Agile

Woody Zuill has a great catch phrase: “It is in doing the work that we understand the work.”

If you are like me your first response is to think about the problem domain: “The problem the customer wants solving is understood when we try to solve it.”. This certainly fits many of my client projects. When I was building electricity forecasting system it was by building the system that I came to understand how the electricity markets worked, how electricity was priced and how we could use contracts for difference to optimise spend.

Or when I was building telecoms software I came to understand how mobile phone network work and how protocols are wrapped in protocols, all the way down.

Complexity in the enterprise

Increasingly I see Woody’s maximum applying to the processes, authorisations, gateways, approvals that make up the way an organization works, or rather the way it think it works.

This was brought home to me recently when I went to visit a client’s offices – yes a physical visit! I was there with a dozen or so other consultants. This client took security seriously so as well as being on the guest list in advance we needed photo id and to pass airport style security.

Time consuming but it worked, in the morning that is. The problem came at lunch time. It was good whether so everyone left their bags, coats and gubbins behind – lunch would only be 30 minutes. As we were about to leave someone said “Do we need ID to get back in?”

Arh.

One of the hosts said “If you have it on your phone you are OK”

Someone check with the security guard: “If you came in this morning you are OK, you are on the system.”

Another said “Make sure you use the other entrance ‘cos you are registered.”

Needless to say, on our return, the other entrance wouldn’t accept us.

ID was demanded.

Digital ID was not acceptable.

Everyone needed to register all over again.

For a few crazy minutes it seemed I couldn’t enter the building to retrieve my ID to prove who I was to enter the building!

As it turned out: nobody really knew how the system worked. Not even the security people who were supposed to know. Everyone had an understanding but nobody really understood it until we lived it.

It was Woody’s maxim: despite our efforts to understand the building access rules it wasn’t until we had to live them did we understand them.

The larger the organization the more rules, standard processes, formal procedures, authorisation and systems there are. To make it worse, almost every company is in a state of continual changes: new processes and rules are being introduced and others retired. Some people think one set apply while others see others say other rules do.

Last year I found myself observing a project spend authorisation committee. As the committee ran over its regular questions the project was asked about stage gates:

Committee: “I don’t see any stage gate clearances”

Product Manager: “We have not completed any stage gates because this project is governed under the new life cycle model.”

Committee: “We’ve never had one of them before”

Committee other: “I’m not sure we are allowed …”

It was only by living the processes that the process could be understood. (My recent queuing post touch on the same idea.)

You don’t need many different processes, and updates to processes, in play before it becomes impossible to understand the interplay of these systems.

At the start of my career it was the technology – the solution domain – which was the difficult bit. Understanding it, making it perform, the limits of what it could do. Today technology power is almost unlimited and you can, supposedly, just ask it for what you want in plain English.

Next in my career it was the ask – the problem space – which was the difficult bit: understanding what the customer wants, defining the problem to be solves, sizing the opportunity and achieving market fit.

That is still the problem in smaller enterprises – start-ups and innovative companies.

Now, I find myself working with bigger organizations and this problem is rampant. Such places have processes, ways-of-working, procedures, rules, the systems of doing work – plus tools like Jira and DevOps which impose more – and nobody knows how they all hang together. The only way to know is to live the process.

Such places are caught by their own demands for processes and procedure. Many of these reflect a unwillingness to trust staff, or a decision to decompose work between different roles: project managers, analysis, coders, testers, devop, security, architects, …

Complexity

Consequently complexity and costs increase. Faced with these problems it is almost pointless to estimate effort or budget, the system is the governing factor.

Nor is it any use looking for a boss to solve the problem. Managers too are prisoners of the system, worse, they are expected to uphold the system and encourage people to follow it.

Complexity breads complexity. For my money less is more, they need simpler approaches that can be understood and reasoned about.

I’ve been really bad at sharing things recently so have a glut of things to share. Take your pick.

Agile Ideas for our AI future: my presentation to Agile Northants in April, the video is now online and the presentation can be downloaded from my website.

As usual I’ll be at EuroPLoP in Bavaria this year, so if you want a very different type of conference please join us.

No presentations. No keynotes. In fact, no speakers.

Lots of discussion. Really learn about feedback, learn about writing and cutting edge ideas.

