3rd in the Series: Foresight over Failing Fast
In a series of publications, Consequential is exploring ideas for new values for going beyond working code in agile product development. You can read our overview and introduction to this series here.
The original agile manifesto and its values pointed out many of the problems with software development that were present at the time. In creating our ideas for new values, we looked to do the same. Tech has eaten the world, and for this to be a positive thing we want to reframe and refocus what we value in its creation and how that can impact what gets put into the world.
In the spirit of our goal, disruption for the common good, we present our ideas for 5 values for the future of agile product development:
- Stakeholder conscious over customer-centric
- Focusing on objectives over measuring output
- Foresight over failing fast
- Collective responsibility over disjointed disempowerment
- Critical questioning over rigid rituals
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Let’s look in more depth at:
From Failing Fast to Foresight
Is the old tech mantra of moving fast and breaking things still relevant?
Business leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and others have openly admitted they never stopped to think about the consequences of their technology when they were first creating it. And this attitude filtered through the industry.
Consequences happen, regardless if we pay attention to them or not. Consequences can range from minor issues like bugs that show people’s data in a pay form, or bad user experience design or dark patterns. Or consequences can be major, like a company’s decision to go to market with a facial recognition software at the point where it’s only been trained on data sets of white people.
This mantra is about getting what we create out to people as quickly as possible, seeing what works, and then iterating it. There’s value in doing this, but only when balanced with an awareness of where you can fail and where you cannot. Knowing this is all about context — in heart surgery, failing is not an option, but in creating a gaming app some iteration can be ideal.
The problem is that in many organisations, value hasn’t been placed on the reflection needed to determine this context. In our experience and our research, one of main reasons there are so many unintended consequences is because reflection on biases, blindspots, and foresight on the consequences of a product on all stakeholders wasn’t built into the agile process.
As a result, companies have suffered massive reputational damage, missed opportunities to harness human diversity to solve new problems, and created products that were not as good as they could have been.
So we ask: Does that mantra still work for us? What are we breaking, and will it be damaged beyond repair? What’s the collateral damage across all stakeholders, including future generations? Is there a better way?
Teams can learn to take the time to step back and to look at the whole picture, to ask themselves ‘what if?’, and ‘what about?’. As an industry, we should be celebrating this ability to think ahead as much as we celebrate the ability to move fast.
The next 20 years of tech product development
It’s been almost 20 years since The Agile Manifesto was published, and it has changed so many aspects of how we work and create tech products. It’s in the pursuit of Continuous Improvement that we explore here the role of responsibility in agile and ideas for new agile values. We hope our ideas can help to positively shape the next 20 years of agile product development.
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Consequential does both big ‘I’ and little ‘i’ innovation to change the existing business landscape. This means we focus on large-scale systems change within business and tech, and strategy and innovation within individual organisations to build their businesses and products in more responsible ways.
