Agile and Passion

I just realised while writing this today, that this is episode 100 of this Newsletter. I can’t sufficiently thank you all for reading it, caring and making me feel safe enough to keep writing it. We’re an awesome team.

Today, I wanted to talk about passion. The connection between passion and Agile* is maybe not the most evident one(*for those of you new to my writing, prepare to be irritated: I use “Agile” as an umbrella term for the overall way of thinking to encompass the philosophy, the practices, agility, culture and DevOps all together).

In fact, the same people who are capable of being “Agile to the bone” would rarely characterise themselves as passionate. After all, it’s a way to get clear, quantifiable, predictable results and it’s mostly IT that truly internalised it and IT professionals are not exactly first in line when it comes to the “fluffy/mushy” stuff.

As I said many times before, when I don’t obsess over Psychological Safety in teams, I think of myself as an Agile Anthropologist, I’m absolutely fascinated by the types of people who have made Agile part of their DNA and by how in technology, the keepers of the soul of the employees, are DevOps. I often wrote about Agile Superheroes and how hard it is for them, about the fact that Agile is a way of thinking not a way of working, about how this thinking maps to the Maslow pyramid of needs and of course, about my obsession: how Agile will help reduce HumanDebt™.

When I say “types of people” I’m sure we’re tempted to believe it is about a certain personality type or specific psychological make-up. That to be Agile, there’s some kind of acronym that Jung mandated that characterises all that manage to truly take to it and explains why all others can not. It would explain so much if some of us had “the capacity to change our mindset and become Agile” and others simply didn’t.