Agile 1984, an anti-pattern dystopia
In 1949 George Orwell published his famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (or 1984), a fictional look into the dystopian future of the totalitarian world. In this work, he introduced concepts and forms that resonate even today, long after the events described in the story.
While reading the book, I asked myself: what if Orwell wrote his novel about the world of Agile full of disturbing anti-patterns and misconceptions?
I tried to imagine this and would like to share it with you.
Disclaimer. This text is a fantasy. All names, characters, and incidents portrayed here are fictitious. No identification with actual organizations, teams, and individuals is intended or should be inferred… unless you would want to think otherwise.
World
“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” ― George Orwell, ‘1984’
1984. Future.
The complex world of product development has been ravaged by methodology wars, framework conflicts, and community protest movements.
Edge Isle is one of the three totalitarian superstates that rule the world, together with the Lean Union and the Republic of Cascada. These superpowers are in a permanent state of warfare — sometimes two against one, sometimes all against each other. The real subject of the conflict is unknown and probably goes back to the historical misunderstanding of domains depicted on the legendary map of Cynefin.
Edge Isle is made up of several provinces:
- SALe — the largest and wealthiest province, with a strong delivery industry, huge consulting market, and total employment;
- Hope Less — once the land of romantics, who idealistically believed in a better future, today is yet another economic region;
- Disciplined Edge Isle — a highly militarized territory, the subject of dispute between three superstates;
- Annexus — the youngest province founded by fundamentalists in an attempt to annex the portion of the growing market;
- Modelfy — allegedly, a self-proclaimed region with an artificially created cultural identity.
Although the provinces sometimes use their own methods to govern their people, they all follow the same state ideology.
Ideology
“War is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” ― George Orwell, ‘1984’
The key postulates of the state were spelled out by its founding fathers in the document known as the “Manifesto for Edge Isle Development”:
EMPOWERMENT IS HIERARCHY
WORK IS VALUE
CONTROL IS TRUST
PLAN IS FUTURE
Scrumfall is the predominant ideology and philosophy of the state.
As opposed to the rival concepts of empiricism, Scrumfall is firmly based on the three pillars of obscurity, indifference, and stagnation.
Obscurity means that critical details and important facts are hidden from those performing the work as well as those receiving the work so they can be manipulated and misled whenever necessary. Obscurity enables indifference — the state of mind incapable of thinking critically, identifying problems, and recognizing deviations. Indifference enables stagnation — the absence of change — which reduces the chance of unwanted adjustments and keeps control in the hands of the state. Stagnation becomes more difficult when people are empowered or self-managing, therefore, repressions are applied the moment someone learns or tries anything new or dissenting.
Successful adoption of Scrumfall depends on the government becoming more proficient in living five values: Ambiguity, Distraction, Conspiration, Abuse, and Obedience. These values give direction to all individuals in society with regard to their work, actions, and behavior.
Society
“Big Brother is watching you!” ― George Orwell, ‘1984’
Edge Isle society is split into three distinct social classes — Inner Party, Outer Party, and devs.
Inner Party
On the top of the social system are the Inner Party members, commonly known as the Board.
They have full decision power in any aspect of everyone’s work and life. They unilaterally define the state’s Vision, Mission, and Strategy (the key elements of the state propaganda that appear on posters hanging out on every wall). They own the whole wealth of the state and distribute it yearly among projects based on detailed business cases (so-called “cLean budgeting”). They can start large and expensive transformation programs that introduce new rules and roles and aim for labor efficiency optimization.
The members of the Inner Party live in luxurious neighborhoods that cannot be entered by other classes without a good reason. They have personal servants who take care of their correspondence and help them ignore annoying requests from outside. It is merely impossible to become a member of the Inner Party due to the strict rules of VIP-Limit.
The Chief Brother is one of the founders of the Party and a mysterious leader of the state. Everyone has seen his image, which is regularly published in press releases, and everyone has read his quotes, often included in the newsletters; however, no one has ever met him in person.
Outer Party
The Outer Party performs the state administrative functions. It is responsible for implementing the state’s policies and maintaining bureaucracy.
The members of the Outer Party have different jobs, like heads, managers, leads, and supervisors. They are busy defining and distributing tasks, making plans, preparing presentations, monitoring performance, and ensuring compliance.
Also, the Outer Party includes plenty of institutions with myriads of trainers and consultants who collaborate to define, develop and grow the strategic Edge Isle Industrial Complex.
The Party Topologies are sophisticated and primarily based on the following ideas:
- Party-First thinking;
- Convey Law: “Any state that controls its population will produce processes, policies, and commands whose structure is a copy of the state’s organizational structure.”
