You’ve got a problem.
You want to measure, and improve, something about your project or people. You’ve got a good idea about how to do this. Perhaps the metric you want to use is already widely measured. Perhaps it’s been in the industry for a while. It might be a KPI, related to a management incentive or perhaps you simply want to replace your existing metrics with something better.
Before you put that measurement in place, borrow my Evil Hat.
The Seventh Hat
Edward de Bono identified six different ways in which people prefer to think, and created the six famous thinking hats.
Unfortunately for humanity, there’s a seventh way in which we think. It comes unconsciously from our innate desire for an easy life, our craving for approval, and mechanisms of feedback which tell us whether we’re doing the right or the wrong thing. It comes more consciously from our desire to be paid more, keep or improve our jobs, and make our bosses happy. If we’re determined to be evil, we can think of it as a way of manipulating the system for our personal gain.
The problem is, even if we aren’t evil, we do start responding subconsciously to the feedback provided by our measurements and responses to them. Like an electrical current, we tend to take the path of least resistance. If we’re seeing problems as a result of the metrics, we’ll address the problems – and if we’re doing it subconsciously, we may not actually analyze the cause of those problems, or the effect of our changes outside of the system. We’ll respond to praise for achieving the targets, and to criticism for missing them – even if the targets and the praise are implicit.
By putting on the Evil Hat, we can move those subconscious reactions into the conscious realm. Pretend, for a moment, that you have no care whatsoever for the success of your project, your team or the bigger picture. You are merely interested in your own personal gain. You are not interested in making life better for anyone else but yourself. This is what your brain is already doing, before the altruism in your conscious mind or subconscious habit kicks in (and there are plenty of arguments to suggest that altruism itself is merely done for psychologically selfish reasons).
Congratulations. The Evil Hat has just turned you into a sociopath.
Sociopaths can destroy your company or project
When a sociopath wants something, they can resort to any means necessary to get it. This article, Sociopaths in High Places, illustrates some of the behaviour we can expect from sociopaths, including bullying, cruelty, manipulation and outright fraud.
This only happens because sociopaths don’t care about other people. Of course, most of us are born with empathy. We feel other people’s pain. Don’t we?
When we’re stressed, our adrenaline levels rise. We are primed for fight or flight. Our instincts are turned inwards, to our own survival. We are more likely to act in our own interests, and less likely to worry about those around us. This rather lovely article talks about the circular nature of stress and concentration, relating the feeling of compassion to the state of relaxation. The opposite is also true.
So, let’s imagine that we’ve been set some targets, and we’re not meeting them. Our boss (who has targets of his own) is putting the pressure on us. Now we’re starting to feel stressed, which makes us less empathic. Even if we’re not sociopaths ourselves, we’re capable of selfishness, and it’s starting to show.
Sociopaths are in charge
The targets in any company tend to filter down from the top. The shareholders want a profit. The CEOs, board members and upper management are in charge of delivering that profit. Their targets and metrics are clear. As Chris Matts has said when talking about Feature Injection, they need to “make money, save money or protect money”.
Two psychologists, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, started applying a checklist for psychopaths to the boardroom members of corporations, and published some of their findings in a book, “Snakes in suits”. This transcript of a radio interview with the authors and other experts illustrates some of the behaviours they found.
It’s often easier for a psychopath to achieve their goals by destroying others. Certainly, they have no empathic reason to want to help others, and they will protect themselves and the power they amass quite jealously. There are some phrases that we can look for to see if we or our colleagues are becoming less empathic with stress:
“It’s not my fault.”
“X did it.”
This is us, protecting our power and our jobs at the expense of someone else. We’re not thinking about the impact on others when we say these things. We’re doing it to protect ourselves.
Of course, true sociopaths and psychopaths (Wikipedia defines the difference nicely) will protect themselves in advance, so rarely have to resort to passing the blame – it will already be obvious to all powerful onlookers that they are blameless. Or, worse, the powerful onlookers will themselves have sociopathic tendencies, and be in cahoots with their sociopathic comrades.
