Why Process Frameworks Are So Toxic

We live in worlds that our conversations create. Our conversations can add value to a situation, person, or opportunity, or devalue a situation, process, or opportunity. Agile process frameworks create their own conversation styles and patterns. Are your Agile conversations generative and constructive? Or are they dictatorial and confining?

In their book Conversations Worth Having, Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres explain the power of appreciative inquiry for making progress when collaborating with others.

Appreciative inquiry entails asking questions from a positive and supportive stance. So for example, if someone says something you disagree with, do not immediately criticize it, but display curiosity and ask them why they think that. Take it as a cue to explore their thoughts and feelings about the issue.

By doing that, you are using an inquiry-based approach. You are asking them to explain their thoughts. You are learning why they think what they think. In the end you might still disagree, but you don’t start by telling what you think: instead, you inquire about their thoughts.

The problem with process frameworks like SAFe and Scrum is that they are not inquiry-based. They are statement-based. The diagram below comes from Conversations Worth Having. It describes a conversation in terms of two categories: (1) inquiry- or statement-based, and (2) appreciate- or depreciative-based.

An inquiry-based conversation is as we described above: it is where you start by asking, in a quest to understand. In contrast, a statement-based approach is where you state what you think, possibly without proof, asserting your own beliefs.

Of course, how you do something matters: one can state one’s beliefs in a very open way, where it is clear that you welcome feedback. But Agile process frameworks are not like that: they assert their rules and roles without proof. You are expected to just accept that the framework is what you need.

In terms of the diagram below, process frameworks are to the left of the vertical centerline—they are either affirmative or destructive. An affirmative conversation is one in which someone is not overly critical, but they are pedantic. In a destructive conversation, they are not only pedantic, but they are challenging and critical. Most of the politics-related social media discussions that we see today are of that type. No one’s mind is ever changed through those conversations: they are a total waste of time. Worse, they generate frustration, diminish relationships, and tend to push us further apart.

Constructive Agility is a right-of-the-centerline approach. It does not begin by dictating processes to use that will “make you agile”. Instead, it begins by asking you questions: the questions are about what your own processes should be. This is a generative approach. If the leadership culture is supportive, then the conversations will be the idea: the ones “worth having”. If the culture is not supportive, the conversations will merely be critical: characterized by challenge and criticism.

An Example

For example, in the section Structure the Initiative, Constructive Agility asks you to answer these questions:

1. What are the main categories of work that must be performed?
2. What are the primary ways in which we will allow the work to be done? In other words, what workflows are envisioned? For example, some choices might be,
3. Engineers fully integration-test every change they design.
4. A separate set of test engineers will perform integration tests on a recurring basis.
5. Some combination of 1 and 2.
6. What skills are needed to perform the work?
7. What are the dominant sets of issues that are expected to arise? - That is, what categories do they fall into?
8. What styles of leadership are needed to expeditiously resolve these issues with correct decisions?

The answers to those questions are intended to help you to decide how to create an initial structure for your initiative. Thus, instead of saying “create this group with these roles and perform these activities”, it challenges you to come up with your own approach, but advises you what to consider.

That is important, because it forces you to think. Remember when you were in school, and you were asked to come up with an approach, using what you had learned? That was a lot harder than merely repeating what you had memorized; but only when you came up with your own approach did you actually start to understand what you had learned.

Constructive Agility is like a college curriculum in which the endpoint is (a) a working initiative, and (b) true knowledge and experience in the minds of those who helped to set it up and get it going.

It is generative and inquiry-based. It promotes relationships, deeper understanding and movement towards desired outcomes. It is fundamentally a learning process. In the course of learning, you create processes, use those, and refine them over time. You end up truly understanding your own processes and why they are agile.

It is not a shortcut, because there is no shortcut to agility. It is the real, and is truly the only way to achieve actual agility.