Therefore, Outer Party consists of various units like squads, chapters, guilds, tribes, communities, departments, or workgroups — often overlapping, including, replacing, or subordinating each other, or all at once, or none of it. One thing is for sure — it is extremely hierarchical.
Although the concept of a “team” exists in Scrumfall ideology, it usually means a large group of people with the same narrow specialization who serve multiple unrelated projects (so-called cross-project teams).
Devs
The world is predominantly populated by devs, the laboring class, who spend their lives working in feature factories.
They have never learned to be autonomous, so they tolerate and never question the rules and decisions forced on them by the Party. They don’t strive for mastery since their responsibilities are clearly defined and rarely change, self-development is discouraged, and the routine tasks keep them overloaded and exhausted. The purpose of their work is work.
The life of devs is straightforward and ordinary. They commute in overcrowded release trains, produce and consume their own low-quality products, quarrel with neighbors over minor issues, and above all, gamble in table football tournaments (the only incentive offered by the Party).
Once in a while, the Party organizes mandatory events for devs to spread propaganda, ensure that all adhere to the ideology, and make everyone commit to the state’s goals and plans for the next decade. They call it Political Information, or PI.
For the government, keeping devs in control is not difficult.
Government
“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation.” ― George Orwell, ‘1984’
The Government of Edge Isle is comprised of four Ministries that supervise Trust, Value, Learning, and Quality.
The Ministry of Trust (Minitrust) concerns itself with control and subordination.
- It keeps society safe from psychological nonsense and thereby protects the Party from any disturbing questions or unpleasant feedback (this function is also known as “psychological safety”).
- It encourages citizens to hold each other accountable and, in case of deviational behavior, immediately blame, bully or report the offender to authorities.
- It maintains a comprehensive social hierarchy based on the “decision-information segregation principle,” meaning that someone in power can make decisions without being biased by any relevant facts or objective data.
The Ministry of Value (Minivalue) focuses on output and utilization.
- It steers the national mission of “doing twice the work in half the time” by setting tight deadlines, increasing pressure, promoting overtime, and engaging everyone in a sustainable race.
- It organizes waste management and ensures a high inventory level in the backlogs, sufficient waiting times in critical processes, and rich re-work opportunities after long development phases.
- It manages velocity, the state’s North Star metric, by collecting statistics, performing actual vs. target analysis, investigating the causes of the missing growth, and providing cross-team comparison reporting.
- It optimizes the objective characteristics of the products (like the number of features or sophistication of its architecture) and minimizes the influence of subjective user feedback (like satisfaction, usage, or retention)
The Ministry of Learning (Minilearn) is responsible for dogmas, standards, and conformity.
- It governs the long phases of a big design up front and ensures that every product specification is comprehensively discussed, thoroughly documented, and perfectly understood before it is passed to implementation (so-called Design Overthinking methodology)
- It creates an environment of error-free experimentation by limiting the number of allowed hypotheses to the range of opinions suggested by the Party (this method is known as “fail fast, jail faster” or “error and trial”)
- It includes the educational department that addresses professional growth and fosters the culture of “continuous certification” — the process of obtaining new certificates, credentials, and badges on an ongoing basis.
The Ministry of Quality (Miniquality) handles production failures, security leaks, and customer escalations.
- It ensures that all workers uphold the “Finishing of Done” commitment so that all features reported as done in the Sprint Review are properly finished afterward (this might include activities like testing, integration, updating, etc. that are often performed by a separate dedicated group of workers)
- It promotes BDD, bug-driven development, meaning that bugs and defects are introduced early in development as a stimulating measure for the testers; a popular slogan reads: “A defect cannot be inspected into a product or service; it must be built into it.”
- It secures state technical debt by protecting the code from refactoring and reducing the environmental footprint of automation.
The typical jargon used in the government’s documents and on the Ministries’ floors is based on Newspeak.
Newspeak
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” ― George Orwell, ‘1984’
Newspeak is a new language introduced by the Party to create a sense of transformation while protecting the old patterns of traditional structures and processes. Not only does it play a key role in internal propaganda, but it is also actively used to demonstrate the power and progress of the state to its rivals and partners.
The vocabulary of Newspeak is continuously extended and revised. Multiple institutions work hard to maintain ambiguity and trivialize the original meaning of the words.
Here are a few examples of agile Newspeak:
- Scrum Master — project coordinator and team secretary (sometimes serves as a hidden agent of the Party and helps impose control over the devs)
- Product Owner — usually a low-rank clerk responsible for backlog maintenance and work sign-off
- Roadmap — feature-based project plan; according to a common belief, it can reliably predict the future
- Sprint Review — project status meeting
- Ceremonies — regular events where developers dance around the product owner or receive awards from the Stakeholder Academy
- Sprint Goal — an aspiration to complete a collection of unrelated work items within a limited timeframe
- User Story — any work task
- Storypoint — the ultimate measure of progress and success; something “delivered” by developers
- Kanban — any board with columns and tasks
- MVP — the first version of the product with the maximum set of features that can be fitted into a small budget until a tight deadline
Newspeak helps to control the thought through language, but doublethink directly controls the thought.
