How Agilists Can Move Forward After Shatting the Bed

This is the second of three articles in my “agile scatological” series, which I recognize is a strange thing to write. In The Agile Community Shat the Bed I explored what I believed to be the key reasons why the agile gold rush has finally ended: too much agile certification; too much framework adoption; too much fluff; too much purity; and too many fads. In this article I provide advice for how people can recover from the mess that we’ve created. 

Let’s start with a few comments about the first article. First, thank you very much for the wonderful feedback. The article clearly resonated with people, mostly in a positive manner.  Second, yes, the title was a bit crude and yes, I did that on purpose. A few people were brave enough to reach out to me privately and I really appreciate that. Sometimes you need to be crude to wake people up. Third, the picture was nasty which I also did on purpose. If it’s any consolation, it was the least nasty picture generated, which makes me wonder what some of these large language models (LLMs) are being trained on.

Here's the rub:  We shat the bed and it’s going to be a long hard road coming back from that. We basically broke the trust that our customers had with us. It is incredibly hard to regain someone’s trust once you’ve lost it. Because each of us is on our own path, I will explore several observations that I hope will provide insight to help better navigate the mess we find ourselves in. These observations are:

1. It is time to consider a career change
2. You must add real value
3. Coaches must help organizations learn to improve
4. Some agilists may become enterprise designers
5. Agile isn’t dead… yet

It is Time to Consider a Career Change

With the end of the agile gold rush ending the agile services market has dramatically shrunk. There are far few agile jobs than there are people who hope to fill those jobs and that isn’t going to change any time soon. To be blunt, not everyone is going to make it into the agile lifeboat. Perhaps it’s time for you to consider moving on from agile?

The Japanese concept of “ikigai” prompts you to search for meaning in your career. To find meaningful work, ikigai recommends looking for what you love, what you're good at, what makes you money, and what benefits the world. In the past agile may have checked all four of those boxes for you, but if that’s not the case anymore then you need to rethink your career strategy.

Take me for example. I’ve been lucky enough to spend the last two years transitioning to a new career. I went back to school to earn a Masters degree in Artificial Intelligence (AI), and if all goes well I will finish in December 2024. This is helping me to reset my focus back on data-oriented work, particularly data quality (DQ) and agile ways of working (WoW) for data professionals. I intend to focus on data stuff, which is critical to both AI and enabling data-informed decision making within organizations. My career transitioning strategy is to build on my previous experiences in both agile and data, enhancing it with new knowledge and experiences around AI.   

My final word of advice on this topic: If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to decide on the direction that you want to take with your career. Will you stick with agile services? Will you leverage agile to do something new? Or will you abandon agile and move on?

You Must Add Real Value

Regardless of which path you take your career, any organization that hires you expects you to add real value for them. This advice directly addresses the need to focus on stuff over fluff described in the previous article. A fundamental mistake made by many agile practitioners is that they were in supportive roles such as Scrum Master. While those roles had their place, they unfortunately didn’t add the kind of real value that makes you indispensable. It should come as no surprise that many organizations are now choosing to dispense with those roles and the people in them.

When I say “add real value” what I mean is that your involvement in an activity is:

1. Direct. Your input is a key component of the critical path of a value stream within your organization. You are doing; you’re not just guiding or advising.
2. Measurable. The activity, and better yet your contribution, can be measured in such a way as to clearly show positive input.
3. Visible. Your input to value generation is obvious to leadership. Just because something is visible to you it doesn’t mean that it’s visible to decision makers.

To make things harder, you need to be able to add real value both in the short term and on an ongoing basis.  Yes, every organization still needs some people focused on long-term, strategic thinking. This work tends to be done by very experienced people who have been with the organization a long time. You must earn your way into those roles, certainly more than staying awake in a commoditized two-day certification workshop.

You want to focus on stuff that isn’t likely to be automated away by AI. This will be easier if you’re in a business role because most organizations are slow off the mark when it comes to applying AI, mostly due to a lack of AI-skilled people and high levels of data technical debt. For technical people, particularly software developers, new AI-based tooling is starting to cause an upheaval the likes of which we last experienced in the 90s with the introduction of modern integrated development environments (IDEs). For most people AI is likely to augment the way that you work, not replace you. But, specialists who like to focus on one aspect of the overall workflow are likely to find themselves in trouble if that aspect is automated away – strive to become a generalizing specialist.

It won’t be easy picking up the skills required to add real value. This requires a combination of experience and knowledge. Experience takes time, there’s no easy path for this. Ideally your experience is varied and has added lots of value.  Knowledge comes from experience, but also from training, education, mentoring, and coaching. Ideally your goal should be to learn how to identify how to add real value in new emerging ways, so that you have the skills required to do so when the opportunity presents itself.  You’ll constantly have opportunities to learn and grow if you stay reasonably near the forefront of your organization. An important skill is to learn when to make the leap to something else before it’s too late. This is clearly easier said than done – you certainly don’t want to find yourself on deck watching the last of the lifeboats sail away, but you also don’t want to be the person who abandoned a ship that wasn’t sinking after all.

