Wax on, Wax off — Part 2
So you have read part 1. You know we used the Karate Kid, and you know that from all indicators the day was a success. Even 4 weeks later (to the day), this is evident. The relief of having the day finished I expected to find did not eventuate. I was expecting to spend the rest of my year kicking back and drinking cocktails by the pool, but, instead quite the opposite has occurred. I often find myself waking in the middle of the night as I have felt the presence of a metaphorical guillotine hanging over me whilst trying to keep up the momentum of what we started.
So now to the what we did. For those of you who are not aware, here at ING Direct we use a framework called PACE. It is a combination of Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile. If you would like to know more please take a look at — https://youtu.be/6NpjOH8WCvQ
The problem with this approach is that, well, it’s common, and most of us, myself included, have had mixed experiences with the above mentioned frameworks. My personal view is that if you haven’t felt the pain that a misused agile implementation can bring, well, you haven’t really lived.
That was sarcasm by the way. I had hair before my first “agile” project. I did not by the time it finished. The problem is real, you can take the word of my earnest, follically challenged self on that. The ghosts of transformations past do live in our teams. Quite often the simplest term is enough to bring terror, anger or even worse — zombieism, as the poor person goes into the process of shutting down whilst flashbacks run through their mind of their last “agile encounter”. As a general rule, following the wisdom of Henrik Kniberg from Lean from the Trenches, I try to avoid the buzzwords wherever possible. That’s the easy part. What I was not sure about was how one could take the next step, from simply removing buzzwords to getting people to learn, and practice something new without explaining what it is.
Thankfully the answer is simpler than you may think — let them work it out themselves.
Well that and games. Lot’s and lot’s of games.
Stop giving me that look. Bare with me here. Honestly, a lot of what agile teaches is not magic wisdom. It is common sense. Common sense we have lost over the years of being indoctrinated into the ‘right’ way of doing things. Don’t tell too many people that though as my families livelihood now rests on selling the magic of transformations.
The entire approach of the day hinged on one theory — if we told people what we wanted, but didn’t tell them how to do it they would logically come to the same conclusion we did.
The first, and easiest exercise we landed on was the Lego agile game (a modified version of http://tastycupcakes.org/2012/09/we-want-a-city-scrum-simulation-with-lego-extension/). Yes, you could say that it’s contrived, and you would be right. It is heavily geared towards working a certain way. Regardless most of us had used it before successfully and we knew our chance of success was pretty high. And yes, it worked well with the teams who are made up predominantly of delivery folk.
But that was the easy part. We knew delivery and agile wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for the team. Placing them into the realm of product development, ideation and experimentation, that was going to be a little trickier. On the bright side we assumed there would be less bad habits to unwind.
Read part 3 of this adventure to find out if we were right.
