A Vision Without a Path to it Is Not a Vision. It is a Roadblock

This post is a collection of my thoughts about why and how Agile is stagnating.

I love the vision of micro-enterprises and people working together to figure out what’s needed.

But if you’re not there already, how do you get there?

Twenty-five years ago those promoting Agile were talking about delivering more value quicker and achieving project success (at the time defined by getting desired scope, on time and within budget). Now, many people that promote Agile disavow that. They still talk about the iron triangle, even though that is a counter productive thinking model.

Complexity has been used as the bogey man to stop us from knowing what to do by saying we can’t know. And justify it by talking about how other systems that bear only partial resemblance to knowledge work.

The lack of training in what customers need is so common that we put it on the customers – saying they don’t know what they need. It’s true, they don’t. There are other ways to decide what’s needed than asking customers.

While feedback and emergence is essential in product planning there are better ways. These have been promoted in Jobs To Be Done, Goldratt’s work and my own Amplio.

Then again there’s the presumption that just adopting solutions without any diagnosis will be useful. They all tie together – we can't understand, customer doesn't know, overplanning is bad, so just jump in.

When Agile started, it was adopted mostly be innovators and early adopters. They have the wherewithal to fill in the gaps. Things have now changed.

Agile, as defined by the Manifesto, is missing most of what’s needed to be successful in large organizations that are not driven by innovators and early adopters.

But it is vociferously defended by those making their livelihood on it which should not be surprising. A corollary to Upton Sinclair’s “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understand it” is “a man will defend to his last breath the very thing that keeping him stuck if he doesn’t know where to go.”

People across organizations are stuck. It appears they are just holding onto control. But Eli Goldratt’s observation that “A comfort zone has less to do with control and more to do with knowledge” tells another story.

When people don’t have the knowledge to convey than it looks like a control thing.

Not being able to understand what's happening, promoted by several Agile thought leaders puts us in a bad situation. 

This is not limited to management but ironically includes the most popular Agile framework with statements like “follow to understand”, “it’s purposefully incomplete,” and “it’s immutable.”

A fundamental unexamined presumption of Scrum has pervaded the Agile space – "we must establish empirical product planning for a complex environment.” This presumes two things, neither of which are true. The first is that empirical product planning is the right way to do it and the other is that we’re in a complex environment.

While there is complexity in knowledge work, it isn’t a fully complex environment. We can take advantage of what we know and minimize risk and waste with quick feedback. This opportunity is lost on those promoting we're in a complex domain.

With these false premise, people are now set adrift without theory to explain things, a harmful act. As de Vinci remarked “He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may be cast."

There are other things as well. Certified Agile workshops focused on frameworks rarely talk about how to convey the ideas being taught. This just adds more to being effective. The irony is amazing when you reflect on Agile is supposed to be about people but people are just expected to absorb an approach without understanding.

It’s such a great premise for the promoters. It can be used to explain away failure and justify even more training in what isn’t needed. We have even seen organizations spring up on how to deal with the boogeyman of complexity.

 In the Choice, Eli Goldratt gives us a different perspective.

“The first and most profound obstacle is that people believe that reality is complex, and therefore they are looking for sophisticated explanations for complicated solutions. Do you understand how devastating this is?”

”The biggest obstacle is that people grasp reality as complex when actually it is surprisingly simple.”

“What I mean by Inherent Simplicity is that reality, any part of reality, is governed by very few elements, and that any existing conflict can be eliminated. If we take that as a given, as absolutely correct in every situation, we'll find ourselves thinking clearly.”

"If we dive deep enough we’ll find that there are very few elements at the base - the root causes - which through cause and effect connections are governing the whole system.”

“When I left physics and started to deal with organizations, I was astonished to see that the attitude of most people is that the more sophisticated something is, the more respectable it is. This ridiculous fascination with sophistication also causes people to altogether avoid using their brain power. You see, since complicated solutions never work, people tell themselves that they don’t know enough. That a lot of detailed knowledge is needed before one can even attempt to understand an environment.”

