A 2020 blog post titled Why Are There So Many Misconceptions Around Agile? by Agile Manifesto signatory Andy Hunt said, “The agile manifesto establishes abstract principles for skilled practitioners in a healthy environment.” Deconstructing his statement suggests that the principles are not intended to be specific rules, they’re only to be employed by those who properly understand their intent and application, and they can only be used in organizations meeting an idealized set of criteria.
- The abstraction of the manifesto lies in its comparative statements, providing generalized value statements about continuums rather than hard-and-fast rules about their end points. Hunt clarified saying, “Agile is not a set of practices or rules. Anyone who tells you any different is mistaken. Agile is a mindset and approach used for working effectively in complex domains.”
- Those principles require interpretation by accomplished specialists rather than naïve application. Hunt indicates those specialists “need a solid set of learnings from the pioneers in the field, combined with lots of practice and experience.”
- Hunt also defined the types of organizational settings needed for Agile. Using the Westrum Continuum model, he said “…agile techniques simply will not work in those environments” eliminating organizations in either a “Pathological” or “Bureaucratic” organization and mindset and indicating that agile techniques only work in Westrum’s “Generative” organizations. That is that Agile organizations must be mission-driven and performance-oriented rather than power or rule oriented. To meet Westrum’s definitions those organizations must have and maintain high cooperation, transparent communication, a practice of sharing risks, encouragement of intergroup connection, acceptance and curiosity about failure, and a focus on innovation. These seem like difficult qualities to find all together in a single setting, seeming to describe a perfectly ideal set of conditions.
Many Agilist writers indicate, “Agile is easy to get going yet hard to do well.” While I expect that Hunt might disagree with the first point, he would agree with the second. Doesn’t that diminish the realizable value of attempting to do Agile? Having achieved the status of doing it well (‘Performing’ in the Tuckman team development phase model), do teams easily lose the ability when turnover happens (reverting to ‘Forming’ or ‘Storming’ as predicted by Tuckman) and is the return to doing it well as difficult in subsequent attempts (easily sticking in ‘Norming’)? Is that why Agile approaches must assume stable development teams?
Hunt readily acknowledges that “most people work in unhealthy work environments with low psychological safety and degraded information flows.” In so doing he must also acknowledge that Agile principles are not suitable for “most people” whether they lack appropriate access to qualified specialists or they lack the appropriate organizational characteristics as a general condition or in team transitions. From this we might conclude, similar to what I have found before in The Lake Wobegon Assumption in Agile, that:
Agile is artisanal programming in a utopian setting.
What is there for the rest of us?
