Agile – red pill or blue pill?

You can always learn from feedback. Someone posted a comment on my previous article to announce “there is nothing new in Agile, it is just trial and error“. Although it was meant as a generic anti-agile statement, it got me thinking.

That feedback is maybe a consequence of how Agile is often presented. Some of the Agile ideas are indeed conventional, perhaps even obvious. Other parts are challenging and even threatening to some. You choose how to approach this volatile mixture and which ideas to focus on. I think of this choice as “blue pill” and “red pill” approaches to Agile. It’s the difference between “doing Agile” and “being Agile”.

You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.
“The Matrix”

“Blue pill” Agile

Agile is deeply rooted in Empiricism, intentionally so. And Empiricism isn’t new. The name comes from the Empiric school in ancient Greece, starting in the 3rd century BC. So there’s two and a half millennia of tradition. And I’m sure there are predecessors to the philosophy in both European and non-European tradition.

Empiricism is the belief that people should rely on practical experience and experiments, rather than on theories, as a basis for knowledge.
Collins English Dictionary

If Agile focusses on experience over theory, it’s no surprise that its good practices can be seen as “nothing new”. They are built on what good teams are already doing, not on unproven theories, so of course people have seen something similar before. The Agile Manifesto was written by practitioners, not researchers. Don’t forget that line at the start of the Agile Manifesto (to me, the most important line).

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.
Agile Manifesto

So is Agile “just” a name for trial and error as that feedback said? Anyone who has worked with me knows how much I dislike that word “just”, which is often used to trivialise and to avoid engaging with people’s ideas. Is that feedback missing something?

When people talk about Agile, they tend to focus on a set of processes. In VUCA environments a deterministic plan is not your best tool. You learn as you progress, and the goal often shifts at the same time. These form the two dimensions of uncertainty that Stacey called “Agreement” (doubt about where you are going) and “Uncertainty” (doubt about how you get there). Agile approaches offer a set of good practices which have been shown to help manage this environment. Scrum is an example of these.

Scrum is an empirical process, sometimes described as “the art of the possible.”
Ken Schwaber

That’s a valuable contribution but feels like only telling half the story, and I believe the less interesting half. The good practices are valuable, but just applying a process can lead to the “blue pill” approach – you continue to believe what you always believed.

This is what we seem to see in many “Agile transformations”. Why do people fall into this trap? Because as well as being the less interesting half of Agile, it’s also the easy half to apply, the most sellable half and, by far the less challenging half. My previous article discusses a case study of how this can lead you astray.

“Red Pill” Agile

So what is the other half of Agile? Much of what I think of as “red pill” Agile comes from Lean and focuses on changed behaviours rather than changed processes. Lean values empiricism and actively promotes experiments to solve problems. But it also makes strong statements about personal accountability and a focus on customer value which can change your way of thinking.

You have to think for yourself and face your difficulties instead of trying to borrow wisdom
Taiichi Ohno

Lean introduces the importance of “Gemba”, the place at which the work happens. This is where true understanding lies. You don’t find what is really happening by looking at what problems someone else has solved, or by asking for status reports, or by managers having meetings with managers.

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
Principles of the Agile Manifesto

“Red pill” Agile focuses on who is accountable. Empowered teams are a fundamental part of Agile and challenge Taylorist ideas of how businesses are run. The traditional view is that managers are there to control the teams.

I can say, without the slightest hesitation, that … the man who is fit to handle pig-iron as his daily work cannot possibly understand the science
Frederick Winslow Taylor

Of course few organisations today would openly support quite such an extreme statement. But how often is the management role primarily to sit in meetings with other managers to make decisions? How many organisations reward controlling and egotistical behaviour, as in the quote below (see “Nokia’s fall in 4 key points“).

The aggressive behaviors of the chairman and some EVPs activated a generic fear toward authority figures.
How Nokia Lost the Smartphone Battle

The assumption is that management past experience outweighs a team’s in-depth knowledge when making decisions. What if this lacks validity in knowledge industries where fast-changing environments reverse that balance? I balance my own leadership skills against a keen awareness that none of the programming languages my teams use even existed when I started my career.

Hierarchical decision making is slow and loses detail each level that is involved. What if you could rethink this with localised decision making and networked organisational structures?

Team autonomy can be very threatening to managers. The impact on middle management has often been highlighted as the biggest issue in adopting agile approaches in an organisation. Many managers have been successful as abstracted decision makers. Many enjoy the power. Surprisingly many are fearful that they would have no role if the team made its own choices. They may not understand the role of an agile leader, or lack the coaching skills, or (often) not value them.

And let’s not suggest this is easy on the teams either. Many workers are comfortable in an environment where managers tell them what to do. Empowered teams have accountabilities and need to live up to these.

Taking the red pill is not an easy choice, but in my experience there’s a lot of value down the rabbit hole. As I was discussing with the development team here last week, there’s a reason why one of the Scrum values is “Courage”.