Agile Thinking In Our Life
Don’t plan, do!
If you always wait for the perfect time to take action, read this.
During my exchange year in the US, we had a guest speaker in our Entrepreneurship class. He was the founder of a very successful local pizzeria. He shared insights about his business and the strategies he was implementing to manage it effectively. In the end, he noted that the most frequently asked question from aspiring entrepreneurs was “how to start?” and his answer was “just start”. It was so simple that at first, it seemed pointless and even ironic to me. It took me years to understand the invaluable meaning of “just start”.
I always used to plan and wait for the best moment (when I would think that everything is perfect and in place) to take action. This may seem reasonable at first but it made me postpone a lot of important decisions hence actions in my life. The fear that something will not go as planned or something will not be as good as expected has always held me back from taking the first step.
When I started to learn Product Management, I understood that this behavior is typical not only for people but also in many companies’ product creation processes (as the saying goes companies are their people).
According to Marty Cagan’s “Inspired”, there are certain root causes of failed product efforts and if we summarize, one of the biggest problems is a lot of planning and too late validation of a product or a feature with customers. This leads to a waste of resources (money, time, etc.) and unjustified hopes as people get attached to their plans and products, making it hard to give up on them after putting in effort as they may find themselves trapped in Sunk Cost Fallacy. As can be assumed besides the material losses this is also emotionally draining. In practice, this is the case when companies invest time and money in thorough planning and strategizing without leaning on customers’ feedback but after release, they realize that the customers don’t like the product as it doesn’t solve their problems and hence is not valuable for them.
According to Eric Ries the author of “Lean Startup”, startups mainly fail because they heavily concentrate on a good plan, well-crafted strategy, and thorough market research rather than the execution part. Often, this doesn’t lead to success as startups operate in such uncertainty that the only way to lighten up that uncertain environment and get some insights is to regularly take action and create at least a small working piece of product/feature, make it available for customers or a group of them, collect feedback, and make improvements based on that.
This is where Agile runs the show.
In simple words, Agile Project Management means breaking up a big project into small, measurable parts and working on them. As we work, we keep collaborating with stakeholders and making the product better based on their feedback. Each part starts with time-boxed planning, followed by execution and evaluation. This is repeated until the project is completed.
In Agile it is okay not to have the complete and perfect version in the very beginning and there is a common understanding that starting small can prevent further unnecessary expenses and that improvements take time as they should be based on real feedback to provide a clear value.
Agile encourages “fail fast”-that is to determine a failing project early on until too much money and time has been spent. That’s why it encourages regular releases of small “parts” of the project and feedback-based improvements, rather than a “long planning-completing the whole project behind the curtains-release” sequence.
From the very first moment that I learned about Agile, I thought how interestingly it resonates with our lives.
Some of us always wait for the right moment and plan every detail until everything is “perfect”. We don’t start that business, we don’t apply for that job, we don’t start learning something new, we don’t apply for that program, we don’t start that relationship wasting our time and energy on planning and preparing ourselves, because we want everything to be perfectly completed “before release”. Whereas, if we follow the Agile Methodology we will start small, watch the process, analyze it, make improvements based on analysis, and eventually decide if we want to go on with that business, career, relationship, etc.
When planning takes a long time, by the time we are ready to implement our plan it may already not be actual or we might have made a critical mistake in the planning stage, and to fix we may have to go back through all the process which is more costly and timely or we may have to give up on the thing we put in so much effort into․ Whereas, if we had done some little work in the beginning, executed it, made improvements and further decisions based on its performance, it would have been more efficient.
Over time I started to apply Agile in my life and it was liberating. Starting this Medium channel was one of its perks. If I had this idea a couple of years ago I would have not done it until now. It still took me several months to take an act of courage to start (accepting that it does not have to be perfect on the first try) and see how it goes but this is still a progress.
Agile taught me that it is okay if something is not that good at first and it takes time to improve. To have the best version of something there should be a not-best version of it and some insights on how you can make it better. To have that not-best version of something we should “just start” without blocking ourselves with expectations of perfectionism.
Eventually, the practice makes the master, not the plan. Therefore, stop wasting time waiting until everything is perfect, take a small action, and “just start” something.
This is, of course, a broad overview of Agile Methodology based on my viewpoint, and I have only highlighted the aspects that I believe have relevance to our daily lives.
