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It’s a new year! Whilst I’m cautiously optimistic that it will be a happy one, I’m also a realist so therefore a big fan of the bitter meme advising that no-one claims it as “their year” and that we enter it slowly and carefully, making no eye-contact as we know all too well what happens when we don’t!:) Is it the year where we sort out this death of Agile debate? Are we going to forge something new far more solid and sustainable by accepting we need to do the work we ought to have embarked on aeons ago, at long last?
Agile is indeed “dead” if by that we mean that the sense of community we all once loved is gone by en large. It isn’t because of the PMI and Agile Alliance move though. Or the eternal “us versus them” between prod and dev. It isn’t because enough Big4s have said it was “out”. It isn’t because we were over-bloated in many industries and we needed to shake coaches and minimise the need for guidance and reflection creating fearful cultures of layoffs-survivals. It isn’t because it majorly failed in some outlets who didn’t get it. It isn’t even because it was done more by McKinsey Powerpoint than from the heart.
It is because we missed the mark on the human part.
It is because living and breathing Agile is hard work, work we have continuously put off for the most part, and we are all collectively fed up and tired. It’s not magically going better and it will take a lot to untangle and no-one wants to hear that. One of the reasons that I slowed down on my writing for this very newsletter is that I was sick of my own doom and gloom so I can only imagine how you all felt reading it:) Since I had nothing good to say, I didn’t say much at all. I still only see the light in the inevitable “change of guards” and not in a magical awakening or some serendipitous change that will happen on its own like we all may have hoped along the way. Here's why.
For the past 15 years of my own journey as a self-proclaimed “Agile anthropologist” I’ve seen shifts in mentality, I’ve witnessed it come of age in many places where it seemed impossible to ever ingrain, and I’ve written about immense successes in my books, but I’ve also seen people who live and breathe it go through more trials and tribulations than most other areas of work and industries. Being an agilist at heart comes at a high personal cost. This is chiefly because Agile is how -and even “who”- we are and not a way we approach projects or simply a way of work. As I said many moons ago, we can’t have the WoW (way of working) without the WoT (way of thinking) and it turns out that when we do have the way of thinking amongst those who do not, the cognitive dissonance and the delta we encounter is soul-crushing.
Most of the things I said about agility being who we are and part of our very DNA as far bac as 2018 still stand but what I didn’t know at the time I wrote those, -not even when I started noticing how it brings about extreme cape fatigue and is responsible for more burnout than many other philosophies or working practices-, is just how much of those coupled with Covid, mass layoffs in technology and the state of general mental health of everyone in the workplace today, will collude to land us where we are today: a LinkedIn feed filled with “I am leabing” proclamations, ridicule for those who remain firm to their principles and more division than ever.
In a sense, for all of us reading this, having “found Agile” back in our day very much resembles how we found our tribes online once we accepted we are neurodiverse (and many of us are, the intersection is staggering and it would be super interesting to have some academic body study the proclivity for agility in relation to neurodivergence but I doubt that’s on many researchers’ bingo cards!) as we settled into the soothing notion of there being others like us who could see the world of doing things non-sequentially in a genuinely collaborative fashion in bright colours that spelled efficient gains for the business. It was nothing short of a welcomed miracle to see others felt the same way and that they were taking on the great windmills of corporate inertia, pointing at naked Emperors and showing the world a better way to do things. So of course we flocked together and learned from each other and felt supported and tight-knit in creating large scale transformation. But inadvertently in doing so, we also created cliques and echo chambers and bias and we are paying for those now.
We stand today in business at a cross-road where we are in some sort of “BAU-and-mindlessly-scramble” AI-fear-based frenzy where the exploration of the methods and ways we do things alongside slowing down to focus on the nuances of the human interaction, is not welcomed, yet it is more needed than ever. Most places fancy themselves clear of any strategic concerns on the ways of work and the psychology of the humans doing it, and are in mad execution mode. Operationally and mechanically approaching everything from product to security and development in lieu of re-examining any of it and cutting it open for analysis at regular intervals whilst learning how to forge solid relationships at work. Most everyone is too busy trying to get ahead of the AI wave to take an honest look at themselves and many have just given up on the theory of it all.
Some are proud of it being at this stage. A CTO last month told me that “I for one am super pleased there’s precious little Agile navel-gazing remaining, we had done that for aeons and it still failed most times” and whilst he also conceded that existing Tech and Human Debt are the culprits for the failure, he couldn’t really connect the dots or resolve to change the focus.
Which is the true crux of the issue - not accepting that there was Human Debt to be cleared and Human Work to be done, before we could genuinely avail ourselves of an agile way of thinking, is what precipitated many a downfalls in the industry that then got amplified by the forces that be, that were to gain most from the “Agile is dead, do it this way instead” powerpoints. And this lack of acceptance, and consequently now this backlash against agility and its coaches and fervent proponents, have conflated to create even more Human Debt. Extra levels of it built by the lack of action of our very own agilists really. How?
By letting all the people topics be thrown over the fence for HR to deal with. By standing idly by as the “touchy-feely bits" were shunned and topics of emotions eternally allowed to fall of the agenda. Whenever we thought the behaviour, psychological safety, belonging and feelings of the humans in technology that were in our teams were “none of our business, what do we know?!?”. By constantly avoiding the admittedly uncomfortable human work and not becoming curious and invested in doing it regularly. By allowing the lack of true closeness and the shallow communication disavuate us of any hope of genuine teaming. All of these inactions have compounded the problem of the already immense Human Debt all non-generative organisations harboured and all of these misses are coming to bite us. And this is where I can’t help but sound accusatory, because we could have done much more to not let this happen.