As the stress mounts, the more clever amongst us will start protecting ourselves. We keep those emails, do everything in writing, and insist that processes are followed, making sure that we cannot be blamed for anything more than being cogs in a giant machine. The more creative amongst us find ways of becoming more influential and indispensable – hoarding knowledge, hiding our lack of skill, making friends in high places, setting others up to take the fall. As the habits develop, we become more and more sociopathic ourselves. Anyone who finds themselves unable to dispense with morality leaves, and the company culture is now fully riddled with blame.
Sociopaths can save your company or project
As Robert Hare says in the radio interview:
Enlightened self-interest is not a bad idea for psychopaths, and try to indicate or convince them that there are ways in which they can get what they want and need without having to actually harm other people. “Enlightened self-interest is not a bad idea for psychopaths…” Now it’s easier said than done, because their behavioural patterns are fairly entrenched. But these are not stupid people, I mean the range of intelligence amongst psychopathic populations is the same as it is in the general population. These are people who know what’s going on.
So, what’s going on?
The word is spreading. Self-organising teams, in which the members are not merely cogs, are more performant. Employee empowerment and learning improves company morale, reduces expensive employee turnover and can help make money. Transparency in the workplace fosters productivity. Incremental delivery reduces risk, resulting in more successful projects and more fulfilled staff; even governments are listening.
It turns out that in most cases, doing the empathic thing – creating positive cultures and professional experiences for employees – is also the most profitable thing, helping those sociopathic CEOs. It’s the most productive thing, helping their cahooting managers. If it involves transparency, it’s hard for anyone else to manipulate, and because an enabled, positive, productive workforce creates options it reduces risk and provides the greatest possible control in the event of uncertainty.
The sociopaths of the world – CEOs, managers, and democratic governments – are also starting to listen. If you know yourself to be a sociopath or a psychopath, you’re in a position of power, and you’re not paying attention, then you’re losing this race.
If, however, you are already cynically manipulating your company culture to be better, faster, more productive, empowered, self-organising, transparent, learning, improving, Lean, Agile, incremental, feedback-driven, forward-thinking, creative, optimistic and prepared, then congratulations. You are about to rule your slice of the world. Just what you always wanted.
Put on the Evil Hat
By pretending to a certain amount of sociopathy before we start introducing metrics and targets, we can ask ourselves, “How will we respond to these targets?” Will we game the system, manipulating these in a way which serves our purposes, but not the whole? Are they perverse incentives in disguise? Will we see anti-patterns emerge as a result?
We can also use the Evil Hat to turn this around. What metrics and targets could we put in place that would lead to even more productive behaviours? That would lead to success, and therefore maximise our personal gain? How can we make sure that the things we’re measuring are the things we most want?
It’s Good to be Evil
I was in a meeting when someone suggested introducing a KPI for measuring team leaders. “One of their jobs is to remove obstacles from the path of the team,” a manager suggested. “We should measure how many obstacles they remove.”
“Excuse me a moment,” I grinned. “That sounds like fun. Just let me put on my Evil Hat, and I’ll tell you what I’m going to do in response…”
Pat Kua’s running a Dreyfus modelling session at Agile 2009 that you should attend if you’re there and remotely interested in how people learn.
Contrary to what it says in the printed program, I won’t be helping to run it. I would have loved to, and unfortunately managed to overcommit some time between the decision to add me to the program and asking if I was available. I think we’ll try that the other way round next time…
So, apologies if you were hoping to go to that session to hear me speak. Go anyway. Pat’s coach-coaching has made a significant difference to my skills, he’s a clear and imaginative speaker, and the outline looks like educational fun, as do the results of the last time he ran this.
I’ve just been reading Alan Skorkin’s and Mark Needham’s posts on the Dreyfus Model.
It’s curious to me that Alan says, “it does nothing to help us build experts from the more junior people on the team!” and Mark says “There seems to be potentially some conflict here with Marcus Buckingham’s idea of focusing on your strengths if our strengths aren’t aligned with the most important skills for software development.”
I’ve not grown experts – yet – but I believe I’ve managed to set people firmly on that path, and used the Dreyfus model to do it. Certainly, I’ve changed teams from novice and beginner up through to knowledgeable and competent, using the models as a roadmap. If it’s useful, I’d like to share some of the ways in which I apply the model which may be different to Alan and Mark’s techniques.
Junior people aren’t novices, and senior people aren’t competent.
