Agile is consuming itself

The biggest threats to wholesale agile adoption within our business society don’t come from a counter proposal, they come from within. The failings of previous approaches are well known and well documented and in fact have been since their inceptions, but everyone muddled through for lack of alternative. There isn’t going to be resurgence in support for the “Good old days”, too many people can prove it wasn’t that good. Nor do I imagine a new way, a utopian enlightenment to dawn upon us, from which point all programme delivery becomes risk and issue free, there just aren’t sufficient unexplored paradigms in our approach.

If the agile movement is to die, to collapse, it will do so inwards, on itself and from within. It will suffer the fate of Robespierre, the French revolutionary who rose to power through a fervent belief in equality and support for those that had been excluded and repressed under royal tyranny. His passion and success made him increasingly blind to the consequence of his unyielding beliefs and the presence of those that coveted his position. Eventually those that would usurp him turned the populace to revile the fanatical dogma that had wrought so much terror in the name of social progress, and he met the same end that he had brought about for the late king, a short drop from Madame Guillotine.

I suggest the dangers lie in three areas, the ignorant, the exploitative and the manipulative. In all cases the issue is misinterpretation of sound decent values, either innocently or more malevolently.

The first case is ignorance. This is a hard truth I had had to admit to myself, and I am reassured to read postings from other thought leaders I admire, who have humbled themselves in a similar fashion – see here, that has given me the confidence to come clean. Years ago I probably was this person, the well-intentioned but ignorant zealot; armed with too little understanding or experience of Agile Values and human politics, and too much theory and process definition.  I was that guy howling into the wilderness standing on Dunning-Kruger’s mount stupid. You’ve may relate to these kinds of transformation attempts; process and terminology centric backed by dogma and rhetoric that is applied through contextless retrospective coherence. Trying to change behaviours and practices through process, like trying to turn the quiet shy girl at the back of the class into the lead cheerleader by tossing her a costume and couple of pom-poms.

The second case is where the revenue generation consequence of those talented individuals working in organisations to support an agile transformation becomes a motivator for themselves and others. When the Agile philosophy becomes a commercial opportunity, then predictable but none too pleasant behaviours start to emerge. Pyramid style certification schemes, and an attempt to commoditise processes and supporting tooling for the purpose of revenue rather than stakeholder value. The worst excesses of this can be seen in those offerings that do little more than relabel existing familiar enterprise operations with new “Agiley” terminology with a supporting license fee. This undermines the Agile principles by dragging it down to something much closer to the status quo for the purpose of profit.

The last case is the most dangerous, those that speak in our name to further their own agendas. The butt of many a Dilbert joke – “Welcome to Agile – stop documenting anything and now you can work faster”. This is the wrecking ball of Agile, or more usually Scrum, wielded by paranoid power-hungry, non-technical managers who feel they now have a weapon to use against their intractable, awkward IT colleagues. Teams have been made to work longer, harder, with less control, fewer standards and more interference all in the name of Scrum. New developers have been born into this environment and are left believing that this is normal, and the more experienced developers resent the dumbing down on their industry and rage against the framework because they are powerless against their management. There are hundreds of comments on blog boards of people decrying Scrum through valid complaints about business practices that bear no resemblance to Scrum.

Now imagine all three together, well-intentioned but ignorant scrum masters being manipulated by untrusting and overly ambitious management to deliver the impossible, at the expense of the developer workforce, being cheered on by a process, tooling and certification industry laughing all the way to the bank. The end result will be a profitable industry of failing projects and people in a slightly different way to twenty years ago, and critically no real improvement in the enterprise project success rate.

So what is to be done? As a consultant working on Agile Transformation; are we like a few conservationists, trying to save what is left with the grim knowledge that it won’t be enough against the rampant consumerism, selfishness and apathy of humankind?

We have to continue, to give up would be dereliction of duty, and most of us have skin in the game ourselves now, we are part of the problem even as we try to point the finger elsewhere. Firstly we should point out misrepresentation of Agile wherever we see it. We need to stop preaching and learn a little humility, for those that teach Agile theory and concepts end each class with this statement – “you now know  a lot less than you think you do and are now capable of a lot more damage than you can imagine”. For those that are working in environments that are Agile in name only, then call this out, transformation to Agile may be beyond your means but at least stop calling it Agile so as to not further tarnish what was once a noble ideology. We need to focus on delivering value, on return for our clients not for ourselves. Be honest and ethical about the contracts we take and the companies we work for.

I like the proposition that someone attributed to McKinseys (I don’t know if correctly) that we should focus on delivering value to our clients rather than to ourselves and through that the money will flow anyway.

About me:

I am Phil Thompson, an Agile Consultant, have worked at many places in many industries and with many people, mostly in Europe, mostly in the UK, mostly in London. My opinions are my own, shaped and challenged by the people and companies I have been fortunate to work with over the past fifteen yrs.

You can reach me at @philagiledesign or LinkedIn