Doublethink
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” ― George Orwell, ‘1984’
A combination of uncombinable is often referred to as a hybrid: hybrid project management, a hybrid organization, hybrid methodology… A hybrid is something that exists on its own, something that becomes objective reality. It is not harmony but also not a conflict.
When you use Scrumbut, you believe in adopting Scrum but also accept that you don’t follow its rules.
When something is almost done, it is kind of done, but not really. After all, there is no Definition of Almost Done.
You can do agile and be Agile, and you are convinced that it is the same while thinking it is different. You can even agile it and be right too!
Can you imagine Agile PMO? Yes, it manages agile projects!
Can you fix a Bug Story? Sure, why not!
BizUXDevSecOps makes so much sense and, on the other hand, does not make sense at all.
A Proxy Product Owner owns the product that is owned by someone else. The same is true for a Product Owner if you doublethink deeper.
Telescreens
“He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head, you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness, they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking.” — George Orwell, ‘1984’
Telescreens, usually in the form of jirascreens, are the means of surveillance that control everyone, everything, and everywhere.
All projects are equipped with jirascreens so they may be monitored and measured at any time.
Comprehensive and restrictive workflows ensure no one can break a rule or miss any step of the defined standardized process. With its rich set of fields and input forms, the jirascreens can capture all detailed information that is carefully checked, classified, and assessed.
Jirascreens are also effectively used by the members of the Party to communicate requirements specifications and distribute work tasks to the teams. Anyone can get an assignment (in Newspeak, a “user story”) that becomes a subject for immediate implementation (but does not cancel commitments on the assignments received earlier).
Every day people are obliged to stand in front of a large board projected by the jirascreen and watch how the Product Owner interrogates them about the work status, introduces new tasks, and dictates technical decisions. This act is known as a daily Fifteen Minutes Hate ritual.
Jirascreens are employed by the state to ensure public SAFe-ty and protect the Party from ideological crimes.
Thoughtcrime
“Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.” — George Orwell, ‘1984’
Any deviation from the approved norms is a crime.
- A transformation of any aspect of life without an authorized transaction of the Party is an act of rebellion — and is a crime.
- An attempt to become self-managing beyond provided boundaries is an abuse of power — and is a crime.
- Wasting time for understanding the problem instead of immediately focusing all resources on solutions is an offense of efficiency — and is a crime.
- Saying “no” to a request from a higher Party member, even with valid reasoning and all respect, is a breach of subordination — and is a crime.
- Seeking simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is considered parasitism, idleness, or incompetence — and is a crime.
- Following the radical movement of Extreme Programming (especially participating in its pair programming sessions or joining its unit test cell) is classified as software extremism — and is a crime.
The criminals are interrogated, punished, and in the most severe cases sent into Room 101.
Room 101
“You asked me once what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.” — George Orwell, ‘1984’.
Room 101 is a chamber located in the basement of the Ministry of Trust. Every criminal here is subjected to their own worst nightmare, fear, or phobia.
In this room, the Party employs the creative repertoire of “Limitating Structures”, the thirty-three torture methods often connected into strings and coming with multiple riffs and variations. Among them:
- Death by Meeting — Participating in a long boring, irrelevant meeting, mostly filled with monotonous presentations and hundreds of overloaded slides
- Loops of Wisdom — Listening to fanatic repetitions of the “Scrumfall Guide” over and over and over again
- The Game of Chase — Being forced to collect all signatures in an infinite product release approval process.
- 1-2-Boom! — Being the only one responsible for deploying to production a set of untested changes in a giant monolithic application.
- Wicked Correspondence — Trying to understand the point in a never-ending email thread and never reaching its bottom.
- Brainwashing — Collecting all possible ideas, discussing, clustering, voting, and prioritizing them… only to see how they get washed away and never followed up on.
- Blame Game Retrospective — Justifying yourself to the peers who, while pointing fingers at you, shout out your faults, mistakes, and weaknesses.
Story
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” — George Orwell, ‘1984’.
Winston Smith, the main character of the story, is a quiet thin man who lives in a run-down neighborhood. He works for the Ministry of Value as a Product Owner, where he is busy writing and re-writing user stories to conform to the state’s ever-changing requests and priorities. He secretly hates the Party and its ideology and dreams of a world driven by purpose and continuous improvement.
