Is “Teaching to the Test” Bad?
If you’re a parent in the twenty-first century, you might have had to deal with this topic. The question you might ask is something like this:
Is my kid being taught how to “get by” on mandatory state tests or are they actually learning what they should?
The next question you might ask me is “Uh, hey Brian what does this have to do with all the agile stuff you normally talk about?”
Well, I read a few excellent things this week that all had something in common. The first was from Jim Highsmith, one of the 17 authors of the Agile Manifesto. He shared a great article “Belief and Behavior: A Two-Way Street” in which he asks the very poignant question, “Does belief (our mindset) drive behavior (our practice) — or does behavior drive belief?”
He says if you implement behaviors (practices) in the right way, they lead to belief (and mindset) changes. But, the key part is in the “doing it the right way”. We must reflect, adapt, and iterate. If it’s just following the rules, mechanical Scrum by the book, not understanding why or not inspecting and adapting, not building feedback loops to learn or think iteratively… then we’re stuck in this “teaching to the test” mentality, I think.
There’s a great quote he shares in his post that sums it up nicely.
“It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than think your way into a new way of acting.”
— Dr. Jerry Sternin, Harvard Business School
I read a few other things talking about the “Is agile dead?” stuff again. A lot of the noise lately is in the inherent mismatch between large company’s belief in where they think they are in a transformation and where they actually are. Very smart employees are disenfranchised because they recognize the symptoms of poorly design organizational structures, too many dependencies, poorly defined product strategies, middle managers being forceful or literal with senior leaders words instead of recognizing systematic changes that need to happen and not willing to challeng assumptions about how things have always been done and escalating and discussing those things. The ones who are complacent enough to just do what they’re told and accept those ugly challenges are the ones who remain.
Systems thinking, value streams, and learning organizations are wonderful concepts (ask my friends Daryl Kulak and Jack Maher about them, they’ve authored books on the topics), but many large organizations are just applying layers of “agile paint” on top of their existing dysfunctions and people are noticing that it’s not working. Organizations are acting like they are “teaching to the test” and play dumb like they’re doing the right things to become an agile company, but the reality is often that it is just not true. They may not even care. They’re happy to say they’re being agile, but not doing the hard work that it requires to actually embody it, embrace it, and do it well.
I’m also very excited to order more books (muahahaha more books) and just received a book I should’ve owned and read ages ago, Scrum Mastery by Geoff Watts. In it, page 219 calls out a common anti-pattern in agility today, in a section called “Assess Your Way to Maturity”. He poses the question “So how agile is your team?” which is a really common question. Companies are either buying agile surveys or making up their own “are you doing agile well” surveys which tend to lead people to… try to manipulate the system more than actually learn how to be more agile. The original Nokia Test he mentions is a great example (one of the first such corporate agile assessments). One topic in that very simple agile assessment was “iterations” and so in order to score higher, some teams at Nokia just switched to one week iterations to increase that portion of the score, completely missing the point of actually thinking iteratively!
So what’s the fundamental problem not being solved?
You can’t skip the why. You can’t avoid the actual learning. If you want to truly be good at anything, it takes hard work. And that, in the case of schooling in America, means you need to go a bit out of your way to figure out what you’re supposed to learn and do what you need to really learn it. (you’ll need to know it for the SATs, ACTs, or in college and life!) It’s not enough to just be prepared for the test. Now, teachers have a very hard job. They should be paid way more than they are and I don’t envy what they have to do. But being a student today is not unlike being a team member in the big machinations of Corporate America. You can do the bare minimum to get by without actually becoming great at the thing you’re supposed to be learning to do your job well. You don’t even really have to understand it well!
This core thing that’s commonly being missed is the belief system that Jim Highsmith was alluding to. And in the modern ways of working, that’s the Agile Mindset. Too many companies are applying agile paint and not forcing a more thorough understanding of the new ways of thinking that go with the new ways of working. You can fake being good at Scrum without understanding why we do it. Being agile isn’t the point. Being Scrum isn’t the point. Passing the test isn’t the point. What’s lost is the hardcore effort it takes to really understand the belief system, the why behind the new ways of working. Which, if I’m being really honest and harsh means people really need to care a little more about the way they do their jobs. Take some pride in what you do. Dig deeper. Seek to really understand, not just take instructions and mimic. Ask why you’re being asked to do the things you do. Ask why we’re working in this new way. Ask what’s the point? And actually care about the answer.
This impetus to really “get it” is what lies at the heart of the Agile Mindset. This philosophy, culture, or mindset is not just nice to have… it’s WHY we’ve decided that the way we had been working for 100 years since the first and second Industrial Revolutions was not geared toward our Information Age and it is most certainly not prepared to deal with the pace that our new Artificial Intelligence movement will have upon the ways of working.
So, as an Agile Coach, I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a long time. How do we help people on teams know if they’re working in an agile way? What things do they need to learn? What new ideas or techniques or concepts do they need to learn to start to “get it”? And it’s just not learning Scrum, or Kanban, or the Scaled Agile Framework. I think people are starting to understand that. But it’s a LOT more than that too.
The Agile Mindset is a combination of the Agile Manifesto’s values and principles, Modern Agile’s guiding principles, the Scrum Values, XP Values and Principles, Lean Thinking, Design Thinking, Lean UX, DevOps, and Systems Thinking. It’s everything about how we work today: the modern ways of thinking and the modern ways of working.
And for a long time, I wished there was a way to write down a short list of the things you need to know to really understand all that. But unfortunately, just like the very first line of the Agile Manifesto says, “We are uncovering better ways of developing software (delivering value) by doing it and helping others do it.” which means you really only learn this stuff and truly appreciate it by getting your hands dirty, being on a team, and embracing the whole definition of the Agile Mindset.
How can I measure whether my team has the Agile Mindset or not?
So after years of working with hundreds of teams and dozens of other agile coaches who have taught me the subtleties of the Agile Mindset, I have finally produced an Agile Mindset based assessment tool. I call it “Measure the Mindset” and it’s ready for some early adopters if you’re interested. Please sign up to be on the wait list and to be notified when it’s available to the general public at MeasureTheMindset.com
And if you don’t mind working with me on an early release of the product, giving me feedback, and getting early access to the tool, I’m ready to sign up a limited number of early adopters. Find me on LinkedIn or find time to talk to me here:
If you enjoyed this, please clap and share. It means a lot to know my work on this blog is read and used by agilists out there in the world.
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.
How well is your team “being agile”? Find out at MeasureTheMindset.com. Our self-assessment tool focuses on 24 topics of modern ways of working including the Agile Manifesto and Modern Agile basics, XP, Design Thinking, Lean, DevOps, and Systems Thinking. It comes with deep links into the Practical Agilist Guidebook to aid continuous improvement in teams of any kind.
The Practical Agilist Guidebook is a reference guide that gives easy to understand advice as if you had an agile coach showing you why the topic is important, what you can start doing about it, scrum master tips, AI prompts to dig deeper, and tons of third party references describing similar perspectives. Learn more at PracticalAgilistGuidebook.com
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