Would someone who studied all the books about swimming, but never gone to a pool, be able to qualify for the Olympic team? Wouldn’t it be better to find a pool and take some swimming lessons with an instructor or join a local swim club? We live in the age of infinite amounts of knowledge – most of it a few taps or Google searches away! We have huge physical libraries along with catalogued digital resources to satiate even the most curious-minded folks. While the access to information is unprecedented, it doesn’t solve all our problems.
In the world of agile transformation, a theoretical bias prevails, we put more trust in documentation over first-hand experience. While books, blogs, YouTube, and courses have great value for the curious minded and provide a solid foundation, they have their limitations. For agility to work, the focus must be on action, honest inspection and experience.
Solvitur ambulando – it is solved by walking, encapsulates what is often missing in agile practice. It highlights the value in solving a problem through action, not theory. Organizations that solve through action, inspection, learning, and adapting operate with true agility. Mastering a skill solely from documentation is essential for understanding the theory, but that’s where the benefits end. Over-reliance on the documented methodology of agility is a recipe for disaster, even more so when those methods go outside the core values of agility.
Employing experts certified in a specific methodology with documented implementation plans, seems like a one-stop shop to resolve issues, but it isn’t inline with the agile approach. Outputs are predictable, but the minute something happens outside the norm, everything falls apart. A guide is just that, a set of guidelines to get you going and any true agile practitioner will know that, “all [methods] are wrong, some [methods] are useful”.
The approach of using an overly prescribed methodology leads to a centralized department whose focus is the delivery of agile. The predictable way this department acts to accomplish those aims is that it now produces documentation and training materials. Words like “playbook”, “handbook”, “guide” and “script” label the documentation that’s handed to groups of people to tell them how they’ll be organized, how they should behave, and what’s expected of them. Coaches in these centers start to act more as a police force enforcing compliance, or cheerleaders promoting mediocre desired output. They are forced to leave true coaching, based on cocreation behind.
Training goes along with documentation and sets the stage in the mechanics of the method. Teams are told how they’ll be evaluated and the metrics they must report back to the centralized area. These metrics are required by the centralized area to measure team success in moving toward the prescriptive method – even if the metrics are useless to the team’s ability to adapt their behaviour. Agile centers measure success based on outputs like the following:
- Number of agile teams created
- Number of people trained
- Number of documents created
These types of transformations don’t do much in terms of the organization’s ability to deliver. But why? It’s because the people expected to change have minimal incentive or desire to work the way a centralized area is telling them how to work. Unless the transformation has degraded to using organizational politics to enforce the change. By contrast the agile centers that work directly with the teams, asks how they want to work, and offer suggestions based on the chosen methodology and observations of the results. These agile centers focus relentlessly on helping the teams to perform by working to transform the entire organization – yes, even the highest level executive! These agile centers measure success not by what they output, but by what they influence.
True agile practitioners work with the people and coach teams within an organization. You won’t find them creating documentation on how to be agile and leaving a copy on everyone’s desk. Documentation that can easily be obtained in the massive repository of material already created. You’ll find them listening, challenging and above all work within the areas that have a desire to improve.
The Moral: Value agile outcomes over agile documentation.