What's Wrong with Agile? (and no, it's not Agile!)

Here at HAAR we keep reading social media posts from Agile 'Coaches’ and ‘Experts’ lamenting and questioning the problems with Agile implementations and practices - then largely playing the ‘it’s not us, it's them’ card by blaming people for not doing what they prescribe, or falling into an argument with each other about the flavour of 'Agile' being the reason why it's not the panacea they proclaimed it would be.

Worse still they fall back on the classic ‘the people have the wrong mindset’, essentially labelling those that don't comply as 'non believers' who should be cast aside if they don't fall in line. This is perhaps the most galling aspect of the Agile evangelist fraternity where a simplistic presumption is made that someone is not useful if they don't wave their hands in the air and clap along to the drum...

The truth* is the actual people doing the work are often ambivalent to Agile (or any other project delivery methodologies / practices for that matter), sceptical of the anecdotal claims it 'makes their lives easier because they have more control', not particularly excited having to work out what they need to do rather than someone telling them, confused by the marketing led renaming of existing terms to make them seem somehow new ('meetings' to 'ceremonies', 'issues' to 'impediments', 'prop / lock / loose forward' to 'scrum master' etc), tired of the excessive ceremonies to review, refine and improve work they're already doing effectively, frustrated by people telling them to restructure their tasks from a gantt chart to a sprint or kanban board for no change in how they do their work, and over the claims by the Agile fraternity that 'people suddenly communicate better and have more control over their deliverables'. The reality is a high functioning team would have these cultural attributes regardless of the delivery method overlaid across their work, and that well meaning management restructures never truly remove the command and control ethos of an organisation. Ultimately someone is in charge!

It's also important to remember that Agile is just the latest iteration of project delivery concepts which begs, borrows and steals from the vast array of existing methodologies, processes and magic. Sure, you get some new sprinkles on top, however regardless how you package the process, it's ultimately just a way of sequencing work and delivering outcomes.

Rather than these self-anointed ‘experts’ blaming people for Agile not working, being misunderstood, or the wrong Agile being applied, perhaps they should focus on understanding what the team is trying to achieve, effect positive change through listening and responding rather than rolling out an interpretation of Agile that merely introduces different structures, and really critique the core Agile concepts to cherry pick what may be useful for a team to use. Something for the Agile evangelist community to acknowledge is when your whole existence revolves around a belief, you can sometimes end up over analysing and engineering it at the expense of the goal you originally had in mind - effective and timely delviery of the right outcomes to the customer!

Here at HAAR we believe that the new world order is the 'Gated Chaos Methodology©' where teams are truly free to form, storm and deliver at their own pace, engage whatever way of working make sense (the back of a napkin is fine if that's what you think), so long as it's working on the right things, delivering value and that the people that need to know get the information they want. Rather than believing specific, defined structures and models can be truly implemented (how often does a PowerPoint pack come back from the dead!), 'freedom guardrails' are agreed across the business for teams to work within with minimal compliance overhead. Less telling people how to, more letting people do. You know it's what they want!

We should add that this blog’s purpose isn’t to argue that Agile is bad, like every other delivery elixir it has it’s good and 'meh' parts. Rather we argue that Agile is inherently misused and applied as a band aid to cure everything that a consultant read in a book should be / could be wrong with an organisation. While we all know that Agile has the beaks of a thousand eagles, Gated Chaos has so much more eagle and It saddens us to think you're missing out**...

HAAR: Thought provoking critical thinking, without much thought.

* Caution, actual truth may be just as anecdotal as anything an Agile Evangelist proclaims.

#flowToAwesome / **#futuramaReference / #gatedChaos