Rethinking How We Might Start
A lot of us were stuck. Agility uneasily coexisted with existing mindsets. Opening up conversations were tricky because topics meant different things depending on our existing point of view. Which led to the most common problem I was tempted to say in regards to command and control management… But realized… I was being unfair, not because it didn’t apply to prevailing models of nearly all large corporations I’ve worked among, but because it also applied to most of us who worked there, including at times myself!
Which was odd, because the greatest joys came from being fluid, being able to adapt and jump into new things without fear or at least without enough fear that would prevent a start. *
And as clashing layers of mindsets became too much and most ignored the noise, even developers agile was initially for seemed to want to be left alone, left out of more meetings, left out of “user value” in false form, and left out of collaboration.
The beauty I hope is a couple things, maybe a possible third, which I’ll start with first. It’s that we don’t have to know a whole lot to dive in… To get started as a beginner and realize we’ll get value in learning from the experience, from challenges that will actually benefit my / our lives. And a challenge can invigorate. Consider Carol Dweck’s views. It was more about my attitude to difficulty that had gotten in my way. If I saw it as a comment on who I basically was, then something difficult meant the problem was me. If there was the possibility to change and improve through engagement and effort, then why not engage and see what was possible to try that helped.
Second, during a period of decompression combined with a longing for “better ways,” it began to feel more possible to start with a team, with the values we chose, not the ones inherited or proscribed. Not best practices, not necessarily all agile principles and values, not company values, but aspects of all of these, whittled down to a few we could actually focus on and try to do well. To do what seemed meaningful to us, to acheive our purpose, together.
Because it seemed we were fragmenting. I couldn’t tell if things were different, but some of the most talented people I came in contact with were either deeply immersed in agile or thought nothing much of it at all. I still wondered if there were ways we could help each other and ran across this from @johncutlefish.
Could this be helpful? A lot of those we interact with seem to work in the same territory we say we want to. They don’t lose it when scope exceeds time, they iterate and produce good work within the constraints they have. Why would that be any different for software? Also, they may not be able to see that as easily in us. These principles may even be hard to detect, because we have so many internal challenges! So, could part of the answer become to relax our mindset, to go with the current sometimes, as much as we liked to disrupt for the better. Get together with other teams and see how we could move forward, recognizing there would be adjustments along the way, and to help others see that too?
Third, why not create post agile / new ways of working in a form that could be consumed by others? Could we try this ourselves? What scared us? What could we safely try? More broadly, because the problem wasn’t the problem by itself… but that we were operating from different paradigms. We may be at a crossroads, where we’ve been sticking to the outer boundaries. It wasn’t really where we wanted to be. Isn’t it better to see the entire flow and participate fully? Can we return to trying for something slightly better than where we are?
As one example, FAST agile, created by Ron Quartel and other experimenters, has started distilling something new, open, and re-invigorated. Perhaps better ways began with finding the important threads in our moment, for the group we found ourselves in… sometimes in between things we thought were important. How do we raise these questions of what actually matters to us? How could our group work well together?
Possible topics to think through with new or existing teams:
- What are the others on my team good at? Can they can help lead, encourage, and teach us more?
- What are the different range of ideas we have on particular topics? Can we understand the value of each perspective when there are opposing views? Can we agree to not let that get in the way of safe experiments?
- For myself, can I practice questions as the first reaction and be curious, instead of immediately responding? And to expect things will go differently than they have with other teams… because we are actually people! People, in different places in our experience, with some closer, some further away from our own views, and some with more to learn (raises hand), but ALL with valuable perspectives.
- Does Open Space inspired FAST Agile help us move towards some of the things we say we believe?
- What are other ways of working that we value?
That’s pretty much it. Co-creating our future post agility seems so much more powerful than maintaining beliefs that keep us separate.
* And maybe it’s ok, to feel a little crappy during an experiment. Maybe not ideal; it’s cool if the experiment’s fun while we do it. But sometimes a workout isn’t fully pleasant every moment. I may get out of breath or a little sore, but those aren’t indicators of what necessarily should be done, or whether or not it’s working…
References (see links above):
- Carol Dweck, Self-Theories
- John Cutler, tweets and longer pieces
- Agile Manifesto
- Ron Quartel, FAST Agile
- Open Space Technology