Certainly not in everything, anyway. A junior person who’s joined a team as a software developer has probably got a great deal of knowledge about some facet of software development. Their best skill may not be in a technical practice! They may be fantastic facilitators, speed readers, domain experts, etc.
Equally, a senior developer requires different skills to a junior developer – and most of those extra skills aren’t technical. They need patience, the ability to pass on their knowledge, communication skills to find out about the big picture, time management skills, skills in giving feedback constructively (and receiving it!), and even a few skills which sit under my “coaching” models. A senior developer who’s technically brilliant may still be lousy at bringing that brilliance to a team. Mark pointed out, “It’s ok to be a novice at some things”. I’d go further, and say that this is the norm. One of my big weaknesses is estimation – I hate doing it, and am usually an outlier with no real reason – but at least I know, and can defer to my more skilled team-mates.
If we find the practices in which people are already competent we can add them to the model, giving them at least one point which allows them to say, “In this, I am successful.”
I’ve never coached anyone who didn’t turn out to be successful in at least one practice, so I haven’t needed to do this yet. People who aren’t successful in some respect tend not to get hired for that role.
Model with examples.
Think of the ways in which novices learn. Driving a car is a good example (of examples) for this. I am a novice; I use the gear, use the brake, use the steering wheel. I am taught the steps of moving off, parallel parking, emergency braking. I need more practice before I can even be a beginner.
As a beginner, I’ll be able to park without hitting the kerb, slow down gently at junctions, steer intuitively, drive at (legal) speed, etc. – but I won’t be able to do all of these, and only some of them will be intuitive.
As a competent driver, experts will agree that I am safe to drive independently.
As a knowledgeable driver, I will be able to have a new car. I will be less likely to have accidents. I will slow down near schools – not because I know I should, but because I instinctively recognise it as a dangerous area to be driving fast in. I will spot the idiot undertaking me on the motorway, and let him go past before pulling in. I will be at one with my car.
As an expert I will perform stunts, drive into the skid, evaluate different cars, judge others on their driving (impartially and accurately!), and do crazy things that most people don’t get to do, even if they are competent (and most people think they’re above average, even when they’ve forgotten most of the practices that allowed the expert to judge them as being successful – this is largely true of all skills, not just driving).
I can’t drive – I really am a novice. I can only model the skill of driving because I know a lot of drivers. See the stuff about GROW further down for how I’d go about coaching someone to learn to drive.
Play on people’s strengths.
There’s a reason you can’t grow a novice into an expert using the Dreyfus model. By the time we hit our professional environment, we’ve usually become at least competent in the practices in which we have the greatest interest – even if that’s nothing more than “I really like solving problems” or “I get computers”. I’ve just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” and found out about the 10,000 hour rule. I’m pretty sure I had 10,000 hours of problem solving under my belt by the time I graduated. Most developers are expert problem solvers (as long as the problems remain logical). Most of us are also competent programmers for small programs.
If you can find the skills in which people are already successful, you can use those to identify, and grow, related skills.
Someone who has taken up a practice but shown no real interest in progressing to the point of being independently successful is probably never going to be an expert. However, they may well become independently successful. Aim realistically.
After that, play on people’s strengths. I give numbers to the Dreyfus models, and let people sit halfway between them, so for me the most interesting numbers are 2.5 and 3.5 – beginning to experiencing some level of success, or successful and wanting more. These are the quick wins; the places in which people can grow swiftly from beginner to competent to knowledgeable practitioner.
I can tell .5s because they’re doing some of the things I see at the next level, but not all of them; usually in one context but not another. So, for instance, I met a manager today who’s great at motivating his people to deliver, but has never thought of motivating them to learn and improve themselves. I have no doubt that now he’s aware it’s important in a Lean environment, he’ll go ahead and make the right space and noise for them to do it, and get better at it over the next few months.
The numbers I love most to see are 4s – the knowledgeable practitioner. These are the people I use to spread expertise in the team. I know they’re not experts, but by the time they’ve spent a few years indulging in conversations and answering the questions for themselves as well as other people, they might well be.
Avoid the word “competent”.
