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I've been trying to avoid joining the "Is Agile dead?" conversation that pops up repeatedly, as it has once again on LinkedIn in recent months. It's tempting to get caught up in this debate, but it happens so frequently. Let's be honest—whenever there's a major change or new initiative in a company, someone inevitably questions, "What about Agile? Maybe it's not so great after all!"
When the rhetorics does rear its head, exasperatingly incomprehensible as it may be, I always refer people to my controversial “Agile Isn’t “Out”, You are!” Forbes article of years ago as it says it all, nothing changed and the backlash I get for it is the same no matter when it comes back around again.
Why does it? Because no one wants to hear it, as I postulated many times before, “Agile Isn’t Business, It’s Personal” - in that genuine capacity for agility is a state of mind and it is not as common as we want to believe. Having spent years studying agility and its psychological tenets as a self-professed “Agile anthropologist” I know it requires a combination of extreme grit, mental flexibility, resilience, intelligence, passion and a dash of perfectionism (debatable as the use of that is) and that it can never be done “by numbers” and without having genuinely embraced it at a deep personal level.
In that article, some 5-6 years ago, I was saying:
“It all hinges upon our EQ. What does emotional intelligence have to do with it? I've often written about this in the past, Agile is a "Way of Thinking not a Way of Working".
Being Agile creates mental pressure to the practitioner. The old ways of work have served the employee for years, changing anything is intensely risky and most of us are risk averse when it comes to our professional lives. At the same time, anyone who looks under the hood understands that Agile speeds things up but may expose limitations as it needs the practitioner to eternally be alert, always question their progress, never stop pushing themselves and others and always strive for new and better. Excellence is not comfortable or easy to attain and all that Agile does is enable excellence.
Clearly, this amount of emotional intelligence and high performance is possible as some people and some enterprises - few and far between- have managed to embrace Agile indeed not just pay it lip service.
Sometimes it took professionals arriving at Agile on their own, whether by reading the wonders of delivery it performs for Google or Amazon or by employing some of it in their own lives before they could see it part of their work.
Sometimes, while it may have been mandated and made obligatory from the top, they have had the right Agile coach that knew how to instill a love of the concept and they have learned to appreciate its merits and have truly taken it to heart.
And make no mistake about it, it genuinely takes taking it to heart.
I often say "Agile is a religion" mostly for the pleasure of watching the uncomfortable shifts in my dialogue partner and while said for drama effect, it isn't untrue - to be truly agile you have to be willing to believe. Thankfully that belief doesn't have to be in any invisible entity but in clear statistics and hard-to-argue-with solid results showing how much more innovative, efficient and successful organizations that truly are Agile can be.
For the younger generation that is simply now coming into the workforce, things are somewhat easier as they don't need to make a painful moral transition between waterfall ways of working and Agile, they simply know there is this magical way that the digitally native technology giants and other nimble entities are using with excellent results, and they can embrace it right away. No questions, no mourning over Prince certifications.”
And this last point is the one I would like to go back to today as the hope I had concluded with in 2018 is slipping away for me - is that still so?
Are our young people, our new entrants to the workforce, genuinely more Agile?
Sure, they are primed for agility - they have heard of it, studied and worked in non-linear ways in their education, understood the value of making work visible, communicating and maybe even testing before writing code if we’re lucky, so they have all of not most of the sine qua non conditions that would make their Agile come “from the heart” but is that enough?
Is the change of guard with so many people in the technology sphere being young and ready for great things translating into the more evident Agile evolution I predicted in that article a few years ago? No, not really, not judging by their reactions to the new “Agile is dead” backlash.
More importantly, more frighteningly, what if it is not on them that this natural progression that ought to at the very least manifested in a cessation of interrogating of the point of Agility as the only way of working we have found in technology to deliver at all, hasn’t come to light yet?
What if, and hear me out here, we simply placed them in too sick of organisations that were too riddled with Human Debt already and too unsure of the right path themselves to let them grow into their own Agile skin?
What if, in other words, we let them see our distrust and our big cravings for BAU, our shoulder shakes and eye-rolls when we talk about SAFE and the rest of the “magic frameworks” (that’s what I call them to execs that think any of the flavours are an off the shelf solution they don’t need to put human work in!) and that lack of belief rubbed off on them?
What if our scepticism -to put it mildly- and our obstinate resistance to doing the right thing if it’s hard (TDD is still not yet an industry standard everywhere, guys, why’s that?!? And don’t even get me started on the unconscious lack of willingness to mop up Tech (and Human!) Debt) has been the passed down norm that will make them renounce their good intentions and heart-level-agility capacity to match the low energy and lack of enthusiasm of the place they joined?
