At the time of this writing, there’s a flood of anti-agile posts on X and LinkedIn and continuous pressure on the supportive roles and structures for agile implementations, transformations, trainings — the whole “agile economy,” continuing the trend of the last few years. The view from agilemanifest.com is that “agility” is needed more than ever, though the way it “manifests” will evolve and morph and reconstitute in a mix of predicable and unpredictable ways. Will the whole of the agile movement, if we want to call it that, be jettisoned in favor of new words, new roles, new ways of working?
Let’s talk about a few root causes. The first is just the natural lifecycle of business practices – when a business practice is approaching the age of the youngest members of the workforce, a meaningful segment of that workforce is likely to view those practices as dated and vintage whether or not they’re effective. In fact, whether or not they’re even being followed. The “agile in name only” phenomenon, is another root cause, which amplifies the first one. Many people in tech who are mid or late career now have had the misfortune of being in organizations with “agile” being thrown around like “empowerment” and “synergy” and <insert buzzword here>. If they haven’t seen “good” agile, they may have concluded a long time ago that there really isn’t “good” agile. Not a big step from there to conclude that agile itself isn’t “good.” So, you’ve got a meaningful cohort of instinctive and experienced skeptics and detractors. That’s the same as it ever was for agile, in truth. But there are other developments.
COVID drove remote work, not that it wasn’t present before. But, en masse, remote work didn’t just make the iconic, best case scenario small teams of vibrant team mates having physical standups an even rarer phenomenon, it shifted the meaning of these gatherings. The insistence on face to face communication fell under the “return to the office” camp, which even as this is written is more closely associated with command and control executives, who, whether they’re right or wrong, often are not leading the charge for other agile practices like decentralization and servant-leadership. Which is to say, the primacy of the customer, and the team’s ability to responding to the customer…is that hurt or helped with being physically in the office, to attend stand ups? If that makes you scratch your head or want to draw a diagram, that’s one of the second order effects — in the context of a hierarchical physical bureaucracy with different floors and buildings segregating functions, getting everyone out of those literal spaces to a literal common space was actually a recipe that “agile” inherited. A small team working together in the same laboratory, or factory, or warehouse, or garage, or cave – that’s how stuff got done with a minimum of latency and fluff. Remote tooling and culture creates virtual spaces – it doesn’t matter if they’re inferior if they seem like viable substitutes. If someone’s emoticon in a Slack message *seems* the same or close enough to being in the room with them, and someone whose title seems to imply they’re a “process master” is telling you that you need an hour commute on both sides of a visit to a common office space filled with cubicles or just tables so you can tell everybody aloud what you could put in Slack, or Teams, or any number of ticketing systems…
Much more can (and will) be said about this, but hopefully the point is made that the last few years, the experience of rote agile practices are massively challenged by macroscopic shifts in ways of working and interacting and the relative desirability of traditional office space in general?
This is going to be a series, but even as we dive more into the nuances of root causes and their lingering effect, rest assured we’ll get to bright spots. We’ll discuss ways that those of you who have experienced, led, trained, advocated for, struggled to enable agility against previous impediments and obstacles will have opportunities to help reshape the way we work together and create value. There’s no sales pitch or easy answers at the end of this series, but it won’t just be recycled gloom and doom, either. Share some of your thoughts in the comments.