Misleading & Misrepresenting - The potential downfall of Agile

As an Agnostic Agile practitioner I of course, to the best of my capabilities, adhere to the principles of the Agnostic Agile manifesto. However, until recently I didn't realize how much I conflicted with the 8th principle - 'To never mislead or misrepresent'.

It's not like I did it out of malice or ill-intend. It was because I didn't realize I was saying things that weren't strictly true. Something I've observed in many Agile practitioners, and by now concluded is an overall trend. A trend that potentially could delute the Agile community to something vague and fruitless.

What I learned from Dunning-Kryger

It started with small, seamingly harmless mistakes, like the Dunning-Kryger effect.

As you can see the Dunning-Kryger effect is quite commonly used in all sorts of contexts (and agile is one of them). A lot of Agile practitioners will adress pain points when talking about self-assessments. This could be for retrospectives, reviews, agile maturity assessments, or other surveys where self-assessment is a factor. I used to be one of these Agile Coaches pointing exactly this out when I was working on an Agile Maturity Assessment for Nuuday.

The only problem of course, is that the graph is a lie. At some point I started questioning this graph, could it really be true? Turned out it couldn't.

The true graphs of the paper that Dunning & Kryger released looked quite differently, and their conclusions where also quite different from what the heaps of articles, blog-post and videos I saw came up with. In fact, It was hard to find resemblance.

This got me thinking of what else wasn't really true, and I started going to the source of things, rather than relying on blog-posts and articles about the source. I found huge gaps and wholes in several things such as the Tuckman's Model, Maslow's pyramid of needs, and Dunbars number.

However, the one that really caught my attention was when I read the paper released by Winston Royce in 1970. For many Agile Coaches this would be frowned upon because the subject at hand is the Waterfall model. Something (me included) most coaches will just dismiss as completely useless, anti-agile and directly destructive in a business context.

However, can that be true? Because currently I am employed at Danske Bank, which is the biggest bank in Denmark, and a contender in the nordics, with over 25.000 employees worldwide. It's 150 years old, and still kicking, and let me tell you: It wasn't build on Agile. So how come the demonization of Waterfall?

The undiscussed truth about Winston Royce

In the paper Royce shows several models for Waterfall, one of the first you encounter in the paper is shown below.

However, the very first line following this model is - 'I believe in this concept, but the implementation described above is risky and invites failure'

In fact many of the points that Royce raises in the paper is quite of an agile mindset. As I read on, I was quite surprised as most of this was completely new to me. He raises points about collaborating with the customer during the process, doing everything twice (prototyping early on), going back and forth between the different steps in smaller iterations and more.

Finally he proposes a model that contains quite a lot more than we are used to seeing on an Agile Coach's slide deck.

Basically Royce went out of his way to describe a process he observed, and added to it to ensure steps would be taken for it to function. However, no one ever implemented it. They did, what I did with the Dunning-Kryger. They simply heard some second or third hand storytelling about Waterfall and took it for granted. For years the entire framework has been misrepresented resulting in a framework commonly used to this day. A framework which is very rigid and as many studies can show, are inferior to running a Scrum setup or similar.

The real concern

After reading Royce's paper I got caught by fear that we Agile Practitioners are doing the exact same thing. Several instances of frameworks introducing rigid 'agile' structures that completely contradict the Agile Manifesto.

Because let me be clear: There is NOTHING agile about Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, Crystal, and so on. They are all frameworks, method containers so to speak, that in many ways help foster an Agile Mindset. But way to often they are more focused on tools and processes rather than the interactions and individuals.

In many senses I see Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters Misrepresenting and Misleading on Agile. Telling teams and leaders that Agile is runinng a Scrum Cadance and having a Retrospective every second week. In order to be Agile we need to have OKR and simplified roadmaps and use Jira a lot.

Well, none of these things are inherently agile and in many ways we could end up like Winston Royce's Waterfall model, marked as something rigid and useless, simply because no one cared to read the collective 9 lines of the Agile Manifesto and 12 principles behind it.