Plus enjoy games, sauna and outdoor swimming. Honestly, its a serious conference!

Perhaps more importantly, my paper from EuroPLoP 2025 Learning to Learn: Patterns for Building the Learning Organization is now available either from my website, or, if you like a more formal version from Springer Nature.

Still on conferences, I’m delighted to announce I’ll be at the Oredev Developers Conference in Malmo again this November.

It is four years since I delivered the keynote there and this year I’m giving two talks in the main programme: Ideals shaping our AI future and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the The engineering mindset.

Finally, as some of you already know, I quietly released my first online self-paced course with LeanPub recently: Long term Product Goals for creating superior products. Subscribers who use this link, or simply use the code SubscriberJ26, can get 30% off.

For the last four years I’ve been saying: “There will be some interesting papers written in future about Ukrainian strategy and command.” While I had hoped for peace and serious studies by now neither has occurred so let me start.

The change paradox

First, remember that the protagonists started in the same place in 1991. While they both changed a lot over the following 20 years they retained much in common. As I understand, it was less than 10 years ago that Ukraine set about modernising their army and moving away from Soviet style command-and-control.

Yet in that time Ukraine moved from a very hierarchal structure to mission command (next up). Importantly, they have done this under intense pressure: they were at war.

I have seen this change paradox many times. Everybody knows “the time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining”. The problem is, when you have time and resources to change and fix things the motivation is low. When times are tough the resources are limited but the motivation is high.

My heart sinks when companies tell me: “We want to make this change but right now we have an urgent project to finish.” They should be thinking “This urgent project is the reason to change how we work.”

Mission command: Leadership for agility in battle

“Frequent and rapid decisions can be shaped only on the spot according to estimates of local conditions.” Moltke quoted by Tetlock

One side: big, powerful, well equipped with a strict command and control approach.

The other: small, under equipped, few plans, responding to what happens.

Everyone expected the bigger to win in days but the smaller one repulsed the attack. A small team out performs a larger team.

The difference was mission command: a philosophy that gives commanders a mission, an objective, an outcome and lets them decide how to achieve it. This has been American doctrine since the 1980s and asks the local leaders to : “think. If necessary, discuss your orders. Even criticize them. And if you absolutely must … disobey them. … Clarification of the enemy situation is an obvious necessity, but waiting for information in a tense situation is seldom the sign of strong leadership—more often of weakness.”

American doctrine became NATO doctrine became Ukrainian doctrine. Perhaps troublingly, America didn’t invent the idea, they took it from the Wehrmacht. Auftragstaktik as it was known lead to victories in the early years of WWII but was later undermined by leadership who involved themselves too much.

(The quotes are from the best introduction I’ve read to mission command, Philip Tetlock’s book Superforecasting.)

Product Development: Drones

Like computers, airplanes and radar before them the pace of drone innovation and manufacturing on both sides is a sharp reminder of how war can drive rapid innovation. Ukraine in particular stands out as a world leader, perhaps the world leader, both in drone innovation and battlefield tactics with drones.

Ukraine stands in sharp contrast with western efforts which, while not insignificant, are very much in a peace time mode. An increasing number of start-ups are bringing modern digital product development skills to bear but since the major customers are still in peace mode even these are frustrated.

A few years ago I met a team building a weapons system. The first systems test was two or three years off. When I asked why they couldn’t do it sooner they looked at me as if I was mad “too expensive, we can’t just blow up an expensive prototype.” So every decision was considered, reviewed, re-examined, and took time.

They would say they were saving tax payer money but I saw a waste of money because they were trying to learn (slowly) on paper. (I asked about digital tools: another, disconnected, group.)

As I keep saying: engineers engineer within constraints. For the legacy armaments suppliers the main constraint is Government funding, not just the amount of funding but the strings that come with it. Before any money is spent all sides need to show that the money is being spent wisely, fairly, and that no unnecessary money is spent. This results in procurement and approval systems which are themselves long winded and expensive to operate – queuing again.

War changes the constraints, now time to market – time to kill – is more important than saving money. Test and learn opportunities are plentiful. Fear of a failed test, or wasted money is less than the fear of defeat. Money hasn’t gong away, but it is not saving money in development, it is reducing cost of manufacturing.

As always: there is more than one way to solve a problem and the constraints determine how you go about solving the problem.

