Agility When the Music Stops

Part 1 of 3 on where we are and what we each should do

Maybe it was all the monsters I mingled with on Belvedere Street in SF on Halloween, but I’m feeling kind of monstrous myself this weekend (or maybe it’s the sugar crash….also a possibility).

And maybe it’s the freedom of not having to watch my p’s and q’s quite as hard (not that I was ever good at it).

I want to pull an issue to the center of the conversation about the nature and future of agile.

And I want to make a concrete suggest about what each of you should be doing to both help you guide yourself at work and to make your perch on the ledge just a little more secure.

First, a little background.

Agile has been branded as a ‘luxury good’ and pushed to the side. Some of that is the inevitable consequence of a state change in the external world we all live and operate in – and some of it is our own doing. I want to uncontroversially explain the first, and then try and hold a mirror up so we can see ourselves as others see us.

Why does that matter? Because my friends and colleagues who built successful careers helping people “do” or “be” agile are often unemployed. The organizations that had as a core value proposition that they would support agile change in organizations are floundering – at best.

Now I don’t want to pretend that other parts of the economy inside and around tech aren’t feeling pain. They are. But the best devs I know are working, and too many of the best agile folks I know aren’t. The best marketing people I know are working, and so on.

So the real world is tell us that we have a problem…and while reality can be kept at bay for a long time if you’re rich or powerful enough, there always comes a point of reckoning. And we’re there.

The reckoning is here in two parts – external and internal.

Externally, we lived for a decade or so in a world where capital was essentially free; interest rates were effectively zero, and the risk premium for experimental work was essentially negative – it was easier to raise or borrow for high-risk high-payoff bets than for low-risk low-payoff ones.

And the foundation for much of that willingness to invest was the immense payoffs some people had taken from the table based on technology – so much of this money was chasing technological Lotto tickets.

That money translated to an explosion of jobs in technology, and huge growth of IT headcount – in legacy companies as well as the startup ecology. That growth in headcount brought three things – rising wages and benefits for the folks who could pass the screen; a strong sense of entitlement from those sitting in those Aeron chairs; and challenges in managing the explosion in the amount of work and the number of people doing it. It didn’t necessarily translate – even in the best companies – into an increase in value delivered per dollar spent.

Jay Geilgatch wrote about parts of it on LinkedIn:

“There wasn't an obvious "crash and burn" here, probably because the system's biggest weaknesses were masked by Google's near-infinite cashflow in that era. But in hindsight, it was terribly inefficient. It was an incredibly low-impact way to harness the genius of Google's employees.

There was no discipline. There was no focus. In the project where I spent my first 4 years, nobody ever articulated the success criteria for our product. What were we trying to do, and how did we measure it? More users? CSAT/NPS? Lower latency? Larger database? Higher reliability? Nobody ever established priorities. When I focused on customer happiness, it was driven exclusively by the fact that lots of users were yelling at me and I had an idea to make that stop.

There was a ton of organizational waste. Teams all across the company were reinventing common components because building frameworks is fun and who's gonna stop you?”

I’m assuming that if you’re reading this you’re aware that – as Jeremy Irons famously said in the best movie about business I’ve seen in a long time – the music has stopped.

Watch the scene here:

What does that mean? Does it mean there’s no more investment for technology Lotto tickets? Nope. We have built institutions whose job it is buy Lotto tickets for investors, and they aren’t going to shut down.

But they are speaking a new language. Profit. Revenue neutrality. Financial discipline.

Not scale, not IP moats, not exits via acquisition.

Non-venture investors are speaking the same language.

And companies are responding.

Those responses take (at least) two directions…

Managerially, there’s widespread pressure to tie work (spending, effort) to result.

(nb. - If I were working today, I’d start doing a personal value review – call it a ‘value compass’ weekly and monthly and looking at what I did and what outcomes – financial and otherwise – I’d driven. I’d keep them, and maybe periodically share them with my boss. If I were a boss, I’d be asking everyone who worked for me to do this.)

And strategically, the relationship between tech employers and tech employees just inverted.

Are you watching Amazon’s AWS folks protesting their RTO requirements?

The days of kinder, gentler corporate employment ended when the music stopped.

Does that mean I support gratuitous cruelty or abuse of employees? Have you met me?

But I also do embrace the notion that people who get paid a lot of money have a lot of rocks they have to carry to earn it. As I’ve told folks who worked for me “We’re not minimum-wage grocery baggers. We get paid a bunch of money and in return we have to bring serious game in every dimension.”

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the internal reckoning – how we in the agile community positioned ourselves to take the full force of this reversal.

And Weds, I’ll try and outline a rubric for setting your ‘value compass’ and how to use it in a context where – like most of us – you have multiple forces determining what you should be doing.