KPIs, not an intellectual debate but a state of always delivering fast results in the face of uncertainty. Those of us who have done so and are truly, madly (some say) and deeply in love with it know it to be transformational in our hearts of heart and that makes us less prone to resource guard and instead examine differences but keep thinking like a team.

So in short - let's try and build a bridge between "tech"; "process"; "business"; "IT"; "Future of Work" and "Ways of Work" and instead of clinging to own definitions and labels focus on splitting the monumental backlog of transforming into an #Agile world into epics and sprints that will see our kids have to marvel at history books showing them that once upon a time people did things in a sequential, non-collaborative, rigid, slow and inefficient manner. So do subscribe to the other series or my blog if you either agree or vehemently disagree.