Sergio Seelocahan invited me to join the celebrations for Agile Nottingham’s 11th birthday last month. It was a brilliant. I loved it. Great people. A great set of lighting talks. So what if I spent six hours getting there and back? I got to share the return journey work Noel Warnell which gave me an extra 2 hours of learning.
Nottingham reminded me of the old days, the happy days. How things should be. And it seeded an idea: did the decline of agile transformations bring about the fall in meet-ups and knowledge sharing, or did the decline of sharing precipitate the decline of agile initiatives?
Despite one post I’ve mostly kept quite about The Death of Agile. Mostly because agile is everywhere, it is not dead. What is dead is the market for agile and agile transformations.
Murder?
Till now my own theory has been that the rush for AI has absorbed all the discretionary time and money people and companies.
In Nottingham, Noel suggested agilistas didn’t do enough to show the benefits of agile is hard numbers. Heck, despite the story point fetish most teams have trouble telling you how many points they average each sprint. Despite my best efforts few teams know their burn rate, or expected ROI. While the world loves big data there is gold to be found in small data.
Jay Hrcsko suggested it was the rush for money. 2001-2011 was spent craving the endorsement of managers and big name consultancies. Agile became manager friendly in the 2010s, the consultants rushed in, cashed in, and gave agile a bad name. Basically this is the “SAFe killed agile” theory.
All these ideas, and others, probably played a role. Now I want to suggest that the agile community gave up.
Agile is learning
Remember the opening words of the Agile Manifesto: We are uncovering better ways.
It wasn’t just that we discovered better ways in the years leading up to 2001. We continued discovering them in 2002, 2003… we have continued to discover them every year, every month, since. But maybe we stopped sharing.
To paraphrase myself:
Agile is learning.
The opposite of agile is not waterfall, the opposite of agile is static. Not changing.
The only way you can do wrong in agile is do things the same as 3 months ago.
You should always be experimenting, changing and trying new things.
We stopped moving
Or out is another way: Agile is like a Shark, it needs to keep moving or it dies.
We stopped moving, agile stopped changing, stopped advancing. Yet, this is exactly the time when we should be learning and changing the most: AI LLMs have huge potential and we are only just scratching the surface.
We aren’t.
SAFe played a role. This Frankenstein Agile method – froze experimentation. It gave consultants a product to sell and executives a solution to buy. Like Scrum and PRINCE2 before it: nobody does SAFe perfectly, we we feel guilty about not doing so and keep trying to. That kills experimentation.
But maybe more of the blame goes to ourselves, the agile community. If true that also means we might be able to fix it ourselves.
You aren’t going to like this
This will challenge many readers. It will mean some will stop reading. So let me say, right now I want to talk about a side effect, not the thing itself.
Post COVID working from home has become very comfortable. for individuals.
It means that come 6pm we don’t leave the office and to the car/train/bus. We walk to a different room and rejoin our family. Going to a meetup is much harder: who wants to leave home office at 5.30pm, journey to a meetup in town and not get back to nearly 10pm. (You have to have a pint afterwards!)
Far easier to stay home, on the sofa, watch Netflix with your nearest and dearest.
But it means our learning is reduced. We hear fewer talks, we talk to few random people, we are exposed to fewer war stories and hear less about the promised land of agile perfection. We stop learning, we stop dreaming and yearning for better.
If we, the agile community, want to see agile rise we need to make it happen. We do that by learning.
Let’s get learning again
Let me finish on a positive note – how we might restart the flywheel.
Since Agile Nottingham things seem to be picking up – for me and the community!
XTC in London is still going, I was back at The London Pride a few weeks ago and they have a hosted event coming up.
Agile Oxford is reviving thanks to David Michel and Mike Harris.
Agile Northants is reviving, albeit online – I am speaking next month.
Steve Forbes if rebooting both Agile Standup in London and Agile Champions
More technically focused groups are still alive, local ACCUs seem to be thriving.
While I’ve stepped back from Agile on the Beach it is still going, as is Agile Cambridge.
Plus, I hope to be in Sweden this autumn for a big conference (watch this space).
Be the change you wish to see
My advice: if you want to see an agile revival get back to learning with other people.
Get out and about. Press the flesh. Yes, it requires making and effort, the law of two feet as it was once known.
Maybe ask your employer if you can host an event. I know more groups who would meet but they need venues. If your employer wants people back in the office they should make the office more attractive.
By the way, that also means you could try asking speakers in for private talks. Ask me! – I regularly do this sort of thing.
Even if you don’t get out physically just start joining more online meetings. Yes I know they are tiring at 6pm after a day of calls.
If the change you want to see is an agile revival then you need to be that change.