Schr?dinger’s Agile: A Copernican Twist.

On the ongoing debate about agile being alive or dead, I think it’s necessary to take a different perspective.

Agility isn’t something that is easy to define. It’s a feeling. Agility in one context isn’t the same as agility in another. It’s something that emerges as a result of group interactions in a specific context. When it emerges it’s great. There are no specific incantations that bring it forth reliably in any situation, it can’t be guaranteed.

It’s a result of (among many things) smart people, some luck, and a solvable problem. If you want to consistently experience agility you have to learn to recognize that when one of these three things is missing you need to pass on trying to solve the problem, or try a different path. Unsolvable problems, bad luck, and cargo culting instead of thinking, all lead to quagmires and frustration. What we call bad agile is a failure to recognize when something is intractable, and instead pursue a solution with ceremony - exactly the same mistake as waterfall approaches.

Trying to define something fleeting and becoming as either alive or dead is one of the problems you should pass on. The failure is to embrace the language of complexity and at the same time link an emergent property to the mechanical causation of frameworks and tropes.

If you have smart people and agility doesn’t emerge by itself, move on.

To understand why, we need to embrace a Copernican twist in our thinking: You don’t solve problems by being agile, problems that can be solved will see agility emerge while they’re being solved!

(Copernicus suggested that the earth revolved around the sun, rather than everything revolving around the earth, this is the twist here!)

Many agile tools are essentially trying to make the ground wet by making rainbows. When they fail it doesn’t mean the rain is dead. By the same logic, claiming that agile is dead is a little silly.

On the same note, rainbow makers have no right to get upset at those pointing out when the ground is dry….

Agility should be seen as an emergent property of a complex system where cause and effect are not well understood. As such it can neither be alive or dead but always in a state of flux, never guaranteed, and from this perspective it follows success rather than preceding it.

For more ideas on how to bring complexity thinking to bear on modern software engineering check out my book here: https://leanpub.com/residuality