It’s a game of words

If you are in the Agile business, you’ll find yourself in a game of words and you’ll find this out early on. Everything you say and do will affect the people around you directly. This is why you must pay a great deal of attention to how to react, how to behave, what to say, how to say it and when to say it. A lot of questions to think about at the same time, right?

Most human beings are sensitive creatures dreading to feel hurt or misunderstood. For this and this only, the Agile Coaching business is such a challenging, thrilling and rewarding field. At least this is the case for me because there is so much to learn.

So hear me out here! Imagine the following situation where you get this question:

How do you recognise a good Agile Coach?

And I’ve got various responses back from our fellow agilists over time, some good and to the point, some not really, answers found somewhere in the industry’s literature.

I am a man of simple words and if you would ask me, it should be simplicity that defines a good Agile Coach. In my opinion, if a solution to a problem is too complex, it means that it isn’t really the best solution, hence simplicity is the key.

For me, a good Agile Coach has one great skill, and that is, the ability to explain the fuss around the Agile world and Lean thinking in simple words so that anyone can understand and follow.

It’s a very easy task to throw around buzzwords like Agile, Lean Thinking, Agile Kaizen or ShuHaRi at people, but it is very hard to understand them beforehand, to apply them and to make sure that others understand them whenever you preach them.

So my challenge is not to follow the flock of the fellow Cargo Agilists, but rather to have an attempt at simplifying this incredible world, by using simple words in everything I explain.

Now, since nothing in life ever comes alone, attached to the above question you get another one, something like this:

Try to describe in really simple words what pops into your mind when you think of words like Agile or Lean Thinking?

And as usually people provide me with some basic and standard answers read somewhere in the industry’s literature. But when we have to face reality we soon realise that, more often than not, we have to talk to people that don’t have a deep understanding of this world, nor have they an interest in it. For this reason, and this reason alone, our mission as Agile Coaches is to remove the mystery for them, if they are to trust us. One rule though! You need to be fast in your explanation and use a simple language if you want something to stick with them.

My attempt to a simple answer

For me, Agile means being effective, and for the non-native English speakers, such as myself, it means to understand how to do the right things.

How I would explain it to a teenager:

Agile is a continuous way of thinking and working through which we can find solutions to our challenges. In order to make sure that we work on the right solution for a given challenge we need to be able to validate that as fast as possible. This is achieved by working in short periods of time, known as iterations, at the end of which we inspect the result of our work and learn as much as possible from it for the next iterations.

Now when it comes down to Lean Thinking, I always associate this with being efficient, and for the non-native English speakers, again such as myself, it means to do the things in the right way.

And again my attempt to explain it to a teenager:

Lean Thinking is a continuous way of thinking through which we always remove the work that doesn’t bring us sufficient value. This should simplify the way we work and the work we do in order to help us focus more on the quality, so that we can get more value out of the effort invested.

Lean for me is all about quality and waste — why should you spend your time on something that does not bring you any value in the end. Simplify your life and you will have more opportunities than before. So above all, we learn that we need to try things out (to iterate) if we want to deliver value. It is here that we learn that we need to reflect on the things we’ve delivered, how we’ve delivered them and to always ask:

To what purpose am I doing this? Is there enough value in what I do?

If you find that the answer is NO, then eliminate it and focus on something else — yup eliminate the waste.

As you can see the stage is now set. We really are ready for success, right? …or are we?

So in the end I challenge you as well to “simple words”!

what I write is only my own view, right or wrong, and my broken English of course.