The seven deadly sins of Agile

Greetings Sin addicts, turns out there's a lot of it about. So much so that my growing knowledge of Greed, Sloth, Envy, Lust, Wrath, Gluttony and Pride is better serving me in my quest to become an effective Value Creator than either my brain, my computer science degree or recently acquired DevOps practitioner certificate.

Dante Alighlieri would have known why. This satirical master of Italian literature wrote the book on the human condition, the Divine Comedies, where he meted-out all sorts of deliciously cruel punishments tailored to the crimes of his political enemies.

And while we're at it, let's stir into the mix an Eastern version of Sinning: the three bitter roots of Buddhism, cause of all Kleshas, or bad mental states: Raga (greed, sensual attachment), Dvesha (aversion) and Moha (delusion, confusion).

Onto the article: where I take a Sinful look at Agile through the wonderfully interpretive medium of anti-patterns. Here we go ...

AP1: learning the symptoms, not catching the disease

There is more to Agile than meets the eye. It is a belief system derived from practice rather than a set of tools and techniques. Adopt it properly and you will be personally transformed. But you'll need to get infected first, and you can't catch it from a book.

I draw red dots on my face with a sharpie. I've got measles right? Wrong. Emphasising the superficial over the deep, coaching over infecting is a sure way to disappointment and failure. Agile is about learning by doing. And another problem: any Enterprise Agile coach will be losing their chops teaching the laggards, much as a tennis pro teaching the sporting inept. This training may emphasise false Agile values like rituals over people and getting stuff done.

Cargo cult Agile is the official term for this approach. Spray Kanban boards around the walls, grab a fistful of sharpies, spend inordinate amounts of time staring at burn-down charts that look to the rest of us like plain diagonal lines. You're building a plane out of a shopping trolley and cardboard and expecting it to fly.

A potential problem here is related to liminality and the ambiguity/disorientation experienced during a rite of passage. During your scrum master course or Agile coaching, did you separate adequately from your formal beliefs, behaviour and status? Or are these perfectly intact waiting to rear their ugly heads? Tip: true Agile transformation is traumatic and painful. There will be casualties and benefits may not be felt straight away (a crossing the chasm experience) --being human, did you skip this step?

Agile is too valuable to keep to your website. It either infects your organisation and takes over or you are merely playing with toys. Warning signs of the "not enough" approach:

• The Agile feature factory, often caused by the business and IT teams being kept separate, being locked in an efficiency arms race with competitors
• Stock price does not take off after a few months
• Management hierarchy and practices largely intact following transformation

Dismal diagnosis: ?? Envy, Sloth, Pride ?? Raga, Dvesha, Moha

AP2: cult of Agile

Your Agile journey has gone too far, cutting you off from non-devotees. Suddenly the heuristics become rules and the rules become dogma. Elevated to the status of religion or cult, your former methodology has driven you insane.

The Epic Children of Agile

Newly crowned ruler, you start your reign of blood arranged in two-week sprints of debauchery and excess (smoothed-out to minimise WIP). Soon you're holed-up behind Kanban boards purchased with donations from the faithful (sold their fixie bikes), dispensing benedictions and punishment. Teams patrol borders with Post-Its ready to inflict lethal paper cuts on the enemy (e.g. anyone seen brandishing a GANT chart), each prepared to die in defence of customer empathy and the reduction in unnecessary clicks.

Case study: a friend reported that at a certain nameless UK corporation, his attempts at agility were blocked for not being Agile enough. His crime? Building a perfectly good GANT chart for a complex project. This was rejected by the cabal of scrum masters running the place. They reworked his collateral so it looked like a Kanban board, dumbing it down by removing dependencies before passing to senior management for approval.

"The horror, the horror!"--Colonel Kurtz.

A warning to the Agile cultists amongst us: the world is complex and dualistic. And while Agile has its place, other forces, modes of thought and methodologies apply. Not recognising this can lead to an Agile world view just as limiting as the one it replaced.

Dismal diagnosis: ?? Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath, Pride ?? Raga, Dvesha, Moha

AP3: misinterpreting the Agile manifesto

The Way was laid before us back in 2001 in the words of the Agile Manifesto and, while imperfect, contains much subtlety and wisdom. But you glossed over this in the rush to get Scrum or Kanban in place and rarely return to it.

