My issues with the Agile industry
I recently had a war of words on Twitter with a guy who’s a self-styled “creative collaboration agent” over his running agile coaching workshops with his 11 year old son. It didn’t go anywhere, I kept trying to find an out, but it’s played on my mind. 2 things in that first sentence frustrated the living hell out of me:
- his title
- his use of a child in an agile workshop
but I couldn’t put my finger on why. It’s only a title; if that’s what you’re comfortable with, cool. And I guess it’s quite nice involving your kids in your work – if they’ve an interest in what you do, that’s a lot more than most parents get. But trying to rationalise it internally caused me great frustration. So I had to look at my prejudices and analyse it further.
Delivery
A “creative collaborative agent”. What the f**k does that even mean. Is he creative in a collaborative way? Does he create collaboration? And an agent for whom? The agile industry, in fact, the wider coaching industry, spawns so many of these nonsensical titles, and the best bit is that people are willing to pay for the services of these charlatans. I attended a Scrum Gathering a few years back, and I loathed it (preparing for ex-communication as we speak). It was full of self-styled coaches and “people artists”, all discussing the fluffy side of human engagement, agile games workshops, etc. Yet in the open spaces, when there were hard questions posed, for example, how to write truly agile contracts, or how to get engagement from hostile customers, the “coaches” disappeared, and no answers were given.
One of the core principles of Agile is DELIVER. No matter how fluffy an environment, no matter how nice it is to coach, you need to deliver; meet user needs, satisfy a business problem, whatever, just get the right solution to users in a timely manner. And I fail to see how these charlatans can achieve this through games and hugs.
Credibility
The second thing that really got under my skin was bringing a child into an agile coaching workshop. Setting aside the child labour part of the statement, but from a credibility standpoint, wow, just no.
Children are amazing; I know, I’ve got two of them. They have a natural curiosity, absorb information like sponges, and surprise me on a daily basis. But the key thing is, they are LEARNING. Childhood is all about building experience to bring you forward into adulthood. But it’s building experience. The bit I really struggled with here is how has a child gained enough experience to offer credible solutions, or at least guide customers to the realisation of their own problems?
One phrase I’ve come to use a lot is “Use good judgement” — taken straight out of the Nordstrom personnel handbook. I believe you need experience to gain good judgement. And I really don’t believe children have that depth of experience to make those judgement calls. I’ve facilitated and lead enough engagements to know that if you aren’t speaking from experience, you’ve no right to be in front of people. People need to see that the person coaching them has enough credibility in order for them to get behind something they are unsure of. Agile is about building trust, collaborating to get the job done. If you can’t prove credible, you can’t build trust, and you most certainly wont get anything done.
Prejudice
I love working in this industry, I get great satisfaction from helping customers solve problems. But as you can see, there are things that really get to me, and I find it hard to step beyond my prejudice. At the heart of it all, I really value authenticity & credibility. And the things I mention above that have caused me frustration, have, at least to me, neither.
Apologies for the rant. It’s been a long week.
