looking for the depth

and repeatedly finding none

I try to adhere to the values and principles of agile. To do this, one not only has to know them but also understand them. There are a group of agile coaches I’ve got to know in London over the years, and whenever we get together, we challenge each other’s recollection of the manifesto through competition and quizzes. We all find it an interesting diversion, but we’re doing something that is less obvious; we’re thinking about the manifesto more deeply than we might otherwise have an opportunity to. I know some agile coaches who’ve read the agile manifesto a handful of times and are proud they know the values but don’t know any of the principles. It’s not that I expect someone to sit and memorise it all, I expect anyone who calls themselves an agilist to have thought about the values and principles so profoundly that they have learned them through repetition. To dare call yourself an agilist and not know the manifesto values and principles, is a large part of why organisations are turning their back on agile.

When an organisation looks to hire agile coaches, it’s because they know nothing about agile, which makes interviewing for the role extremely difficult. The interviewers don’t know what they don’t know.

One of my personal principles is that you only have to be one page ahead. Here is the negative side of it. When interviewing someone to come in and teach you about agile, you need someone ten pages ahead.

How can a complete novice, the interviewer, tell if the candidate is one or ten pages ahead? Organisations think the people they’ve hired are good enough because candidates have looked up how to answer the basic questions the interviewers had looked up to ask.

Agile is a philosophical approach to work; you need to hire people who have explored the values and principles and stretched the ideas to find intersections with other valuable practices. True agilists understand that software development is more like art than engineering, and therefore, the environments we create in our organisations need to be studios for artists to work in. The more remarkable work of art you want them to produce, the more remarkable the studio needs to be.

But when an organisation is new to agile, it doesn’t know that it needs some agilists who are ten pages ahead. The difference between one and ten pages ahead can be the difference between a successful or failed transformation, not a good or great one.

I have a retro based on the agile manifesto. It is one of the first retros I will facilitate for a team I’m engaging with. I find it will tell me more about a team and organisation than an agile maturity checklist because it provides qualitative evidence that can lead to quantitative evidence about the quality of the product and the team’s ways of working.

A checklist will tell you about the behaviours but not their quality or outcomes.

The difference between implementing the meetings as dictated by the Scrum Guide and achieving the outcomes the Guide is hoping/expecting you to achieve is the same as between the letter of the law and its spirit.

We expect court judges to have had years of experience with the law, to understand how it has played out in many different circumstances, and to have thought and argued whether or not something constituted a breach of law to lay people on the jury.

As an agile coach, I expect to explain all my decisions and actions to a layperson within the host organisation and explain how my reasoning aligns with one or another philosophy that we’re trying to adopt as an organisation.

However, unlike the jurors, the laypeople I have to explain my work to are not dispassionate. Often, they’re pretty passionate indeed.

I am brought in to change how their system works. And in their minds, they likely find it hard to separate the idea of themselves from the idea of the system. It’s probably because another person has decided the system needs changing without including those I’m directly working with in the decision-making process. Yet, they’re somehow accountable for the success or failure of the transformation. Management imposes a significant burden on those who they impose change upon someone and make them accountable for it.

As the stranger who arrives and tells people that everything can change about their system and make it better, even though I have never worked in their sector before, I scare them. There’s not much psychological safety there. Before I even start to think about explaining the changes I would like to support, I need to build a relationship with them and move them to a more dispassionate position.

I know when the people I’m engaging with are still more passionate than I would like because they will behave irrationally. The problem is that they aren’t receptive to what I say and their behaviours are unexpected to the system. When others native to the system recognise someone behaving differently, the system reacts by others behaving weirdly, too. It’s worth noting that when observing a system, these behaviours can skew your opinions of how that system works; watch out for it.

As people realise the shift in attitudes towards the change agent, they also start to treat the change agent differently. I find that my typical timeline with a new system goes as follows:

· a couple of weeks of observations and spent

· a couple of weeks actively engaging with the system, and then

· a couple of weeks for the system to send back the first shock wave

· a couple of weeks of waiting before I can do anything more

At one organisation, the shockwave sent back to me was so large (and disproportionate) that it ultimately pushed me out of the organisation. This reaction still stays with me six years on because the director created such a toxic environment for me and everyone around me that it was obvious to everyone that change, even the idea of change, was not and never would be welcomed.

Yet, I had the greatest success of my career with that director. After working with his teams for six months, he asked me some questions that showed not only that he was finally receptive to hearing what I had to say but also that he was thinking differently about the ways he and his teams were working. I live in the hope that he continued his journey after I left and that those mental shifts continue to ripple throughout that organisation.