Stoic Agilist - Plans for 2024
"A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving." - Lao Tzu
Nine years ago I began publishing Agile-focused articles on The Agile Fieldbook, where the tag line is "Taking Agile into the wild." My thinking at the time was that Agile had won the tech shop battle - although perhaps not hearts and minds - and it was time to take Agile practices and tools into other areas of the business. Three years ago, with the goal of broadening the scope even further, I reoriented as the Stoic Agilist and began publishing on Substack. Close to 300 articles later, I've explored a wide variety of ideas. Most of them have focused on developing high performing technical teams via Agile methodologies.
Privately, 2023 was going to be the year I finished a book on Agile coaching. Applying Derek Sivers' Law of Commitments, I never got a "Hell, yeah!" for completing that effort. Too often, I'd land on "Why bother?" So it languishes in the proverbial e-desk drawer. The past year has been about sorting out my lack of enthusiasm for this effort.
While I still believe Agile has a lot to offer, the workplace has undergone a radical shift from what it was even nine years ago and the Agile values and principles have taken a bit of a beating. Technology, of course, has played a big part in this. Where neural networks, machine learning, and AI were once esoteric and fringe topics, they are now mainstream. To the average knowledge worker, these emergent technologies appear as existential threats, probably for good reason.
A much more powerful driver to workplace change, however, has been cultural. Some for the better, much for the worse. What I see as stronger forces at play, the cultural shifts threaten to stifle innovation and choke the joy and satisfaction out of the workplace. The pandemic-inspired lock-downs revealed to many office workers just how much they had given up in the age of hyper-connectivity and surveillance. They saw - viscerally experienced, even - the incremental layering of workplace crap and garbage that had built up over the years and was preventing them from enjoying the satisfaction of doing the job they were hired to do and do it well. Agile practices won't change this. In fact, it's possible Agile practices will be leveraged to further the toxic agendas of the few.
Long-time followers of the Agile Fieldbook and Stoic Agilist will have noticed the shift away from articles narrowly focused on the implementation and practice of Agile methodologies in business. Two leading reasons for this...
First, I have very little to add to the corpus of articles, books, trainings, and coaching on how to implement and practice Agile. Agile is a very simple approach to organizing people and getting things done. (That doesn't stop people from finding ways for making it overly complicated or abusive.) AI is already encroaching on the careers of those who pursue re-teaching the basics.
Most of what I read on the subject these days are rehashes of rehashed material. Even the early gurus and thought leaders are busy cranking out new versions of the basic spinach salad. A recent scan of articles published by Mike Cohn, for example, include:
Troubleshooting Nightmarish Daily Scrums
Daily Scrums Not Working? Try This Instead.
Daily Scrums: Synchronization Meetings, Not Status Meetings
I've learned a lot from Cohn through books and training. And if you read or study with no one else, you couldn't be better prepared to practice Agile in the software world. And there's absolutely nothing new in these or many other articles on Cohn's blog that I hadn't read multiple times from multiple sources in the last ten years. The same can be said of my articles on the basics. When even the thought leaders have no more leading thoughts, it's time to move on.
Second reason behind my shift in focus is that Agile - as a discipline - is deep into the shiny object phase of it's evolution. This happens to every innovative idea when it goes mainstream. People clamor to jump on the wagon and stake their own "innovative" claim in the new frontier.
Early on, in the case of Agile that would be up until about 2010, there were many useful and valuable improvements - Cohn's work around estimating and Patton's work on story mapping are just two examples. Today, all I see are ever more convoluted rewording and re-branding efforts applied to long ago established practices. Added to this are fervent claims about having "invented" something new or refactored the "badness" out of Agile and delivered the next generation, version X.X, or whatever. The end result is a whole lot of noise and very little signal, especially original signal.
As I look out into 2024, I wrestled with a recurring question: Will I be walking into a desert...or out of one?
So there you have it. The crux of the matter has been I don't feel I have anything new or particularly unique to add when it comes to practicing Agile. It's all been said a thousand times. To counter this, the plan for 2024 is to continue my series on Agile Mastery and illustrate how the topics in the series play an integral part in the success of Agile implementations and practices. That is, connecting non-Agile elements such as self-control, self-awareness, and resilience to specific elements of the Agile methods - how flexibility with each of these domains serves as a force multiplier for leadership and team performance. I'll also expand on topics related to how mastery of self leads directly to professional success beyond the narrow confines of Agile practices in the workplace.
For those who are busy hawking some gussied up version of the same ol' basics, I say "yawn." However, I do believe there are many things that need to be said, but aren't, about practicing Agile in the modern workplace. Conversations that are important for solving business problems aren't happening because it's risky to surface unapproved systemic issues or call out aberrant behaviors. For knowledge workers, the modern workplace contains a lot of mandatory kabuki theater at the behest of skittish HR minions and sheepish middle managers.
While Agile principles and practices are still very much a part of my toolset, I've a different direction in mind, something that's got a "Hell, yeah!" behind it. My goal is to speak to the more challenging issues related to developing and leading teams. Agile can help, but these issues aren't Agile issues and won't be solved by any Agile-related tool, technique, or process. Rather, issues that are human communication and relationship issues. More importantly, issues related to developing ourselves personally.
As I look out into 2024, I wrestled with a recurring question: Will I be walking into a desert...or out of one?
It's time to speak directly to those who have an open mind and similar concerns. The people who recognize their tribe in Plato's remnants, who have broken free of the chains and emerged as free men and women from Plato's Cave. The people who will persevere though the cruft of identity politics and victim culture, lead healthy and high performing teams, and succeed in their quest to build great things. I hope that includes you, Dear Reader.
If you have any questions, need anything clarified, or have something else on your mind, please email me directly.
Photo by Billy Pasco on Unsplash