agile and rockandroll
Stop Talking and Start Creating
If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. ~Albert Einstein
I’M AN AGILE COACH in the world of software development. I’m also a musician, mostly a guitarist. When I’m not helping organizations improve how they deliver software I love listening to and playing music. In my twenties, I played music on stage somewhere just about every week. During those ten years I had the opportunity to play in a few bands from stages in front of tens of people to stages in front of thousands.
Over the years, I have made many special memories as well as learned a few lessons on music, friendship and life. Some of those lessons have carried over for me into the world of business and software development. I would like to share one of them with you here today.
THE LAST BAND I PLAYED IN was a favorite of mine. Close to ten years of searching for “the perfect band” was finally realized for me in an Americana outfit named Maida Vale. A group of old friends from Tallahassee plus one new friend from Chicago decided the artistic vision and personal life timing was right to form a new band. We had the skills and experience to get off the ground fast and hit the music scene hard. The only problem was we were almost too experienced for our own good.
In the beginning days of this band, we decided that weekly band meetings would be the right way to get the band started. We had ideas to vet, decisions to make, and strategy to formulate. Our dreams and goals were big but if we worked smart we could make some substantial progress in the first year. So as successful working professionals during the day it seemed natural to port many of our corporate job practices to the band environment. Our weekly meetings were quite formal. Kitchen tables were transformed into make-shift conference spaces. We had meeting facilitators and note-takers. We had fancy document templates for capturing detailed meeting minutes, next steps, action items and owners. We had our macbooks and iPhones, screens all brightly glowing against our faces. We had our moleskines (we were artists after all, if not a bit tech-geeky). I could go on.
You might be thinking this sounds very organized, professional even. And that was the intent — to be serious and focused so we could accomplish big goals in a short amount of time. The only problem was we had barely written a single song let alone played a single show. Sure, there were lively debates about who we were artistically and how we would translate that vision into music, branding, recordings, shows, merchandise and more. And there was some value in that. But without an audience or fanbase yet it was really just theory and bloviating. And it was sucking the life out of the band before it could even get off the ground.
Fortunately, after a month or so of these meetings, an older, wiser member of the band cracked. He couldn’t take one more stuffy meeting. He rightly identified the problem and proposed a radical change of direction. We would…wait for it…play music. And in writing and playing music we would start to learn who we really were as a band and what we were actually capable of creating.
Good music comes out of people playing together, knowing what they want to do and going for it. You have to sweat over it and bug it to death. You can’t do it by pushing buttons and watching a TV screen.
~Keith Richards
FAST FORWARD TO LIFE as an Agile Coach and I now look back on this experience and chuckle. We were so earnest, but we were trying to create the perfect product on paper. And while some of this was just the usual chaos of people coming together to form a new team and understand who they are, at a certain point we seemed to have forgotten what we started the team for — to make music.
Many teams and organizations building software products fall into a similar trap. They spend months huddled around conference tables, laptops glowing, engaged in lively debate over what the product will do, how it will be designed, and more. And yet no one really knows if any of these ideas are even viable. Before long, the life is sucked out of the team. People start showing up to meetings late, cynical and disconnected from the once animating product vision.
Entering into such an atmosphere as a coach can be tough. The apathy is often palpable. The remedy though can often be quite simple… build something.
You don’t necessarily need to throw out your vision statement, nor your ideas on what to build or how to build it. But you should start building something now. And as you start building, you can start validating your ideas about the product. You will then have something concrete to judge and use to make your next decision.
As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications. ~Dr. David Parnas
WHAT I’VE DESCRIBED for both the band and software development team scenarios is the trap of the predictive process and the solution of the empirical process. In the predictive process we attempt to plan our every move in advance believing we can craft the perfect plan on paper that when followed will lead to success. Even the best-laid plans though are no match for reality. Thus, with the empirical process, we plan (albeit with fewer details), and we then quickly build something so we can study the results and decide our next action. It is this cycle of feedback where we plan, build, inspect and adapt that produces far better results. Of course, the empirical approach is what Agile thinking and practices are rooted in.
So if you’re tired of seemingly endless meetings and debates, if you’re tired of editing another version of a 200-page requirements document, if you’re tired of presentations to apathetic audiences, consider stopping and actually building something. Even something very simple and small can be surprisingly eye opening and tell you if you’re on the right path or not.