Put it all together

Ultimately all these three examples are about learning and acting on that learning. Most learning occurs early on. Planning is learning but so is doing. Plan a little, do a little, learn a little, keep iterating.

Motivated people, devolved authority, clear constraints and a need for action. Isn’t that what every team would like?

Perhaps it is also a check list:

• Are your team motivated?
• Is authority close by?
• Are the constraints clear?
• And is there a need to act?

There is going to be more to learn from this war but lets start with that checklist.

By the way…

One of my pet hates is “what we can learn from the military” talks when the speakers have no military experience. I’m breaking my own rule here. In my defence, I do have a little first hand knowledge of both countries and peoples, I’ve a little contact with British military industrial complex and I read some credible sources (e.g. The Economist.)

“Our bosses should be here”

“You should tell this to our boss”

Over the years I have heard this again and again, typically when I’m delivering training. I teach my stuff, I’ve people exercises to practice new techniques and ways of working, I inspire them as a group to do something different. Time and again I’m told “Our bosses should hear this too.”

Sometimes I’d say “But your bosses want these changes, the fact that they have given you time to be here, and pay me to train you shows they want the change.” While I think I had a pretty good success rate in generating change I’m also sure all too often nothing changed when I left.

The catch is, they are right, but so am I.

Each and every one of us has a mental model which says “we need our bosses authority to do this”, or “our boss can make this change.” And sometimes bosses do need to put their money where their mouth is, to spend on new tools, resources, and training, or to allow time for people to practice their new skills.

But, bosses are themselves prisoners of the same system, if anything more so.

For a start those leaders got where they are today because of their past success, that success was based on certain ways of working, certain beliefs about the way to get things done. At the same time they didn’t upset the wrong people, they didn’t make life difficult for those they worked for. Doing something different means can mean breaking with that, potentially upsetting people, possibly changing ones own behaviour.

Those leaders have to follow the same processes and practices as everyone else. If leaders break the rules why would anyone else ever follow them? They are expected to lead by example.

Those leaders have more to loose than workers: they may well hold senior positions with higher salaries. If they are seen to act irresponsibly they may loose their job.

They may be looking to become an even more senior leader – either in the same company or by going elsewhere. They won’t get those promotions if they are seen as trouble makers, don’t work well with others, ask too many questions or if they break too many rules.

Imprisoned by expectations

They are surrounded by expectations from their own bosses and those they must report too. In fact everyone has a boss: as a self-employed person have no boss on paper but I have to answer to clients. CxOs have to answer to CEOs who have to answer to a board. The chair of the board has to report to shareholders, all directors and many executives are legally responsible; plus they can get called in by politicians.

Politicians might seem more powerful but they have to answer to voters. (Not to mention allies and enemies.) Many of those voters are also shareholders – perhaps through pension funds.

Shareholders, pension funds, directors, executives, leaders, workers, everyone has to answer to someone.

Everyone is prisoner to the system. The more system – the more processes, procedures, tools, standards – you have the greater the change, the greater the difficulty in change and the greater the risk,

Doing something different entails risk, but at the same time there is risk in not changing.

Those people saying “You should tell this to our boss” are right, but at the same time the bosses are often looking to them to take the lead and make the change.

Kindling change

My mental model for leaders looking to create change is to “take both ends at once” – top-down and bottom-up. This is like starting a fire.

The leader who wants change needs to kindle the change. They need to get the fire started by encouraging people and providing resources to start the fire. But it is very very easy to extinguish the change with too much support. A fire without oxygen will not start, but too much oxygen will blow the fire out before it takes hold.

Your bosses might be far from perfect but remember: they are a prisoner to the system as much, or even more, than you are.

Please join me online next week when I deliver a brands new presentation for the first time: Agile Thinking for our AI Future.

Thanks to Agile Northants for organizing this Register now to join the call. Tuesday April 28, 2026 at 6.15pm.

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.

When I first studied economics I was taught that queuing was a form of non-monetary payment. My teachers pointed to the Soviet Union and described how, in a non-market economy, queues were the price people payed rather than money. In a free market when demand exceeded supply prices rose, that increase was information which pulled in other suppliers until supply matched demand.

Or maybe prices rose to the point were people decided they would spend their money on something else. Or maybe a bit of both. With a queue people paid with their time by standing in line but without the feedback loop of price there was no signal.

