Yearning for simplicity

I was recently invited to contribute a talk to the Agile week hosted by Sainsbury’s. This was a wonderful initiative to share ideas and enthusiasm around their Agile journey supported by internal events and discussions and a few external speakers of high quality and industry renown, of which I was flattered to be in their number.

In the modern world our lives are increasingly busy, short term focused and digitally driven. We are bombarded by information and multiple demands for attention, however within this maelstrom of data, the things we still seem to value the most are the opposite. We value time, peace, small close human interaction with family and friends. We yearn for nature. We value the soothing sound of gentle waves on sand, the laughter of children or those heart warming yummy noises your friends make on sharing the meal you made for them. This is to conclude that, as humans, we aspire to simplicity.

I shared my thoughts on this with the group from Sainsburys, the beginnings of something I hope to put in more concrete structured terms eventually, whereas right now, although I can hold it for a moment, like rainwater in cupped hands, it drains away.

Broadly the premise is simply this: That hundreds of years ago people largely worked at a learned skill, likely familial, within small communities had a representative set of skills and collectively they were more than the sum of their parts. Typically there was a degree of craft and pride in the delivery of their work, be it farming, carving, furniture making or bread baking. The world was small.

Throughout history there is an ever present theme of the strong exploiting the weak. Landowners exerting as little effort as possible by coercing others to work on their behalf, reaching an extreme with slavery and plantations. It seems there has long been this battle between what is morally right and what is most profitable, where profitable is considered from the perspective of the very few who “Own” the enterprise. The industrial revolution is another excellent example, and is pertinent as it is the tail end of this period that created most of the operational and structural norms that govern businesses today. The Industrial revolution gave birth to the very concept of management.

At the heart of what was happening was the separation between thinking and doing. Thinking was the role of management and the doing was broken down into many pieces so that each operator only had to do something very small, but thousands of times a day to hone that single skill, looking for maximum efficiency. Basically, we turned thousands of people into machines, endlessly repeating a single task, a deeply dehumanising experience.

Fast forward to today, now those smoke belching workhouses have been replaced by efficient assembly lines, with varying degrees of automation from robots and computers. Increasingly employment has shifted toward more creative problem solving domains, more “thinking” work, less of the old school “Doing” work; however some of the silos adopted in that era remain. The principle that all work can be broken down, understood, sized and scheduled to be delivered with certainty for a fixed delivery date, still exists as the norm in many institutions. This may just about still hold true for the few remaining mechanical tasks, where there is little variability in the work, but isn’t, and has never been, true for creative knowledge work.

My entreatment to the audience was not to see our Agile labelled ways of working as something new, a natural evolution of professional progress, but rather a return to a simpler approach, much more aligned to how we naturally would operate in a group of people in a self sustaining community.

The most successful ways of working are optimised for the worker not for the product, and as such we should optimise for the opportunities to express our fundamental humanity. Work that naturally aligns to our human traits such as figuring out problems or creating processes rather than having to follow those foisted upon us will deliver greater results simply because those involved are more emotionally invested in them.

So I ask you, as I asked them, what is the most natural way to address the need you have? Not what does this framework say, or what does that so called expert say…? First, just what is the simplest most logical and ethical thing to do? Try that and then reflect on what transpires, maybe that is sufficient, maybe you’ll need to iterate a few times, but ultimately I believe that this simpler approach will bring better results.

Comments are welcomed – even criticism. It is only through feedback that we learn.

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