AI and Agile Have A Lot in Common
AI Transformations Fail the Same Way Agile Transformations Fail
I had the privilege of attending AI Rising, my first AI conference this week in Columbus. (Thanks Dan GreenLeaf and Elizabeth Tolia!) Of course everyone is still learning and it’s near impossible to know everything going on because AI is exploding so fast… but there were a few really big a-ha moments and some very pleasant surprises for me as an Agile Coach.
It’s Still Early, Go Learn!
I learned a new phrase: FOBO. The Fear of Being Obsolete. This resonates with so many people. Will AI take my job?
Some of us are going to turn into that old mainframe guy on the team that just doesn’t want anything to change anymore. Can we just keep doing what we’re doing and get paid? Sadly, the answer is “no” more often than not.
You will not lose your job to AI. But you will lose your job to someone else who has learned how to use AI.
I tend to avoid long podcasts. But I listened to a 90 minute long podcast last week from the Kevin Rose show. He had on the two guys from “AI For Humans”, Gavin Purcell and Kevin Pereira. There were so many interesting things discussed in this episode, new tech and ideas and speculation about the future… but one thing in particular stood out to me. Kevin Rose suggested the idea that the most important skill going forward is the ability and willingness to tinker. New AI technologies will continue to be released and it’s bound to accelerate. The other thing they said more than once in the show is this other great observation. After reviewing super impressive features of AI products, they said “…and today is the worst any of these technologies will ever be.”
Some people have said that agile is a fad. And with the downturn in the tech and agile job market, people might be starting to believe that. However, if you look at the core of the Agile Mindset, it’s hard to believe anything about being agile will ever go out of style. So, it’s here to stay. The market will rebound. And importantly, it’s never a bad time to learn something new that makes you better at working in an agile way. This tenet of improving yourself and learning things that matter is exactly what will help you meet the oncoming AI wave as well.
The sessions I attended at the conference helped me draw another conclusion that impacts my career working with agile transformations.
Agile Experience Will Help You Advise AI Adoption
I don’t know why this wasn’t already apparent to me. It’s obvious now in retrospect. But in the same way that agile is a tool (process) to accomplish business value, so is AI. As they say:
Agile is not the goal, nor is it your strategy. AI, too, is neither the goal nor the strategy! If your business is to sell lemonade, AI can help you sell more, but it is not your strategy.
Thanks to Joseph Ours for letting me paraphrase and repeat the lemonade quote. It’s a great reminder.
There are so many other similarities, which may become obvious to you if you start thinking about AI and Agile in the same context. There will be many opportunities to leverage AI technologies, but it comes with a cost. So the right questions to ask include “What are the outcomes and is the effort worth it?” Also, consider how might any potential AI efforts be prioritized?
Are you even measuring what you aim to improve with your AI project?
There is chaos being caused by the accelerated pace of change in AI. It’s easy for companies to lose their minds, chasing shiny pennies without really even stopping to ask big obvious questions first.
As a consultant (or Agile Coach for that matter), your business acumen and diligence in understanding the role business strategy plays in transformations is crucial. If, for example, a company does not have a well-articulated strategy and vision statement or is not product-driven nor has a customer-driven focus to the way they work, there is a really good chance the transformation will fail. Many agile transformations fail simply because they tried to apply agile everywhere at once without adequate leadership support or embracing iterative thinking and without unwinding the organizational challenges that complicate the ability to deliver products quickly. The exact same challenges will harm any efforts around applying artificial intelligence tools and technologies.
Other common challenges worth considering. Who will be trained on the new AI tools and techniques? Are there silos in your teams? Are there silos in your data strategy? Are you seeking early success stories? What’s the smallest project you can do that will build trust and confidence in these new ways of working?
One last thing that occurred to me that may be even more impactful in the world of AI than it maybe was in Agile. What if, just like in early agile transformations, you only train and give the tools and support for AI to a small number of early adopter teams? What happens if those teams become wildly productive, as perhaps is expected? How might that unfairly impact the HR review processes, comparing performance among peers? The impact of AI has the potential to create big leaps of productivity, but it will require some effort to properly train, educate, and prepare a finite number of teams to properly embrace and use the technology. During an agile transformation, there was likely an impact as well, delivering features sooner, eliminating waste, and increasing quality. But with AI, it has the potential to be undeniably more impactful. How will your company handle that?
I look forward to applying all of my learnings from agile transformations and finding ways to use that knowledge to the benefit of my clients as the wave of AI takes over and drowns us in new ideas, new tools, and new ways of working.
If I’m right, we’re already more prepared than I thought we were!
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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach and AI Advisor who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the complexity of the Agile and AI universes into easy to understand and simple common sense.
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