Progress Through Imperfection
When people start to learn what makes agile work well, it’s almost always because they’ve started to really understand the agile mindset.
In baseball, you might learn something after every single pitch. The best players learn to take the right risks, learn from mistakes quickly, and find a path forward to success based on what they’ve learned. The concept of making progress in spite of imperfection has had me thinking about a few interesting ideas recently.
Agile Looks Like the Opposite of Waterfall
If we’re honest, a lot of the waterfall ways of working were not just about big upfront design and tiered hand-offs — It is based on a lot of assumptions and risks that need manual intervention (not defined by the process) in order to create the necessary feedback loops to be successful. Said another way, we had to deceive ourselves with the potential of lies and rely on hope that the ideal product would be built properly after a lot of effort. We lie to ourselves that the ideal product will emerge.
Conversely, being agile relies on a data-driven, truth-based approach where feedback loops and steps of validation are baked into the process and approach. In Scrum, after every sprint there are validation steps to make sure the working product increment is in fact valuable and heading in the right direction. Every user story is based on a hypothesis that should be proven and approved by the Product Owner, demonstrated and reviewed with the customer that the desired outcomes have been met. Even in SAFe, there are monthly and quarterly feedback loops that ensure very large complex systems are being built properly, delivering value and eliminating risks and the potential for waste.
When I worked in a Waterfall way (in consulting in the 90s), the path from start to completion looked like a straight line and we imagined following our project plans to the letter in order to deliver the perfect product.
Progress, NOT Perfection
As the title of this post describes, agile does not claim to create perfect outcomes. I suppose one could argue that Waterfall doesn’t either (it relies on smart people intervening, renegotiated plans, and making non-standard adjustments). However, agile explicitly has standardized practices and measures that embrace the idea of “failure equals learning” and asks teams to follow a path carved by data, truths, validated assumptions, customer behaviors, and learned outcomes. At the core of the agile mindset is “iterative thinking” and the very idea that we should plan to fail fast, learn through doing, and drive progress through hypotheses and prototypes and conversations as opposed to having the goal be a perfect product with a regimented approach and hard deadlines. When teams get good at embracing this way of thinking, they look for the next interesting milestone where they can validate direction with stakeholders and customers. And the path to a great product looks more like a meandering, crooked path driven by feedback and redirections (or even steps backwards) as opposed to a straight line based on a lot of preconceived assumptions.
Imperfections FTW
When teams (and teams-of-teams and whole companies) get good at working in an agile way, they will literally see imperfections everywhere, (on purpose)! And they recognize that this helps them to know if they’re doing it right. It can sound counterintuitive. Kids, for example, are praised for getting 100% correct answers. Perfect seems like the goal for lots of things in life. A golf game. The SATs. The American Dream. Dating. Video games. Even annual reviews. But as we age and mature, we realize no humans are perfect. Exact measures are rarely the best judge of quality. There are more shades of grey in the world than what may first seem like black and white topics or issues.
So when I think about everything agile, I have a hard time imagining anything not embracing this idea of imperfections being OK and being a tool to help us measure progress against longterm goals. What agile concepts can you think of where being imperfect helps you make progress, embrace a growth mindset, and strive to improve? Here’s just a few: Teams. Standups. Sprint Reviews. Prototypes. MVPs. Communities. Product Increments. Storypoints. Teams of Teams. Risks. Dependencies. Sprint Goals. OKRs. One on Ones with your boss. Vision Statements.
The trick is to start expecting to see these imperfections and create the appropriate conversations and feedback loops to adjust your process to take advantage of them. If you do, I guarantee you will build better products sooner and satisfy your customers in more meaningful ways.
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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach 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 practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
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