My Agile Christmas Letter
Still true today
So over the last few months, as I’ve been reading my Agile commentaries here and elsewhere online, a few things have occurred to me that seem worth sharing here today.
In general, I’m worried about all of us. I’m worried about how we’re doing – more importantly how our clients are doing – out in the real world. I’m worried about the state of our behavior as I see it expressed online.
As a way of explaining what I see, one of my guilty pleasure books is a 1930’s biographical novel about Miyamoto Mushashi by Eiji Yoshikawa. If you could imagine a Japanese version of “Gone With The Wind” – including nostalgia for an imagined martial past, cheesy romance, sweeping battle scenes, and a few really strongly drawn characters.
In the novel, one of the themes is the constant competition between schools of swordsmanship (basically teachers who are constantly seeking work teaching the guards and nobles of lords). The competition seldom devolves into actual swordplay – but it comes close pretty often. In the normal course of things, it ranges from the comical to the sad to the occasionally tragic.
You doubtless see where I’m heading with this…
It’s not only that I think the unspoken and explicit competition within the Agile community is something we’re doing in the wrong way – it’s that I think the behaviors it drives push us too far away from the core values we need to succeed in what we’re nominally here to do – guide people to a better workplace.
I’m more of an “Agile doer” than an “Agile thinker” – I’ve spent much of my tech career using Agile to get stuff done, rather than teaching it.
One of my core principles is getting stuff done is that to succeed, I’ve needed to live by the human values that I believe underpin Agility. I’ll suggest that these are:
Respect for people and facts
Trust in each other
Humility in our self-perceptions
Continuous curiosity and learning
Empirical inquiry
How do we adjust the values of our community to see more of this and less “my fu is better than your fu”?
Because I’m not sure how – as that’s being done today - that helps in any way except in trying to convince the local nobles to hire one of us rather than the other.
And worse, I’m not sure how that doesn’t lead to an Agile culture that bakes in values that make us all less likely to succeed in what we’re all here to do.
I’d like to invite us all in the spirit of the holidays to think about how we do better at creating a culture in the Agile community that makes us the leaders we need to be in order to create the change that we’re all passionate about making happen.