My final word of advice on this topic: Organizations are looking for people who add real value quickly and regularly, rather than people who talk about guiding others to do so.

Coaches Must Help Organizations Learn How to Improve

During the agile gold rush far too many “agile coaches” and consultants focused on helping organizations adopt frameworks rather than to learn how to improve. They certainly talked a good game about improvement strategies such as PDSA (plan do study act), PDCA (plan do check act), and OODA (observe orient decide, act). Unfortunately, most of them didn’t have the background to suggest viable strategies to experiment with, hence they failed far more often than they should have and justified it through promotion of failing fast. Their customers noticed this and started to realize that they were funding the learning journeys of these coaches, rather than their own improvement journeys as they’d been promised.

A few years ago, Mark Lines and I developed a strategy called Guided Continuous Improvement (GCI) which enhanced a typical PDSA kaizen loop with the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit.  The idea was that a team can leverage the learning of others to identify a potential strategy that best fits the context that they face and then experiment with that. By making better choices like this you increase the likelihood that your experiment will succeed, thereby reducing your failure rate. Mark used to refer to DA as a “coach in a box.”

The cynical among us, and I would include myself in that group, are likely to think that I’m simply promoting my own work. Yes, I am. But to be clear, I have no financial stake in the success of DA because it is now wholly owned by Project Management Institute (PMI).  Other great options for improvement knowledgebases are Essence from Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) which captures a plethora of software development practices, the great material shepherded by the Business Agility Institute, and the pragmatic wisdom captured in Agile 2. I’ve also had good experiences asking LLMs such as ChatGPT or Copilot for coaching advice, although you need to be careful given the hallucination issues with LLMs. I’m also seeing promising work in LLMs that are trained for this specific purpose and experimented with building such a thing myself as part of my AI-masters work.

I highly recommend that you invest time to learn your trade from sources outside the agile mainstream to gain a more robust background than what the agile industrial complex promotes. This would include change management skills, a great source of which is Prosci.  I also recommend gaining a respectable background in coaching, with the International Coaching Federation (ICF) being the leader in this space.  Although you may want to consider this advice to be a bit biased, I also recommend PMI’s Disciplined Agile Coach (DAC) certification because of its focus on teaching you the skills for how to coach improvement at the team and cross-team level. DAC teaches coaches how to leverage the hybrid, contextualized advice captured by the DA toolkit in a pragmatic manner. Once again, I have zero financial incentive to promote PMI products or services, or the products and services of any of the other organizations mentioned in this article.

My final word of advice on this topic: Organizations are interested in improvement and results, rather than framework adoption and directionless transformation.

Some Agilists May Become Enterprise Designers

A major contributing factor to the death of the agile goldrush is that few in the agile community really had the background to do improvement work. In addition to agile knowledge, change management experience, and a solid foundation in coaching, you also need to understand the fundamentals of enterprise design (ED).

For the past several years I’ve had the privilege of being on the advisory board of the Intersection Group, a not-for-profit organization that helps people create better enterprises.  They have built an interdisciplinary community that focuses on collaboration and exchange of ideas, something that should speak to anyone with an agile mindset. They have developed a simple, yet robust visual language called Edgy for exploring and sharing enterprise design ideas, and they are actively putting it to use in a wide range of contexts. My guess is that once you see what Intersection Group is sharing that you’ll wish you’d learned about them years ago.

It was never sufficient to just “be agile”, you also needed the skills to “do agile” too. Similarly, it isn’t sufficient to have knowledge about enterprise design, you also need enterprise skills and experience too. For example, how many senior roles have you held in organizations?  None?  Then why would anyone seek your advice?  How many decades of experience do you have in such roles?  Without extensive experience understanding the nuances of how enterprises work, what makes you think you are qualified to fiddle with their design?  

My final word of advice on this topic: Becoming an enterprise designer may very well be what many agile coaches were really hoping to be all along. The journey to become an enterprise designer is long and requires a lot of hard work, as any worthwhile journey does.  

Agile Isn’t Dead…. Yet

The agile gold rush may be dead, and the agile movement has taken a significant hit because of that, but it isn’t a fatal hit.  Agile will recover if the agile community chooses to take a better path.  I’ve described several paths that individual agilists may choose to travel, and if enough of us do so then things will get better. Anyone who decides to wait around for the good old days to come back will be waiting a very long time. 

For the next few years “agile” will be a bit of a swear word in most organizations, and frankly we deserve that. I don’t think we’re going to see a replacement word that will put a veneer of respectability on the agile movement. However, if we do then my money is on “adaptive”. Similarly, I don’t think we’re going to see a new movement any time soon that will replace agile.  I could be wrong, but I’m not sensing any glimmerings of anything viable.

There is a lot of great agile stuff out there, some of which I’ve referred to in these two articles, stuff that is solid and will stand the test of time. But this stuff has been tainted with the agile brush and it will take some time to wash the agile stink off it. Have patience, it will all work out in the long run although it will be painful in the short term.

It’s not about being agile, frankly it was never about being agile, instead it was always about being effective. Focus on that and you’ll do ok.

Next In This Series: The Future of Agile Isn't Shit.