You and I know what that word means, because we’re familiar with the Dreyfus model, and probably the model of conscious competence too. However, to someone who’s not into learning models, the word “competent” together with any insinuation of “you’re not” correlates with the words “incompetent” and “fired”. Making people scared tends to stop them from admitting to weaknesses and mistakes, which tends to stop them learning, and the word “competent” is scary.
I’ve replaced the word “competent” with “practitioner” in my models, and I tend to talk about being “independently successful”. That is, even as a novice or a beginner, you can be successful on a team where someone is around to catch your occasional mistakes or give you guidance to avoid them.
This helps coachees get away from worrying about addressing their weaknesses – which will develop with practice anyway, and with help from the rest of the team – and towards acknowledging their strengths.
Equally, concentrate on the people in the team who are ready to grow. They’ll help the others.
GROW them.
GROW stands for Goal, Reality, Options, Way Forward. I get the coachee to pick a couple of skills in which they want to improve (they’re rarely novice skills, which is fine by me). The conversations usually go something like this:
“So, you’re a 2.5 and you’d like to be a 3 – independently successful. Can you see yourself doing the things written here? Which ones do you think you might have problems with? Is it a matter of not knowing, or not understanding? Would you simply like to be more confident? Would you like to know which books cover this subject? Can you think of anyone else who’s better at this than you, who you could talk to and find out how they do it? Do you think it just needs more practice?”
We establish a goal, which means that the coachee visualises what it would be like if they were at the next level in that practice – how they might behave differently, or how they’ve seen other people behave that they’d like to emulate (look at NLP’s “well-formed outcomes” for really great ways of knowing whether you’ve achieved this). We then look at different options and resources for getting from the level they’re at, to the level at which they want to be. Then we agree to try something out, and revisit it a week or two later to see how it went.
Interestingly, the act of visualising the next level sometimes causes people to take on the different behaviour, which helps coachees to learn what happens when they try the new practices. If maintained for long enough it becomes a conscious habit; otherwise you’ll see that person revert under pressure. The behaviour of a manager under pressure tells me a lot about more about their ability to motivate people and provide realistic targets than their behaviour when things are going well! I also discuss with the coachees whether they’d revert or not; so far they’ve been honest enough to admit it if it’s true, and then we can find more appropriate options.
Look for years, not months.
Expertise does not happen overnight. There is no quick way to grow a novice into an expert (and you probably want to concentrate on a different, non-novice practice anyway). The 10,000 hour rule still applies – but we’re talking about experts, not practitioners. It’s perfectly OK for someone to be a well-rounded individual! On my own measurements of a Dreyfus Developer, the only skill I’m an expert in is BDD (and therefore its subset of TDD) – and only because I’ve spent just about every lunchtime, weekend and hour in the bar talking about it, practicing and teaching others for the last five years.
And I’m still learning about the practices which play into BDD, and how much fun you can have with it, and how it’s done in Ruby, and how it’s still evolving. Even expert skills can be broadened.
Applying the Dreyfus model is a skill.
Here are the “Applying Learning Models” models from my “Coaching Competencies”. They’re probably not accurate above the practitioner level, because I don’t really have access to any experts in this. I’m not an expert myself – just successful (and re-reading this post back to myself tells me I’ve learnt more since writing them; maybe I’m more than just successful now).
If you know better, please help me become an expert!
- Novice:
- Knows what a successful user of a skill looks like
- Encourages individuals to become practitioners
- Experienced Beginner:
- Can articulate the difference between someone following novice steps and a successful practitioner
- Has an awareness of the kind of practices which might lie beyond practitioner level
- Understands that it is not always necessary to address a weakness in a skill or practice
- Encourages individuals to identify and play on their strengths
- Practitioner:
- Can look at a practitioner in a skill and identify steps which are suitable for novices
- Can draw out past difficulties from practitioners and identify for novices who are gaining skill
- Can draw out current issues from practitioners and identify knowledgeable and expert practices which address those issues
- Can help individuals to measure their progress accurately by providing observed examples of their practices or antipatterns
- Targets the expertise of an audience appropriately
- Knowledgeable:
- Can examine an individual’s skill level and help him identify paths forward to the next level of skill
- Fluidly tailors presentations or workshops to the expertise of the audience
- In an audience of mixed expertise, calls out the level of expertise being addressed at any time
- Can articulate the dangers of targeting novice practices as indicators of performance
- Expert:
- In an audience of mixed expertise, provides a route map that celebrates the ongoing journeys of novices and beginners whilst providing practitioners and above with a route forward
- Can map different learning models to each other.
