Dance Away
I read a Linked IN post the other day that started as a rant about ‘Agile’ not working. “Oh, good!” I thought. And then it went on to say that what organisations should really being doing is ‘Agile 2’.
“Noooooooooooooooooooo!” I moaned, as I fell backwards off my chair and lay in the fetal position for a bit.
I wasn’t bewailing the fact that this person’s critique was just a transparent attempt to promote “their thing ™” (I mean, that DID piss me off but it was the minor crime).
I was bewailing the fact that ‘Agile’ is a ‘thing that should not be a thing’.
He was right to say that ‘Agile’ isn’t working in most organisations but that’s because IT SHOULDN’T BE A THING.
I know a lot of people think it is a thing and they have been trained in this thing. They quite possibly have it in their job title, or have one that is associated with it like ‘Scrum Master’ or ‘Product Owner’. They might even be working for consultancies who are ‘rolling out Agile’ for organisations. But they shouldn’t, because it shouldn’t be a thing.
It became a thing because those very consultancies took an idea, sanitised it and productised it into something that could be ‘transformational’ and be sold to corporates and then the flogged the arse off of it.
But if we go back to it’s origin, to the place that the idea was born, we will see that the creation of ‘Agile’ as a discipline is antithetical to the original idea.
Because agile, as described in the Agile Manifesto, is not a discipline, or a project, or a process, or a set of tools or any of the stuff that gets pushed out to organisations. Agile is a state of mind.
Let’s look at the Agile Manifesto
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
That’s it.
There’s another document that lists the 12 principles underlying the manifesto that takes up less than a page.
The only reference to processes and tools, which is what most of the ‘Agile’ industry flogs, is that they are of less value than individuals and interactions. According to the Manifesto, if you want to work in an agile way, you need to show your people how to have better interactions. I don’t see much of any of that happening in the ‘Agile’ industry.
‘Agile’ has become a religion, with it’s own dogma, rituals, hierarchies and symbols. The reason ‘Agile’ is failing is because the organisations are worshipping a false god.
Agile is not a thing you ‘do’, it’s a way of being.
It’s not a thing.
Lean On Me
Of course, there are lots of other things that shouldn’t be things, ideas that have been misinterpreted and bowdlerised into something soft and pappy that can be fed to the C-suite on the promise that it will improve the organisation, like some sugary breakfast cereal that will somehow improve your health without you having to do any exercise, like chewing.
Lean is another example.
It’s something you come across all over the place, a word slapped on all sorts of things to make them seem more efficient, more virtuous. And especially more saleable.
There is a massive industry around ‘Lean’, selling tools, courses, accreditations and, of course, massive consultancy projects. All promoted as ‘transformational’.
Lean is good, right?
Or is it? Does it actually deliver on it’s promises? Does it actually mean anything?
I’m not saying there are no good things that come out of the various flavours of ‘Lean’ that you come across but, really, should it be a thing? Because it’s very, very confusing.
So we ask the question, where did it come from?
It all started with the Toyota Production System (TPS), which in turn was based on the teaching of W. Edward Deming, an American business theorist and management consultant. Deming was sent out to Japan after the Second World War to help them reconstruct their industries and teach them his management philosophy.
Japan emerged as a manufacturing powerhouse thereafter, which was substantially attributed to developments like TPS, which was widely adopted by Japanese manufacturing companies and enabled them to produce higher quality products at lower cost compared to the US. This was originally referred to as ‘Just-in-time manufacturing’.
US manufacturing companies wanted to find out how they did it and to improve their quality levels to compete, so the big consultancies saw an opportunity to teach the methods behind TPS and began codifying them. This is how most of the western manufacturers learnt about the Japanese methods.
This is where things start to go awry because what was taught began to get detached from the underlying principles, as the objective of the exercise became to create something that could be sold to corporations rather than to impact and change how those organisations function. That’s because the latter is hard and difficult work and much harder to sell than the sugar-rush of a new set of toys of play with.
This is how it is described on the ‘Lean Six Sigma Definition’ (!) website
“To respond to the increased competition from Japan, the US developed numerous quality improvement programs, such as Total Quality Management (TQM), Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), Management by Objectives (MBO), and Six Sigma. However, they focused too often on the technical quality tools, but did not address the more difficult and important aspects: systems thinking and management principles.”
The very fact that there is even a thing such as ‘Lean Six Sigma’ that needs defining shows that things have gone rather off-track here. What we see is the endless creation of new ‘Lean’ artefacts that organisations and people get obsessed with collecting without actually adopting the underlying philosophy of the Toyota Production System that they are supposedly wanting to match.