What if, as a generation, this inability to do it “from the heart” will have translated into how we lost the opportunity to embed a much faster and more intelligent way of working into the fabric of all we do in technology and the rest of the knowledge industry?
Is that even conscionable? That we may end up in a world where we would revert to water-falling, false projections, corseted processes and incessant planning with no capability of delivery? Of course not. The tech shops that could do that even if they wanted to, and still remain competitive in the market are, I dare say, inexistent.
And why would we? What have we learned about agility that makes us think a revert would be a good idea? It's not that it doesn't deliver results. Thankfully there are not many that claim that. What then? That it’s hard? That some people don’t want to do it? That it’s impossible to have performance by just following a rigid scrum dance or going through the motions of a Kanban board without doing the dreaded -and much harder- human work where we genuinely relate and empathise with each other to get anywhere?
Sure.
Undeniably, the road to being transformed and having agility in your very DNA is windy, tiring and long but is that a reason to quit the race? Of course not.
The fact that we have young people come into our industries and see us quarrel about the point of agility this late in the game, is a testament to how frighteningly slow we have collectively been in landing this for them.
That we invite them into an industry that is eating itself in sterile conversations about the point of coaches or the exact differences between product owners, project managers (and any other tech leaders who have to do the adulting bit everyone dreads for that matter) is a pity.
We could and should have done better. We should have let them know it was hard and how and why and helped them see our journey and how to avoid any pitfalls and instead embed all the learnings we did. We should have welcomed them in a place where we had made the jump and we now knew, in our hearts why there is no other way.
We should have “made it nice” for them in the technology world and shared our lessons fast, hard and excitedly.
I don’t believe we are doing any of these things and I believe that is a crying shame.
Where are the many “Our Agile journey” case studies that speak about the mentality changes it took? Where are the examples of truly Agile organisations that now are transformed at a fundamental level complete with the personal stories of the heroes who did them and the leadership teams that are beacons of agility? Where are the hero projects and the reliability and delivery cadence success stories that translate into low tech and human debt? Our team has been trying to find these architects of change to interview them for our People AND Tech or (the newly launched!) Tales from the FinTech Crypt podcasts to showcase the genuine real stories of how agility came to permeate their organisation and they are few and far between. Many of them are out of the organisations and even industries they served when they started on their Agile transformations and many are burnt out and momentarily (or permanently?) disillusioned but we still need each and every of these role models and for their stories of deep intrapreneurially change to ring louder.
We need more stories of agility success instead of this continuous attack on the concept, its many acronyms, generated job titles, antipatterns, and idiosyncrasies.
To have the young generation witness Agile manifesto signatories still having to explain the initial points to sneering “experienced execs” on LinkedIn who regard it all with a mixture of amusement and suspicion is soul-crushing to even the new inexperienced eye who can see them not having reached financial or even ideological success of the magnitude they deserve and soon shakes them of all that goodness I thought they could infuse in our world.
The new generation is coming into a workplace where there is tech debt, and cultural or Human Debt so great that it is taking solid thinking and winning process down with it.
The culture of most organisations they go to, is one of extreme theatre disconnected from real markers of functional dynamics of human groups.
Everyone talks that good game about innovation, the love of their humans that are never resources and the extreme appetite for diverse perspectives and no one is genuinely doing anything of substance.
Inflamatory and not true in your case? Ask yourself - when was the last time a heart-to-heart was had in your team at all leave alone when was it aimed at auditing your agility? When was the last time that your company did an “all minds on deck” thinking exercise about how to return to genuine experimentation whilst delivering whilst also urgently up-skill to develop the emotional intelligence we all need to live agile lives of empathic communication with others? When did you do last regular self-improvement work on your own -recognised and remunerated by the enterprise on company time not your desperate efforts to keep burnout at bay!- or with your team?
Not any time recently, I bet. We meet less and less clients that are allowed to even talk about the human aspects. They are barely clear on remote work, they're still in horrid mental shape following the pandemic and the current wave of layoffs, and yet they fully unsupported, they’re issued with a yearly survey that results in a shiny NPS and no genuine heavy lifting in learning or practicing ever happens, in fact, the subject has all but become taboo in some places that feel woefully unequipped. How can we expect any more than a “Should we do it like this after all?” never-ending bikeshedding loop on the theory and why do we stand for the navel-gazing in lieu of firm progress anyhow?
