Cargo Cult Agile
Fred: Are you in a Cargo Cult?
According to Wikipedia, “The name derives from the belief which began among Melanesians in the late 19th and early 20th century that various ritualistic acts such as the building of an airplane runway will result in the appearance of material wealth, particularly highly desirable Western goods (i.e., “cargo”), via Western airplanes.”
In Agile, we too often see the same thing.
Being envious of the success and benefits of Agile, many companies adopt the superficial trappings of Agile, renaming the meetings as “stand ups” and calling management reviews “retrospectives”. But in practice, nothing changes. It’s still the same primitive management driven hierarchical organization, micromanaging the teams, using outdated waterfall practices, and completely failing to grasp the core principles of agility.
No wonder those Cargo Cult teams can’t get off the ground. It’s all an illusion. Teams have no true autonomy, and are still treated as cogs in a machine instead of human beings.
Senior managers are the ones most responsible for Cargo Cult Agile behaviors. They read some magazine article on an airplane, and next thing you know there is a command from on high that tomorrow everyone is going Agile.
Mimicking the appearance of Agile, just like building a wooden mock up of an airplane, won’t deliver any goods. It’s just a waste of time, distracting everyone from real problems. What it inevitably means is that the company is in fast decline, and anyone who can get out of this toxic environment should run, swim, or fly away as fast as they can.
Tom: Illusions and Imitations
Agile has become a mainstream, many people say. I dare to have a different view. I believe that agile has become a hype. Ron Jeffries some time ago tweeted agile: many people talk about it, but only a few actually get it, which summarizes it nicely.
The core of the problem is that most of the so-called agile gurus (more on gurus, super-stars, full-stack people, ninjas, samurais and others in a later post) don’t understand the principles. For them, agile is a method or a set of tools that will help them do things faster and cheaper. And they do that by imitating technical practices they have seen elsewhere without changing the main things — mindset, leadership style and culture (although the last cannot be changed directly, more on that also in a later post).
What we are left with is what I call illusion of agility — from a process perspective, these cargo-cult teams seem to be doing everything right. They have all the roles. They hold all the events. They work with all the artifacts of, say, Scrum. But the real benefits of agile are not there, because on a closer look, we will find out something is broken — be it lack of ownership, no real products, no focus on value delivered or something else.
And it is even worse than this. Most of these teams and companies are sure they are really agile. They don’t allow anyone to doubt their agility. Eventually, they start to see agile as either a solution to all of their problems or — in the worse case — as a reason of all their problems.
This is nicely illustrated on an example of a big company I know. A CIO in that company had been to a CIO retreat where some other manager mentioned agile. When he came back, his goal was simple: by the end of this year, at least 50% of our IT teams will be agile. He went on and pushed this goal to his lower-level managers. These managers, wanting to deliver on that goal, chose the simplest path — they renamed their roles (project managers became scrum masters, business analysts became product owners, …), their meetings (status meetings became sprint reviews or daily scrums) and even their project phases (planning became product discovery, development has been divided into “sprints” followed by a “hardening sprint” that replaced SIT and UAT). Did they become agile? Of course not. Have they met their goal and satisfied the CIO, who could then brag about his successful agile transformation in front of other CIOs? Definitely yes.
So, let’s stop meaninglessly and hastily implementing agile. The agile mindset needs to be understood and slowly nurtured, especially in larger organizations. We need to be patient, proceed slowly and take feedback along all the way.
Have you seen your colleagues or managers behaving like a cargo cult and focusing only on rules and processes? Why don’t you send them this post? (You can even do that anonymously.)
