Broken Agile Records

I got something along these lines from two different CTOs over the last few months: “I love what you write and I read it religiously myself but I stopped sharing it internally, it’s demoralising to eternally go back to basics and clubber people over the head with how important it is to be doing it from the heart and as a way of thinking, that was needed while we were changing but it’s been years now, it’s done, we’re Agile, we got it, we’re doing it, we’re living it every day, do we have to keep talking about it?”

While -as always- very grateful for their honesty, I have to admit it made me pause. Do we? Have to “keep talking about it”? When it comes to Psychological Safety and our work on that, we’ve accepted that it’s new and it will need years of awareness-raising, so it’s likely we will be saying the same things over and again way past the time when they are just applied common sense to most, but in Agile’s case it has genuinely been tens of years of having it around and it is so much more than just a concept, so does it need the constant advocacy? It does. We do. Need to “keep talking about it.” Here’s why.

Not only is the proportion of the enterprises who “have it at DNA level” low, but it’s also a non-set-in-stone, precious and fragile thing. This is a different kind of fragility than the term we use to accuse clear anti-patterns such as rigidity of process or trying to hide tech debt, but it’s there nonetheless and in some ways, it’s more insidious as it refers to how easy it is to lose one’s way.

Consider how long Agile has been around. Why isn’t it “IN-IN” and why does it at times falter? Because as long as we still have so much HumanDebt™ we can’t have it “in-in”, there was too much impression management for people to reject it explicitly if they needed to at the beginning, there was too little Psychological Safety to acknowledge the times it hasn’t worked out and mistakes were made, there was too little sense of team magic to really feel the times when it went well and did what it said on the tin intensely. There was too much fear and too little sense that the team deserved any of the joy of running fast together. And too little real organisational permission. Too wobbly of a commitment to change. Too scarce of real support for a new way of thinking that transforms our very thought.

And it may also be that our intellectual “set-point” is waterfally after what would have been most of our professional lives for most of us. Even the most Agile of us. The charmed structure of it all, the perceived comfort of requirements and stages and planning, it’s all familiar from our long “other lives of Prince” and it’s enticing when we’re tired. Command and control play right into our organisational Stockholm syndrome so yes, we still crave it at times. Continuous learning and improvement can feel exhausting, even if fun. And it’s not that when we’re burnout, or wary, and we wake up one morning and decide not to be Agile that day or to go back to our old ways of thinking, no. It’s a lot more insidious than that. We’re a little less excited for new here or there. A little less understanding of sudden changes. A little less interested in the impact. A bit too processy. A tad too keen on automated piloting. A smidge too unengaged and less inclined to be fully honest and open.