This is what the Agile Manifesto says:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on

the right, we value the items on the left more.

And this is what you do:

That is, while people tell us there is value in the items on the right, we don't really believe it, assume they are optional and make no time for them as we value the items on the left exclusively.

This in turn can lead to the following:

• Accumulation of technical debt (the customer doesn't care about it so why should we?)
• Pushing other teams away who need a document or process to make sense of what we are doing and how they fit in
• Always valuing the urgent over the important

Dismal diagnosis: ?? Sloth, Wrath, Pride ??Raga, Dvesha, Moha

AP4: favouring outside-in over a balanced approach

Customer obsession (outside-in) is great but can be taken too far, leading to the ignoring of important inside-out work. As with many things, a balanced approach is best.

The customer is outside looking in. I empathise and give them great features, lifestyle technology and branded convenience in no clicks. There are a number of dangers with this approach:

• Giving the customer what they want, or what we want them to be hooked on rather than what they need or what is good for them. e.g. sweets near tills, Fox News perpetuating climate change denial
• Forming a customer-obsessed clique that is cut off from the rest of the organisation
• Going too shallow and ignoring the need to serve wider stakeholders including the EA, clearing technical debt etc.

Let's look at the alternative, inside out. Cf. my article on the sins of enterprise architecture:

Nope that doesn't work either. As with many things, a balanced approach is best. And perhaps a systems approach even besterer.

Dismal diagnosis: ?? Sloth, Pride ?? Dvesha, Moha

AP5: failing to scale

Your website and a few innovation hubs have gone Agile and are doing quite well. But then you Balkanize and battles rage. Or worse, you ignore each other. You created a series of exclusive hipster clubs and have failed to apply Agile thinking at the Enterprise level. You didn't scale.

Actually scaling Agile is a WIP. And as Kanban is all about minimising WIP, we have never really nailed it as this article shows:

Here are signs of your failed attempts to scale:

• Calling all your unchanged Waterfall and Portfolio approaches by Agile names cf. Cargo Cult Agile
• Release train coordination problems
• Lack of autonomy
• Not addressing Purpose->System/Principles->Leadership
• Not treating your enterprise as a market economy (e.g. open APIs, shared risk/reward models like DevOps, Product owners owning P&L)

Dismal diagnosis: ?? Sloth, Wrath, Pride ?? Dvesha, Moha

AP6: valuing Agile over agility

While agility may require abandoning Agile altogether, you doggedly stick to the script. You worship the barge, you do not think to use the barge to cross the river.

Major factors of agility that lie outside Agile are:

Teamwork

Teamwork is enhanced by Agile practices, there is no doubt. But there's a lot more to great teamwork than that. Google covers a lot of bases here:

Some key principles:

• Psychological safety, transparency and trust
• Trust vs. competence and getting rid of toxicity
• Diversity and inclusion

Culture

Guilds and other communities of practice

Can be a great way to reform your org.

Rewiring your network with General Stanley McChrystal

Daniel Pink's intrinsic motivators: autonomy, mastership and purpose

Great post here by Catherine Howe:

Dismal diagnosis: ?? Sloth, Wrath, Pride ?? Dvesha, Moha

AP7: not realising the key to agility is within

True agility means overcoming ego and other biases which stand in the way of trust and stop you becoming a servant leader or effective team member. And this time it isn't about the customer, the work breakdown, the organisation or even the methodology. It's about you.

There is a reason Michael Saunders, Agile transformation lead at Lloyds Bank, was authentic enough to describe himself as a:

"Reformed a$$hole"

https://www.agileconference.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/1300-Michael-Saunders.pdf

For true agility, personal growth--and therefore suffering and reflection--is required. Michael progressed and so can you.

Dismal diagnosis: ?? Sloth, Pride ?? Raga, Moha

I'll end the article with a pithy attempt to define Agile:

"Entropy grows a beard."

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Postscript--

Others feel there are problems:

Views of an agile atheist:

Great article here:

Teams:

And another on admitting omissions: