Lessons from Cargo Cults

Mike Bradford
Jul 22, 2017 · 3 min read

We Learn more from Failure than Success

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery
Samuel Smiles, The Lives Of George And Robert Stephenson

We often hear a lot more about success than failure, and there are a lot of reasons why.

We love taking about successes as it makes us feel good; they provide a template for ‘best practice’; nobody is going to pay to learn about failure :-)

Learning from success seems to offer a shortcut. Do what woks without all the trial and error to work out what works from first principles.

Yet so often it is hard to distinguish between effect, cause and correlation, meaning it is hard to know what to copy from success.

Each situation is slightly different, and requires adaptation. The tweaks required may undermine the desired outcome.

It is my belief that expertise and experience is as much built on knowing what doesn’t work, and using this knowledge to help understand the underlying fundamentals.

One of the issues I have with the Agile Industrial Complex (and all other management, software and technical fads) is that it concentrates on selling ‘successes’ as a template to copy.

This has led to the creation of the Agile Cargo Cult.

What is a Cargo Cult.

Agile Cargo Cults are a metaphor. They aren’t true but provide a powerful tool to consider how Agile is most commonly implemented.

Cargo cults are described in detail here, but are Pacific societies who saw the wealth and success of the American GIs in WWII and logically decided to copy what the GIs did so they could atain the same success. To a Western eye this is obviously crazy, as we know the goods and bounty arent due to how the GIs dressed, marched, or acted but to the factories, organisations and industrial society that were out of sight on mainland USA.

Yet they are a result of a common human cognitive bias. We attribute events and results to what is visible. As such ‘Cargo Cults’ are created every day by every society and group.

Why are Cargo Cults Bad?

SCRUM, SAFe, Agile and Lean, as well as many other methodologies such as PRINCE2 are taught as templates, processes which can be copied.

The measures of success are how well the templates and processes are followed, such as the NOKIA Test and this SAFe Self Assessment.

No regard is given to delivery of the desired business outcome. This inevitability leads to the result of ‘Doing Agile, not being Agile’.

The end result is the failure of these transformations, where the business processes, tools and organisations are transferred to no appreciable benefit. They fail the ultimate test of ‘I don’t care what it is, does it work?’

Why studying Cargo Cults is useful

Unfortunately Cargo Cult Agile is an unintended consequence of the transformation process for most organisations. No amount of description of good practice will prevent it.

Being in an Enterprise that has embraced Cargo Cult Agile provides an opportunity to enumerate the many potential traps and decisions that can lead to the unintended consequence of the Cargo Cult. And try to turn them around, one step at a time.

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