“The key for thinking like a true scientist is the acceptance that any real life situation, no matter how complex it initially looks, once understood, is actually embarrassingly simple. Moreover, if the situation is based on human interactions, you probably already have enough knowledge to begin with.”

The following quotes are from his co-author daughter Efrat Goldratt-Ashlag, in the same book.

“he doesn’t claim that reality is not overwhelmingly complex; he acknowledges it in full. But what he says is that there is a way to realize that from another more important aspect, it is exceedingly simple.” (From his co-author daughter Efrat Goldratt-Ashlag)

“The hardest thing to do is to struggle to find an answer to a problem when we believe that there is a high chance that it doesn't have an answer; it is so easy to give up. That is why Father recommends starting with the conviction that a better solution exists for sure.” (From his co-author daughter Efrat Goldratt-Ashlag)

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All of this has been used to justify poor results with “they weren’t being Agile” the definition of which varies with the person saying it or “they weren’t doing Scrum.”

But the presumptions on which both are based are never examined. Anyone with the audacity to do that is attacked as when Tom Gilb wrote a very lucid explanation of the failings of the Manifesto. The discussion that resulted was “why is Tom Gilb so mad?” Not any conversation about why a respected thought leader, often referred to as the “father of Agile,” would say such things. When I came up with the Factors for Effective Value Streams which can be used to reasonably predict whether a change to workflow will be an improvement, it was called BS and I was called a liar without any engagement from the accuser.  Much worse has been leveled at anyone who has the audacity to say there might be a better way to deal with complexity other than Cynefin.

This is a common defense – talk about the messenger, not the message.

It has done a great job of keep us stuck or moving at a snail’s pace while keeping the certification mills going.

Without an underlying understanding how to be effective, change becomes more opinion than science.

Executives and managers aren’t given an explanation as to why you need to focus on he most important things, why limiting work in process is useful, and how interruptions cause problems, and when they are it’s usually told from the developer teams’ perspective. It sounds more like excuses than manageable problems.

This is the underlying cause of imposition on teams – there are no explanations available to get them interested on their own. They have not been given something else – a rationale for better ways.

If they were, however, an invitation is not the right way to go anyway.

First of all, invitations from management don’t feel like invitations which should have no consequences for not accepting them. But an invitation without understanding still has the person doing the inviting being in a position of authority.

The irony of this is demonstrated on the Open Leadership’s Network home page with Jeff Sutherland. Jeff has been the biggest promoter of the hypothesis (I won’t call it a theory because theories are intended to be tested) that we can’t understand the cause and effect of what’s going on and must self-organize without leadership.

What I have found works is making a set of agreements on how we work together to improve our methods. Having agreed upon goals, seeing what’s in our way to the goals (not to a framework someone decided to impose on the team as often happens). Acknowledging all parties have something of value to contribute. Having a unifying theory that everyone can relate to we can come to an alignment on how to work.

An agreed upon model of what works is helpful here.  In this way teams can make agreements about how they work together.

My experience is it’s not enough to just say do it and then blame people when they can’t. A support system to help is required.

This is why Amplio includes a set of capabilities as a potential set of actions that are needed. Each capability includes a pattern which uses the theory and factors for effective value streams I’ve been talking about that enable people to decide together how they should best work.

We need to work together to solve our problems. With theory, a good consultant or manager can get people to access their experience and see what to do. Without it, people need to reinvent things.

If this dialog appeals to you, I invite you to check out The Amplio Body of Knowledge and How to Use it.

It's free and you can attend free live sessions weekly. If you want to help create what's next, send me a message and we can talk.

Here are some of the first principles, guidance and factors for effective value streams used in Amplio. While many of these are acknowledged to be true in isolation, few Agile proponents use them together in a systems thinking approach to navigate complexity.

 It is important to use these as part of a systems thinking approach. See Why Amplio Integrates VUCA, systems thinking, inherent simplicity, flow, and human-centered development to be effective.