Wake up and see the queue

If I had a magic wand and I could magically teach everyone one thing it would be: queuing. Everybody knows how to queue (stand-in-line for American readers) but almost nobody knows the meaning of queues or how they arise.

At the same time I want to open eyes to the implication of queues. If I could motivate our leaders to fix just one thing it would be queuing and the implications of queuing theory.

It is a simple economic model. We could discuss market failure, exceptions, and a lot other “special cases” but the theory is sound. It also does a long way to explain why the USSR no longer exists. Queuing theory is sound too, and it is more than a theory, it is mathematically provable, there are equations.

Spoiler: if you study queuing theory itself it turns out to be more complicated. It is not just about shortages. However, the basic premise stands: time in a queue is a form of pricing, often a hidden cost.

Hidden costs

Now the killer: The cost of queuing doesn’t appear on any balance sheet anywhere.

Cash flow reports don’t measure time spent queuing, value lost from queues, workflows, lack of flow, disruption from queues, human costs of queues (extra stress, lost time, lost work-life balance) or simply any queue in any organization, anywhere.

Queues increase costs directly because it takes longer to get the benefits, e.g. if I queue for an hour to see a doctor then it is one hour longer before I have a diagnosis and can start medication. This is a form of cost of delay.

I was reminded of this by John Burn-Murdoch’s FT column “How London unwittingly killed housebuilding” (probably paywalled). He describes how new safety reviews have created an 8 month delay in building projects which can render house building uneconomic.

Once you know what you are looking for you see it everywhere, but unless you know about queuing theory, or been trained in economics or systems thinking it is invisible. And it gets worse.

Queues also cost because they increase complexity. If I have to queue for an hour to buy a chicken then I have to go to the shop and hour early. That also decreases choice and options because costs increase (time) which makes some options unviable. (And for those still interested, that decreases your agility because it both reduces options and increases lead time.)

That complexity increases dramatically when there are multiple queues (I need to queue for chickens and for chicken feed). When those queues are intertwined complexity increases again (I’m not allowed to buy chickens unless I can show I have chicken feed to give them.)

For humans that complexity increases cognitive load. Because I am thinking about buying my chicken feed and chickens my brain forgets what I am supposed to be at the doctor’s.

Complexity and cognitive load isn’t measured on balance sheets and cashflow statement either but this is where so many organisations, especially large corporate ones, destroy their own capabilities.

Because none of this appears on any financial report, then someone – manager, consultant, CEO, politician – can save money by cutting capacity to service the queue. This is cutting the back office, it looks harmless but it is insidious. The impact might not happen immediately so it looks like a cost-free saving, but over time it degrades system performance.

To continue the building example: suppose we have 20 people reviewing building plans and it takes two months to get a Yes or No. If we remove half the team, 10 people, then we have saved money, 10 salaries. That will appear on financial statements almost immediately. At first output looks the same because there was work in progress.

The work of 10 people will silently disappeared into a queue but the queues will impose costs nobody measures. The organization with the longer queue sees no financial consequence – yippee!

The 10 people left might change their work patterns to compensate: they might do the easy cases first. They might even work harder or longer for a while. Eventually those compensations will wear off. Plan review will take an extra 2 months. Since the easy cases have been done there is a higher ratio of hard to easy cases so things slow down further. And since the system has less capacity any variability will have a greater impact.

But there are external costs: the companies waiting in the queue do see a cost, a cost of delay. One place saves while another pays. This is what economists call an externality, the cost shows up somewhere else.

Rampant corporate queues

This kind of problem is absolutely rampant inside large corporate entities in both the private and public sectors (think immigration processing). Waiting for security review, architecture review, budget approval, business case review, sign-off, meeting, meeting, meeting. The more these queues cross over the higher the cognitive load, it is nye on impossible to know how things should work or how to accelerate work. Often these externalities are actually internal, one department saves while another looses out.

The systems “work” but they work at a high, hidden, cost. I would also argue that this is corrosive to trust between the parties and feeds into the feeling that “nothing works” any more.

As I said, I wish I could open people’s eyes, I wish I could make them see how queues are not cost free but undermine progress, delivery, trust, and rational thinking.

Subscribe to get my thinking in your mailbox (and a free book)

Picture copyright Kirill Razumov