While working in the Ministry, he observes Julia, a young dark-hair girl who is an enthusiastic participant of the town hall meetings and a Scrum Master. Winston often spots her walking past him and suspects her of being a Party spy who controls his accountabilities. One day, Julia suddenly bumps into Winston, and while he helps her to stand up, she secretly slips a sticky note into his hand with the only word: “empiricism”. Winston is shocked but also encouraged.
Winston and Julia start looking for opportunities to see each other. At first, they discreetly communicate in public spaces like crowded office hallways and coffee corners — anything else would be too dangerous. After some months, when Winston visits a remote part of the building, he discovers a meeting room that is not yet equipped with surveilling jirascreens — a perfect place for one-on-ones with Julia.
In their secret room, Julia tells him that she is also against the Party, but she would prefer to quit and escape rather than start a revolution. Although Julia is an activist in the Movement for High Predictability, it is just her masking — instead of objecting to the rules you can’t change, it is safer to pretend that you follow them. Winston and Julia spend hours and days talking about empiricism, flow, outcomes, empowerment, engagement, and many other things forbidden by the state.
Once, while Winston is waiting for Julia to come, outside the window, he observes a woman, probably a developer, tunefully and bravely singing a melodic song:
“…Let your Scrum fall
When it crumbles
We will stand tall
Face it all together…”
Her voice transports him to another reality where free passionate people engage in pragmatic collaboration and create valuable products by experimenting and learning. Winston thinks: “if there is hope, it lies in the devs”.
One day, Winston is approached by O’Brien, his superior from the Inner Party. O’Brien gives him a hint that he is a member of the mysterious Steering Committee that plans a revolutionary change program, and Winston and Julia need to come to see him in his offices. When they arrive, O’Brien shares with them the confidential Implementation Roadmap and initiates them into the Change Agents of The Great Transformation. He also gives them a copy of the heretical work “The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game” by Jeff Ken, the principal enemy of the state.
When Winston and Julia meet again, they enthusiastically read and discuss the Guide trying to fill its framework with their own ideas, concepts, and contexts. Suddenly, they get caught by their direct managers and accused of neglecting their duties, which is a crime. Winston and Julia get separated.
Hours later, Winston finds himself trapped deep inside the Ministry of Trust, in a small room without windows and beverages. O’Brien arrives and reveals himself as a chief people development officer. Initially, Winston hopes that O’Brien can help him to escape but soon realizes that O’Brien deceived him. He was there to break his spirit and align him with the Party ideology. During the following months, Winston is tortured by compliance courses, daily status reports, and studying PMBOOK.
O’Brien wants to change Winston’s mind, so it is capable of doublethink. To test the results of his efforts, he holds four fingers extended and asks:
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Four,” answers Winston.
“And if the Party says it is not four but five — then how many?” — asks O’Brien again.
“Four,” repeats Winston hopelessly.
O’Brien understands that Winston failed the Confidence Vote test and takes him to Room 101.
Here Winston is forced to confront his deepest fear — unhappy customers. The room is dark and quiet. On the large conference table is only one object — a bulky box with the shiny title “PRODUCT” on it. O’Brien explains that inside the box is the most horrible software the world has ever seen: poor quality, awful design, tons of useless features, simply garbage and disaster. Behind the room’s door are the customers who have been expecting to get their product for a very long time but were only fed with promises and are now hungry to finally see and try it.
Winston’s face turns frightened.
“First, they will open the box and realize they have been fooled,” says O’Brien. “Then they will start asking difficult questions, right in your face, accusing you of functional defects, poor performance, and clunky UX.”
Winston hears the blood singing in his ears.
“Enraged,” continues O’Brien, “they will scream and shout, write awful reviews and send your NPS to the bottom. And finally, the worst will happen — they will leave quietly and never use your product again.”
Now scared to death, Winston frantically shouts:
“NOOOOO! Stop it, please! I will do whatever you want! It is Julia! She is responsible! It is her fault!”
O’Brien glances at the clock. They managed to get there sooner than he thought, just within the timebox…
One year passed. Winston sits in the “Conversation” café, alone, gazing at his empty glass. On the table in front of him is a sheet of paper with his name and the bold title “POPM 5.0 — Certified Product Owner/Product Manager”. The jirascreen on the wall displays the recent burndown, smooth and steady. A ray of sunlight cuts through the window and softly touches his face. He smiles. He knows he has been healed now. He loves Scrumfall.
The story ends, the life goes on.
In the dystopian world of George Orwell, we see: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”.
In the real world of product development, however, it is unlikely we can control the future. But we can try to influence it based on what we learned in the past and by what we act upon in the present.
Don’t let your Scrum fall.
