5th in the Series: Critical Questioning over Rigid Rituals
In a series of publications, Consequential is exploring ideas for new values for going beyond working code in agile product development. You can read our overview and introduction to this series here.
The original agile manifesto and its values pointed out many of the problems with software development that were present at the time. In creating our ideas for new values, we looked to do the same. Tech has eaten the world, and for this to be a positive thing we want to reframe and refocus what we value in its creation and how that can impact what gets put into the world.
In the spirit of our goal, disruption for the common good, we present our ideas for 5 values for the future of agile product development:
- Stakeholder conscious over customer-centric
- Focusing on objectives over measuring output
- Foresight over failing fast
- Collective responsibility over disjointed disempowerment
- Critical questioning over rigid rituals
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Let’s look in more depth at:
From Rigid Rituals to Critical Questioning
Over time, and with age, flexibility has a tendency to become rigid — whether that’s muscles, mindsets, or processes; it’s a human thing. In some places, rituals of agile that are meant to be lightweight have instead become rigid. For example, timeboxing comes to mean there’s no time instead of meaning meetings should be well-prepared to allow for meaningful discussion.
In working collectively, there’s often an underlying assumption that good intent always leads to good results, but this often simply isn’t the case. In David Marquet’s book Turn the Ship Around! he suggests a ‘Questioning attitude over blind obedience’. We love the idea of critical questioning being a core value of agile — though we’re maybe less keen on blind obedience as a problem.
From our view, the problem with overly rigid organisations is that they can stifle critical questioning and exploration. Critical questioning is already at the heart of agile through the use of the retrospective, but we believe there’s also explicit value in questioning the product within a team environment. Because we believe that good intent paired with critical questioning and embedded foresight leads to good results.
Critical questioning isn’t about slowing down development, but rather about inserting healthy friction with the goal of creating the best possible product.
Friction in design used to be seen as the enemy, but time has shown it can be the best thing for everyone. For example, for many banking apps the focus was on a seamless customer experience, but now they purposely design friction in the form of questions into the money sending process in order to combat fraud.
Which is why we want to see the same spirit present within agile and within teams. More importantly, how can critical questioning with a motivation for positive impact become part of the practices and processes of software development?
The future of tech product development
It’s been almost 20 years since The Agile Manifesto was published, and it has changed so many aspects of how we work and create tech products. It’s in the pursuit of Continuous Improvement that we explore here the role of responsibility in agile and ideas for new agile values. We hope our ideas can help to positively shape the next 20 years of agile product development.
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Consequential does both big ‘I’ and little ‘i’ innovation to change the existing business landscape. This means we focus on large-scale systems change within business and tech, and strategy and innovation within individual organisations to build their businesses and products in more responsible ways.