Grow expertise using experts.
I’ve never taken anyone from novice to expert, but I’ve certainly coached them from experienced beginners to knowledgeable practitioners, and from competent practitioners to expert. I’m particularly proud of Andy and Antony’s expertise in BDD, Szczepan’s creation of Mockito, and certain team-leaders and technical experts who’ve gained coaching skills.
The thing is, I didn’t do all the work – they did it themselves. All I did was make a couple of remarks, point them at some resources, and allow others to do the same. And they weren’t exactly novices to start with. So, if you want to grow expertise in a team – use other people too. Be a coach, not a trainer.
(Thanks to Andy and Antony for teaching me the power of collaboration, Szczepan for prompting me to rewrite JBehave, and the team-leaders and technical experts for passing on leadership and technical expertise…. amongst other things. I’ve come to realise that successful coaching is rarely a one-way transaction, and often just a straight swap.)
I’ve put up a page on lunivore.com which describes how I use the Dreyfus Model in coaching. This model was the one we adapted to mark the XP values in the Game of Life workshop at Screwfix, and I’ve also found it powerful when used in one-on-one coaching in combination with GROW and well-formed outcomes.
It’s taken me a fair bit of practice to get good at building Dreyfus models, using them appropriately and adapting them for different organisations; however, I’ve not encountered much downside to using them. If anything, the act of creating them has taught me a great deal (Dan North reckons there’s a Dreyfus Model for Dreyfus Modelling.)
lunivore.com has changed hugely since this post was written. For more about the Dreyfus model, see here.
What’s a Cargo Cult?
Once upon a time, during World War II, there was an island on which planes landed. The islanders loved the planes landing, because they brought goods that the islanders couldn’t normally get. The soldiers shared the goods with the islanders, and the islanders considered themselves wealthy, lucky, and blessed by the gods.
When the planes stopped landing, the islanders missed the cargo that the planes had brought, and decided they’d try to bring them back.
They did the same things that they’d seen the soldiers do to make the planes land. They created signal fires, waved at the sky, wore coconut-headphones on their ears and made replica planes from wood and straw. The cult which surrounded this sympathetic magic came to be known as a cargo cult.
What’s Cargo-Cult Agile?
As the Wikipedia author says, the islanders mistook a necessary condition for the planes arriving as being a sufficient condition for the planes arriving.
Teams and individuals sometimes make this same mistake with Agile. They believe that by following the practices of XP, Scrum or some other methodology, they’ll be successful in creating a culture which allows them to succeed.
Unfortunately, the islanders hadn’t realised that the soldiers created the airstrips because there were planes that wanted to land. The planes caused the airstrips – not the other way round! Without the planes, there would have been no desire for control towers or signal fires, for radios or waving arms, or for headphones, coconut or otherwise. And although these artifacts made it easier for the planes to land, the soldiers could have experienced some success with just a bare strip of earth and a little caution.
Agile values
In World War II, the leaders who wanted to win the war realised that planes were necessary. The air-strips helped them to use the planes effectively.
In Agile, the Agile practices that we know have emerged from teams that wanted to deliver valuable, working software, and who had discovered certain personal values that were effective in delivery. The practices they used allowed them to leverage those personal values effectively, but really, a bare strip of dirt – or any kind of process that reminded them what they were trying to achieve – would have enabled them to experience some kind of success.
I’ve found lots of different names for the values that allow teams to be successful – collaboration, trust, responsibility, innovation, camaraderie, rapport, honesty, transparency, helpfulness, forthrightness, motivation, responsiveness, agility, idealism, pragmatism, curiosity… the list goes on. They’re all wonderful ways of expressing those personal values, and I’ve seen or heard of teams succeeding with these values, regardless of which methodology they use. Partly this is because the values they’ve adopted allow them to try things out, to feel safe in questioning the processes they follow, to recognise better ways, and to be pragmatic in balancing the adoption of new ways of doing things with the responsibility for delivery.