This has clear parallels with what happened to the Agile Manifesto.
For all the statistical measurements, tools and processes that support TPS, it is essentially a state of mind. It’s actually about systems thinking.
Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota and co-creator of the TPS, instructed his managers to begin by spending two weeks on the production floor doing nothing other than watching, listening and asking questions and then to reflect upon what they had observed and learnt. Can you imagine that happening in organisations today that are ‘going Lean’, when the whole rationale for doing so is to reduce costs and increase efficiency?
This is because the mindset of US and most western management is antithetical to the philosophy behind Lean approaches. So instead we get lots ‘Lean’ things so we look lean without actually really being lean. It’s like being a weekend Punk, wearing all the clothes and looking like a rebel but putting on the suit and going off to your corporate gig on the Monday.
So we have lots of ‘Lean’ theatre but a failure to actually BE lean.
Your Latest Trick
Why does this matter?
Because the underlying philosophies and principles are really valuable but once they’ve been mangled by the consultancies into CEO-friendly turn-key solutions they get lost. Worse, their credibility gets undermined and they eventually get dismissed as just another fad.
This is already happening with Agile. This newsletter was prompted by a piece reporting that organisations are abandoning ‘Agile’ because it is not delivering the transformation that was promised when it was sold to them. That’s because what they are implementing is a thing called ‘Agile’, they are not actually becoming agile. What they actually get is just a superficial ‘Agile’ wash over their existing waterfall development approach. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work as promised in the sales pitch.
With Lean, we see a burgeoning and bewildering choice of variants and sub-variants, and even cross-variants like ‘Lean Six Sigma’ that confuse and obfuscate. It hasn’t turned Lean into a silver bullet, it’s turned it into a whole arsenal of sliver-based ammunitions and means of firing them. You want to ‘do Lean’? Take your pick from this wide variety of weaponry.*
None of them actually solve the problem but they make a fantastic sound and look real snazzy
Unbelievable
These are not the only things that should not be things that I could have picked over but they illustrate two points,
The first one is that you should alway go back to first principles. Where did these ideas come from, what did they mean originally? There are so many words, model and tools that are bandied around today that are corruptions of what the sources actually meant. The way we use them today is actually misleading and would have their originators spinning in their graves because we have missed the wisdom they shared.
For example, Maslow didn’t create the hierarchy of needs, he saw the needs as inter-related and equal, which has a very different meaning. The application of the hierarchy corrupts our understanding.
The second is that you should always question things and not accept them at face value. This applies to news items and ‘conventional wisdom’ as much as it does to models and concepts. It definitely applies to research reports, where all too often the headline presented is not really supported by the study or cannot be extrapolated in the way suggested. In some cases, the study actually contradicts the conclusion being stated.
Of course it’s hard to check everything. There’s so much information thrown at us we must by necessity apply a filter. On the other hand, it’s often not that hard to check. A quick internet search can give you enough information to sense-check what you’re being told (I’m amazed at how often I can ‘win’ an online argument by asking Doctor Google a simple question). I’m not perfect on this, by any means, but I try to cover as much as I can and I’m perfectly OK with being pulled up on something when I don’t (so all you Agile and Lean experts reading this, please let me know if you disagree or if I’ve mangled something!)
When it comes to the big stuff, it’s worth spending the time and effort to get to the source. After all, you don’t want to build your house on foundations of sand, do you? Much less your business, or your career. Or your life.
Otherwise, you are living in a state of delusion. That can be quite comfortable until reality comes along and breaks up the party, leaving you with the mother and father of all hangovers.
Exactly. Also:
- https://tempo.substack.com/p/agile-diagnostics-a-visit-to-the
- https://tempo.substack.com/p/we-have-always-been-at-war-with-bureaucracy
- https://tempo.substack.com/p/project-management-for-the-masses
Thank you! My similar hot button is quality programs. I don't understand why anyone needs to be told, for example, to "do things right the first time." If a company needs that "program," maybe their problem is who they're hiring. Fix that and they wouldn't need a quality program. (I agree that as you've said there's value to be sussed out of most of these things, but the program as a whole is 75% baloney.)
And I'm damn sceptical of ISO9001. I worked for a customer of a high-profile, national service provider with an ISO9001 certificate. Part of my job was auditing every one of their invoices because their invoicing quality was so bad 11% of their charges (during my audit tenure) were incorrect, in their favor of course. So what, exactly, was the benefit to anyone of their ISO9001 certification?