Agile Conferences or Monty Python’s Flying Circus

“You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally… I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what, I can’t learn anything from you, I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. Then I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t want to do that, do you sport? You’re terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief.”Good Will Hunting

I will not take a part in any agile conferences this year. I participated in two conferences last year and it brought no value to me. I am not saying that agile conferences are pointless at all, I am trying to say, that they are not for me. Why?

The basic problem for me is that in those conferences, form prevails over content. Speakers there, care “professionals”. They seem to almost forgot that they need to do some “normal” work as well, not only visit conferences as speakers. They are like clowns, crossing country with the same number in each town.

Agile speakers are so concentrate on the form of their exhibition, that the content is shrunk to the banality and cliché (you know “bullshit bingo”, right?). They are speaking about “amazing” agile examples, engage audience with the stretching exercises (“stand up”, “sit down”) and everything is done with such an enormous dose of infantilism that one is “forced” to believe that it is honest. But is not. It is artificial, stupid, useless and also expensive in the end.

I don’t want to share shallow knowledge, but I want to hear a story. I want to hear their personal stories, how those people managed to deal with their ordinary but complex problems in grey day-to-day banality of life. I want to hear “boring” performance, where the story-teller explains, how she/he managed transformation in the project last time. Which steps were right and which were mistakes. When he/she implement agile in corporation last time. What he/she did, when half of the team left the project. How are his/her best practices when speaking with business.

Simply, I want the agile speaker to go back to the bottom, to the basic stuff of agile and try to speak their personal experience in one concrete and particular case from the last time.

Telling stories about yourselves is a tricky thing as I showed in another place. But there is the value. And agile conference organizers should remember about this. If not, their event will always be only pure business matter.

January 2015