I’ve also found that the following five values encompass pretty much everything that I’ve written in the list above, either alone or in combination:
- respect – the belief that other people are valuable, able to teach you something and amaze you, able to succeed given experience and support, interested in others’ well-being and success, and motivated by the desire to make the world a better place; and that any behaviour to the contrary is caused by external pressures or ordinary, forgivable human frailty
- courage – willingness to try new things which might not work, to accept personal risk for professional gain, to make oneself vulnerable in order to learn, and to lead others to do the same
- communication – the art of making oneself clearly understood, understanding others and feeding back any lack of understanding so that it can be corrected, listening and imagining, being aware of the impact of communications (verbal and otherwise), and finding other ways to communicate when required.
- simplicity – the ability and desire to reduce complexity, mitigate or isolate it where it’s inevitable, and avoid introducing it; to start, where it’s possible to start, without worrying about how or where it will end.
- feedback – knowing that our perception of our world and the ways in which we model it may be inaccurate, actively seeking out those inaccuracies (which may require courage!), trusting any existing mechanisms which can inform us of those inaccuracies, and listening to them when they do.
These are the five values of Extreme Programming, as outlined by Kent Beck (the poor definitions are my own).
As a coach, I’ve run competitive workshops in which these values formed the basis of the point-scoring. I’ve seen companies, especially Screwfix, adopt Agile using these values as a backbone, and seen them successfully release projects with previously unimagined scope and resource constraints. I’ve seen Scrum adoptions that were failing take on these values and begin working out the kinks, and XP adoptions that were rigidly bound by their processes, but whose employees lived by these values, become more fluid and successful as they aligned themselves accordingly.
I’ve also seen methodologies adopted without these values, leading to rebellion and the quick return to known, established practices that don’t leverage them. I’ve seen mailing lists on Agile topics become cliques – at least, I don’t feel I can post in them because of the lack of respect shown by some participants to others. And Kent Beck himself had to add that value – Respect – because it turned out not to be as obvious as he would have liked.
Measuring values
I’ve used the Dreyfus Model of Skills Aquisition frequently to measure how well the adoption of particular practices is progressing. I’ve found it useful to map the levels to these values as well, where:
- Novice: still shows anti-patterns, behaviours which are not aligned with the values
- Beginner: behaves like a normal human being, and would be pleasant to work with
- Practitioner / Competent: is a model for these values, has few “off-days” and is forgiving of others on theirs
- Knowledgeable: maintains these values intuitively, not only as part of their work-life, and can lead others in adopting them; has become a better person as a result of adopting these values
- Expert: maintains these values in the face of adversity and in environments where these values create vulnerability; can articulate the benefits of holding these values both personally and professionally; can teach others and provide constructive feedback to help them adopt the values and leverage them more effectively.
That “Practitioner / Competent” level, 3, is in my experience the average that a team needs to achieve in each of these values in order to successfully adopt any Agile or Lean methodology. They also appear to lead to more enriched, fulfilling lives at work.
Landing planes
The great thing about these values is that it’s hard to introduce perverse incentives when using them as a metric. One participant in a workshop asked, “What if we just pretend?” Well, you can’t pretend to communicate better without actually communicating better. You can’t pretend to make things simpler without reducing complexity. You can say that you don’t believe in these values, or that you don’t think they’re helpful – but in my experience, teams who’ve tried them have discovered that they’re so much more fun than not maintaining them, they haven’t looked back. Even pretending to value these values leads to good habits, and the reaction of co-workers has often been positive enough to cause them to be subconsciously ingrained.
So, give it a try, and if you’re thinking of adopting Agile or Lean, land those planes first. The practices will follow, and make a lot more sense.
Spurred by Dave Anderson’s blog pointing at Tobias Meyer’s blog…
I once told this story to a group of people I was training as coaches.
The problem with Waterfall
Once upon a time some people noticed that their software projects were failing to deliver what the business needed. “We should be clearer about what we need,” someone said, “and check that those needs are interpreted correctly all the way down until we reach the code.”
And when things still went occasionally awry, they said, “You’re not doing it hard enough! Get more detailed requirements before you start work! Spend more time getting the design right! Don’t start coding until you’re sure!”
