The Right Way to Use a Manifesto

There are no fewer than 36 “manifestos” out there somewhere, pertaining to Agile, product design, business agility, and a range of related topics.

It seems like creating a manifesto is the thing to do when one has ideas for how to do things better.

This might seem like a bad thing: after all, how does one know which one to follow? Which one is right?

But that question is actually the problem: one should not seek one to follow. A manifesto is not a religious text, assumed to be the “one true word” of a higher power.

Manifestos are written by mortal people, and they are all imperfect.

Manifestos are written by mortal people, and they are all imperfect.

Recently I wrote a post in LinkedIn pointing out that the Agile Manifesto has serious flaws. My post was, I thought, nuanced and thoughtful. I did not wholesale dismiss the Manifesto: I was surgical about what some of its flaws are, and I prefaced my post with the statement that “The Manifesto was a strong document”, and yet, while I received a lot of support (and a ton of LinkedIn connect requests afterwards), I also received a good number of nasty ad hominem responses (though fewer than the number of connect requests that I received).

Such is dealing with the public: there are those in the public who will throw stones when they don’t like what you say, and will seek to sew chaos and make broad statements such as “this is a mess” or “none of this makes sense”. That is highly unpleasant, but it is not disagreement that is unpleasant – what is unpleasant is nastiness.

The good news is that the nasty people will be unable to actually hone in on what they don’t like, because their reaction is driven by emotion – not logic.

The people who hurled nasty responses were, I believe, those who have come to identify with the Agile Manifesto on a personal or professional level: by critiquing the Manifesto, I was – in their mind – critiquing them or their work.

That is a real problem, because if people identify with documents or sets of ideas, then we cannot criticize those without offending people personally. That prevents us from advancing.

Einstein had this problem: during his early career there were many scientists who had built careers around teaching Newtonian Mechanics. Relativity challenged that, and they took it personally, and they were pretty vicious towards him.

Some say that science advances one death at a time: in other words, we have to wait for the current theories’ proponents to pass on before we can challenge those theories.

The solution is the view a manifesto, or any document or set of ideas, as just that: a set of ideas. And presume the ideas to be imperfect. Never, ever come to view the ideas as sacrosanct. And don’t let yourself identify with the ideas personally or professionally: always view the ideas as tools, and anticipate that better tools will come along.

So having multiple manifestos is okay. Each is only a set of ideas. They may overlap – that is okay. And they might even contradict each other, and that is okay too, because they are just ideas, not inviolable rules, and so it is up to you to decide how to apply the ideas, or to decide that they do not apply in your current situation.

One thing that really helps is if a manifesto contains an explanation of the intentions and rationale behind each of its statements. That way, one can grasp the thinking behind it, which enables one to interpret the idea for one’s situation. Lacking an explanatory narrative, one has no choice but to take the idea at face value, and apply it without adjustment. And that is a hugely risky thing to do: it effectively turns the manifesto into a set of rules, which it should never be.

So beware manifestos that contain merely a set of unsupported assertions. And if you cannot feel confident that you understand the manifesto’s ideas – that you have not experienced situations in which its ideas apply – then you are not ready to use those ideas.