Has the language of Agile become the Newspeak of the business world?
And are its coaches the new Thought Police?
In George Orwell’s novel “1984”, the state of Oceania is controlled by the Party, a totalitarian government which, among other things has created the propagandistic language of Newspeak designed to limit free thought, promote the Party’s doctrines and brainwash the population into unthinking obedience. The story is a warning of the dangers of the accumulation of ideological power without accountability. Daring to question is punished and propaganda trumps free speech and thought. It’s a poignant reminder of the vulnerability of our civil values.
I couldn’t help but draw this parallel when I recently heard the story of one senior manager at a large UK based company accounting her experience of a business transformation done in the name of Agile:
“They [the Agile coaches] arrived this morning. And without even enquiring as to what we actually do, they laid out a set of practices we have to adopt immediately. A whole new set of meetings and stand-ups my teams and I now have to attend. To what end? I’ve no idea. But I do know they’ve only added to the burden of our work.”
This scenario sadly is all too common and not isolated. It’s got to the point where even the original signatories of the Manifesto for Agile Software development are calling for the abandonment of Agile [1].
Aren’t these the very behaviours and bureaucratic anti-patterns that spurred the creation of the Agile manifesto in the first place? By placing a stake in the ground and defining a set of values and principles, the authors hoped to provide a new course for developers, stakeholders and customers to collaborate towards.
Sadly today’s Agile has become a kind of Newspeak where we’re provided with a vocabulary of everything’s changing for the better when in fact the very opposite is true. We’re witness to Agile being coopted by the interests of profit and self-promotion to the detriment of the authors’ original intentions.
The results are what we see today — corporations buying frameworks and processes in the hope they’ll fix their productivity, efficiency, quality and engagement challenges. Sold by organisations offering one-size-fits-all suites of behaviours that in the end do more harm than good.
To be clear, I’m an advocate for agility, not this form of Agile. There is great value and worth in developing business agility and the values and the principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Of course there is — they are based on the human values and the principles of collaboration, emergence, ownership, systems thinking and flow.
Since its inception, the adoption of agility for many people has had and continues to have enormous and positive impact. It caused me to rethink how I managed my software projects when I first discovered XP in 2001. Many, many teams and organisations are agile to their core in their behaviours and culture.
But sadly there are many - too many - organisations suffering under the Newspeak of Agile. That form that white-washes the organisation in doctrine, destroying the very essence of what makes the place unique. Leaving behind a ridged set of useless ceremonies forced into place and completely out of context.
It doesn’t have to be like this.
The goal of an agile organisation is the ability to respond quickly and appropriately to change with alignment at the top alongside autonomy at the bottom. What if instead of asking "How can we scale Agile?”, we start asking "How do we make the whole organisation agile?”. This shifts the focus back to the principles of agility and delivering continuous value to customers.
Managers become responsible for clarifying the rules of the road: the roles, the teams, the rhythm, the purpose and meaning. Management’s goal becomes ensuring these rules are actively helping teams move fast, getting to where they want and need to go and not slowing them down. Teams operate with the autonomy to go about their work, trusted in both the planning and practice. And though they may be autonomous, they are not uncontrolled. The emphasis is on self-control, with enough check-points established to prevent instability, ambiguity and tension turning into chaos.
As coaches we can help managers and leaders master this form of agility. Done correctly, teams take on a sense of safety, voluntarily taking responsibility for the value they create.
The bottom line is it’s not Agile for Agile’s sake. The reason agility works: It encourages responding to change over following directives and fixed plans. It accepts uncertainty over looking for and expecting certainties. As a result you create teams and an organisation that perform better and far more effectively.
A warning to us coaches who mean to help: We must remember our place and role in our relationship with our customers, clients and stakeholders. It is not to enforce doctrines in the name of transformation, efficiencies and cost savings. Leave that to others if it is so required. Our role is to listen, to understand, to question in order to clarify and then guide, support and encourage with some teaching and training as is useful to fit the need. Let our clients and customers lead the way so that they’re continually learning through their own chosen experimentation and direct experience.
To do otherwise is forcing an agenda that is not our customers’, but ours. An agenda driven by an arrogance that we somehow know better. No we don’t. How could we possibly know our customers’ business better than they do? What we do know may be of use. It may indeed be highly valuable. But it must first fit the context so that it can be relevant and effective.
So coaches, bring your wisdom and experience, not your arrogance and attachment to results. Trust in your own abilities. Remove the Newspeak. And above all, trust your clients.
From the authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development on the state of Agile today:
“Developers Should Abandon Agile”
— Ron Jeffries
Ref: https://ronjeffries.com/articles/018-01ff/abandon-1/
“Agile has become a devastated waste-land”
— Kent Beck
"An Agile Industrial Complex"
— Martin Fowler
“The team doing the work decides how to do it. That is a fundamental Agile principle. That even means if the team doesn’t want to work in an Agile way, then Agile probably isn’t appropriate in that context. And that’s the most Agile way they could do things!”
— Martin Fowler, Agile Australia 2018