Silver Bullet Agile?
The agile approach is a great thing if used wisely and appropriately, serving a real user or customer need. Sadly, some applications of “Agile” are just stupid.
I happen to love greek Feta cheese. I add it to many foods I eat — from various salads to pasta and even stews. But I’m not going to buy a Feta-flavored ice cream because I know it’d taste awful. Only a Feta-fanatic—or a very stupid person — would do that. Everything has its time and place.
As “Agile” is gaining recognition (and is being marketed and sold as a commodity like hot sauce), there are more and more morons trying to apply it just everywhere — sometimes in the most stupid and damaging ways.
Why?
Probably because it’s cool, and too many people are selling it too hard. So we can expect to see this spread more widely. Perhaps we’ll be told at the next conference that we must all have daily stand-up meetings with our kids, or have a retrospective after we walk the dog, or should play planning poker when deciding what toppings to get on our pizzas.
Of course this is ridiculous. It’s the old “silver bullet” fallacy again.
Applying “Agile” in a way that is directly opposed to what agility is supposed to mean starkly contrasts with using it to deliver great products that make the world a better place for the users, for the companies making these products, and for people building these products.
One recent example: I was invited to an agile meetup focusing on “Agile in HR”. Before going there, two thoughts were on my mind:
- Agile HR is a non-existent HR. Why would you need an HR department anyway? Wouldn’t it be a better idea to transfer all the “HR” functions directly to the teams and let them care of themselves? They can take responsibility for hiring new team members, deciding on what training to invest in, and how to divide bonuses. They are doing it at Buurtzorg after all and they report it’s working wonderfully.
- Why would you even want to have an “Agile” HR? Shouldn’t HR be the function that represents stability inside the organization? Surely you don’t want the HR people to iterate (in weekly cycles) on things such as benefits or pay (“In this iteration, we have changed two words in section 8 of your contracts. Please sign and return to us by the end of next week, otherwise your salary for this month will not be processed.”) It’s absurd.
Surprisingly, the meetup turned out to focus on something else: hiring. And “Agile” turned out to mean fast and sometimes with false promises of how things work at the company. This is not only a bad idea (first: people will soon find out about any false promises you make, second: even in a tough and competitive situation like we have now, why wouldn’t you take all the time so that both you and the candidate understand each other?) but also seems to lead to hiring gurus, ninjas and superstars. You really don’t want to do that unless your goal is to sabotage the company.
Another example I came across recently was an “Agile” marketing agency. They would literally drag their clients into weekly “review meetings” where they’d for example show them all Google font combinations and make them choose one — essentially trying to outsource their work back to the client instead of understanding needs of their clients, coming up with a proposal and collaborating on that. Again, they have used a concept that would work for them (getting client feedback before they start mass-production, validating their ideas) in a wrong and idiotic way.
We have to stop this before it gives agile itself a bad name.
Next time when you want to implement “Agile” or are confronted with a situation where it has been implemented, ask yourself these questions:
- What is the real need behind using agility here? What are we trying to achieve?
- If this fails, what would be the potential impacts?
- Are we using agility to quickly learn new things and improve our products or processes? Or are we pretending to be “Agile” because it sounds cool?
If you cannot come up with satisfactory answers to these questions, don’t just implement “Agile”. Think more about ways true agility could help. In the aforementioned HR situation the key things would be allowing the delivery teams to self-organize and to improve any HR-related processes to make teams as self-sufficient as possible.
Do you have any examples of “Agile” being used without a valid purpose? We’d love to hear from you! Until then, be careful where you add the soft and crumbled Feta. It has a place and purpose, and putting Feta in a strawberry shake makes as much sense as forcing Agile onto your HR department.
Also, do you think someone else ought to read this post? Send it to them! (You can do that anonymously.)