Of course, if you subscribe to the nihilist version of the future where machines take over soon enough for all of us to luxuriate in a new found paradise of creative and human values supported by some phantom universal income system we will magically all agree on then none of this matters. But what if none of that comes in time for either us or our kids now (or soon) entering the workforce? Or, even more likely, what if on the way to that future we need the 5th industrial revolution to teach us about the ethical intricacies of the human versus machine economy that requires brand new capabilities in the areas we never touched before in our organisations?
And what if, meanwhile, while we are avoidant, scared and frankly too lazy to do the human work our desperate pursuit of an imaginary "business as usual" set-point will make it even worse in the long run when the Human and Tech Debt it generates will simply be too high to untangle?
What’s the answer? Some big HUMAN WORK things need to happen.
- Shut down any of the “Is Agile dead?” rhetorics or at least challenge it at every opportunity - is that genuinely true and if so why and what should we imagine and try instead of it
- Deeply consider the difference between “doing Agile by numbers” vs “doing Agile from the heart” and ensure ALL your leaders are Agile to the bone, “getting truly Agile at the top” should be a priority to any self-respecting organisation.
- Shut down the semantics debate when it becomes sterile, academic or even bullying. PM vs PO, Dev vs Ops, Tech vs Business, etc, then take away their oxygen and redirect it towards understanding communication, emotions and ways to effectively relate.
- Stop deluding yourself that the human work, the work to better one’s emotional intelligence (in particular if that “one” is in leadership position of any kind) can be avoided and instead start earnestly working on creating the space and the habit to accountably better yourself and your team with tools such as our Team Dashboard.
- Recognise your true Tech and Human Debt, audit it with honesty and then make the work of lowering it visible and regular. Over the past year, our team has developed a method for “Blameless Tech and Human Debt Retros to Lower Tech and Human Debt” - chiefly designed to surface the tech-debt work in a way that keeps all engaged and non-defensive and these efforts really work best in organisations that complement them with the human work on their EQ, empathy, communication capabilities, self and team awareness. Come chat to our team and let us teach you how to do these interally at scale yourself to drastically improve your company risk profile and capabilities.
- Benchmark good team dynamics and sustainable agility-conducive practices against the few good data points we have such as the Aristotle and Oxygen Projects from Google. In our work at People Not Tech, we were super encouraged to notice that our Aristotle Benchmarking tool -which we built for teams who have comparable tech goals to be able to start measuring Psychological Safety, Dependability, Structure and Clarity, Impact and Purpose- has immediately reflected in much more mature agility practices and higher KPIs of performance across the board.
- Get real about diversity and being genuinely human and open. Genuinely real. Rethink it all. Not the DEI theatre that sits at the opposite ends from even worse, the blatant DEI disregard of organisations that violate inclusivity principles at every corner and close down their efforts. (Perform spot checks on the deep cultural issues, for instance check how you are really doing on being open to diversity with our Culture and DEI Snapshot)
- Embed the Human Work in the day-to-day for accountability. Reward it. Recognise it. Teach your leaders and all your teams that doing work to better themselves or their team dynamics, is more than allowed or desirable, it is fundamental and it needs to be incorporated into the day-to-day alongside any tech or operational efforts. There is SO much that needs to be done learning and practices wise on the “soft skills” side of things that we must start it asap as it shall remain our UHSP (Unique Human Sales Point) once all else is automated away.
The best part about this? Doing these things doesn’t require you to be the leader and commander in chief, any team lead can (and ought to) have tried to do it all at their own level in the team bubble. We help organisations at the CxO level and we work with team leaders directly at a mid-management non-organisational level as well, and let me tell you, it is invariably the latter that make the most progress happen. At their individual team levels. Where the human needle can really move.
That is where the magic happens. You don’t need to fear doing the human work is going to step on HR’s toes or not get the budget and time you feel it may need, just empower your team with the right start and the right tools and they will create magic at their own team level.
That is where agility lives, in every team and in every human being getting the point of flexible, open, non-linear ways of effectively doing the things they were hired to deliver on.
That’s what will stop us from periodically and sensationaly proclaiming the demise of the one concept we as humans created to achieve faster and better outcomes.
Agile is not dead and it’s not dying, it is still our road ahead and our evolution as thinking humans called to deliver on the 5th Industrial Revolution - it simply needs the next phase done - the human work.
So far we’re colouring by numbers, let’s start doing it from the heart hand in hand with this new generation that will teach us how to be the emotional, communicating, agile humans we deserve to be.