And when things still went awry, they said, “Do it even more!”
And that’s how we got Waterfall.
The problem with Scrum
Once upon a time some people noticed that their software projects were failing to deliver what the business needed. “We should assign someone to be the product owner, who can express what’s needed,” someone said. “We should have a stand up every day, a planning meeting at the beginning of each sprint and a retrospective at the end. And burndown charts.”
And when things still went occasionally awry, they said, “We should put someone into the teams who knows how to do this better, and who can make sure that everyone is following the rules properly. And we should give them certificates!”
And when things still went awry, they said, “Do it even more!”
And that’s how we got Scrum.
The problem with XP
Once upon a time some people noticed that their software projects were failing to deliver what the business needed. “We should assume that we’re wrong to start with,” someone said. “We should keep the cost of change low. We should do acceptance and unit testing, integrate continuously, maintain collaborative ownership of the code, and be courageous, respectful and communicative, keep things simple and get regular feedback about how wrong we are.”
And when things still went occasionally awry, they said, “We should automate more acceptance tests, and reduce build times, and automate deployment, and if anyone doesn’t like it we’ll make them pair program! Turn the dials up to 10!”
And when things still went awry, they said, “Do it even more!”
And that’s how we got XP.
Some good things about Scrum, XP and other Agile methodologies
According to the Dreyfus Model, novices – those learning practices for the first time – really value a step-by-step approach. They don’t necessarily know which steps are important. Patricia Benner, in her book “From Novice to Expert”, describes how novice nurses will follow every item on their checklist, for each item.
This is a great way to start learning. However, with experience and practice comes an intuitive knowledge of what’s important, what’s not, and what you can do to get a similar value from your practices. For instance, a competent nurse will spend her first ten minutes on the ward checking that nobody’s dying, before worrying about the bedpans.
Once we become experienced in a methodology, we start to put the focus on the things we find important, and find alternatives for things which are hard. I’ve worked on XP projects which had no automated acceptance tests, but great QAs. I’ve seen people refuse to pair-program, but happy to review each others’ code. Things do sometimes fall over in these projects – that’s just life! It isn’t necessarily because the practices aren’t being followed. Sometimes it’s part of a learning experience, and something to be celebrated, because it means people are trying things out and willing to be surprised.
The problem comes when we see things fall over, and try to prevent them by adhering rigidly to our steps, no matter what. They’re there for novices. They’re not intended to work for everyone all of the time, or even for most people, most of the time. They’re just a good starting point. As soon as we depart from those steps we’re in uncharted territory, and should expect to find things out. In my experience some of these findings are painful; most of them are delightful.
So, next time you find yourself arguing about what makes a good methodology, and which methodology is best, you could try asking, “Who for?” It might get rid of some of those arguments.
Why Lean is different, and the same
Lean’s a meta-methodology. It’s a methodology that you can apply to other methodologies after your step-by-step practices have become stifling. Techniques such as Value Stream Mapping, as well as principles like minimising waste and root cause analysis, can be applied to any project, no matter which methodology it started with.
I’ve done this, quite successfully and in combination with a bunch of other tools. I don’t have much experience with Lean, and was still quite surprised at how much I learnt just from reading some books and talking to some people who’ve worked in Lean manufacturing and Kanban software teams. I particularly liked the Poppendieck’s books. Scrum also has merits, and I understand the desire to keep the mailing list suitable for novices – maybe it’s time for another mailing list. XP is still the core methodology I prefer to start with – thanks Kent Beck. I also found sensible practices in common sense, patience and valuing other people’s opinions.
Lean is a step-by-step approach for me at the moment. I have no doubt that if I try to apply this blindly to every Agile coaching gig that comes my way, I’ll find the limits of Lean just as I’ve found the limits of Scrum and XP.
The problem with Waterfall, Scrum, XP and Lean?
Probably isn’t with Waterfall, Lean, Scrum or XP. Except for Waterfall.
It probably isn’t even with the people, either. We’re human, and we’re all at different levels and stages of learning. Different practices are appropriate for different people, in different situations. Why not try a few, and see which ones work best?
Then next time you hear someone evangelising some particular practice over another, you can smile, and nod, because you know where they are in their journey, and perhaps you even know where you are in yours.
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