Should the “agile world” of 7-8 years ago focused bullishly -or even exclusively!- on the human side of things and became really high performing with KPIs around genuine tight knit, psychologically safe behaviours, communication and collaboration -which we knew full well were sine qua non to building anything together, mind- then we would be in a much stronger position today, and most of the big loud “agile failures” would have been avoided.
Should we have taught the organisations and non-agile leaderships that agility is about much more than post-its and ceremonies and got them to mandate the human work and make room for it intentionally and regularly in every sprint, in every team and every organisation to build a practice things woud have panned out differently. Should we have understood why core elements like pair-programming can never be in the absence of genuinely open communication and understanding how it makes people feel and should we have supported devs and product people to become a tight-knit and ever evolving EQed machine that genuinely works in unison we would have gotten so much further. Should CTOs and CPOs have admitted they are really people-leaders first -accidental as that may have been for them- and that they need to stop hiding behind the day to day to help everyone land agility then we would have seen lasting change.
People like Alistair Cockburn, Teal Unicorns, Gitte Klitgaard, and us at People Not Tech who talk about hearts and dig into feelings around agility, should have been booked to the gills guiding tech leaders everywhere to transition to what was needed - true fearless EQed leaders of humans who mentor and empower everyone to do the human work- and we weren’t half as busy doing so, as we should have been. There should have been an evident and stringent need for tens of thousands of us and execs should have learned to exist in this intensely-human body-doubling state with a "counsellor Troy" type and instead there’s a drive to have even less. Software like the one we built that helps the team continuously improve and achieve the behaviours we need to team effectively, have psychological safety and therefore perform, ought to have flown off the shelves, and every team would have had the time and tools to do this all-important work on their emotional intelligence and connection on their screen alongside Jira every day, and that’s far from the case today. Every leader should have been well on their way to becoming highly EQed and a Psychological Safety engineer.
None of that has been happening for a very long time. If anything, we are going backwards, conferences stopped dedicating their agenda to exploring the "people side" of agility, coaches and mentors everywhere are cut from the same organisational charts that are now even doing away with DEI, and less and less of the human work topics are talked about, leave alone owned by the techies. Not that they are firmly owned by anyone else either, with a now exclusively admin HR function and a leadership layer with a collectively derisory EQ.
In other words, we as humans who should have embedded agility at the same time as its necessary humanity, spectacularly missed the mark. We ought to have used the initial wave of enthusiasm for the speed of delivery and for building and breaking things fast to land the foundation of human habits, practices and knowledge to support us having such a radical change in the way we do things, but instead we were content with doing it “by the numbers” not “by heart” and now it’s breaking. It’s crumbling not because it’s not needed, or because it’s it’a all superfluous or not fit for purpose, but because we never landed the big win of normalising the much harder work of feeling and opening up together.
Is it salvageable? I say it is! What has landed still means a lot. What clarity we gained regarding the need for genuine flexibility, the nature of non-sequential and bite-sized work, and some of the revelations on flow and being in the zone, are in my view, nowadays present across the board and somewhat ingrained even in the heads -and hopefully hearts!- of the most waterfall of old school execs. More importantly, if we are to look ahead some 10-15 years it will all land even more as the new generation comes in able and willing to put in the harder effort of the human work.
You see, this generation comes in principle-guns blazing and untaxed by dire economic considerations and a cPTSDed existence, and they come with more understanding of emotions and human nature than any generation before them. They are emotionally intelligent, value human life, have self-respect and pace themselves as part of self-care, know the value of deep communication and opening up, and have an all together stronger foundation for striving towards Zero Human Debt. Not only that, but they are unwilling to cater to office politics and won’t stand for BS and hide as willingly as we did. They aren’t chronically suppressed by a fear of failure and years of being micromanaged and they won’t shun the hard conversations. They aren’t “emotionally constipated” and they don’t fear deep conversations, genuine relationships and the nature of feelings. They haven’t been forced to believe they are all homogeneously neurotypical as we have and are proud of the strengths diversity brings. They certainly don’t think the enterprise hired them to be silent and semi-functional machines trying to prove their worth against faster AI computations.
The “new guard” know their true USP is their humanity and they’ll make the most of it. Hopefully we’ll help them not stand in their way defending our failures.
If Agile (and with it any common-sense type of work) is dead let’s stop talking about it all together and redefine it to mean “Human Work for Technology Performance” and use the time we waste debating, to make up for when we were so human-work-shy that we risked all our progress. Let’s talk about exact tips and tricks, strategies, hints, best practices, ideas of how to rapidly revive and recreate a sense of building together based on human needs and emotions. Let’s watch what works for the few who got culture in technology right. Let’s stop assuming any of this will take care of itself or is anyone else’s problem. Let’s make up for lost time and match the energy of the new guard not throw them into the jaws of the “business prevention departments”, the stagnant fearful vibes of the many work groups masquerading as teams or let them become victims of the corporate inertia hells we let fester around us. I know we can and I have to hope that we will!
If you have time this week check out the episodes you may have missed last year of my Tales from the FinTech Crypt and the NeuroSpicy@Work as well as the Secret Society of Human Work Advocates podcasts as they all, inevitably, come back to the need for lowering Human Debt and they also always strive to offer genuine practical suggestions on how to do so and come speak to us if you’re ready to help the new guard coming in redefine agility, success and humanity at work alike and let’s hope we’ll all look back on 2025 a year from now and think “Ah, it would have been safe to “claim 2025”, it’s been a blast and agility is stronger than ever!”.