If something is good, then more of it is better,
right? Wrong. That's this week on the Badass Agile
Podcast.
Greetings, team. Welcome to the Badass Agile Podcast.
I'm your host, Chris Williams.
All right, come on in. Happy to see you. Thank you for being in an
age when we complain about burnout, overwhelm, endless
work and expectations. Sometimes we have to look
and see where we're responsible for those expectations.
But first, let's take a moment to remember why we're here.
To create an elite tribe of leaders who truly serve their clients and
communities by doing what matters and what works,
relentlessly chasing value and excellence like a badass.
There's so many resources out there about what you need to do to be
agile, but we're focused on who you need to become in order
to lead teams. So let's hammer down those fundamentals to create
a truly unique and powerful force in this industry.
If you love this episode, do me a favor, share it with your friends.
Now, look, I don't know about you, but I was attracted to Agile
because the principles were simple, easy to learn,
easy to apply. And the fact that we're here now,
where some people proudly hail themselves as badge
collectors, is a bit of a concern. I have a
hunch that easily half of those people, if you put them in a room and
ask them to figure out what real business value is or how to deliver it
efficiently, they probably couldn't answer. And if you ask them
to create an experiment where failure is likely, they might just
as well call in sick. The bottom line is that all of
this agile knowledge isn't making us better. So what's happening
here? What's happening is that too much knowledge,
too much information, too many certifications, too much
education, is actually making things worse.
It's creating confusion, it's creating complexity, it's
creating overwhelm all on its own. You know, when we talk about agile
failure and the root cause of Agile or agile transformation
problems, it's not always the boss, it's not always the job,
it's not always the scope. That's the problem. It's the
extent to which we do the following.
Overburden ourselves with process.
Wait a second. Don't rules make things better? And if they do,
wouldn't even more rules make things even better?
No. We devise rules and processes
so that things are repeatable and certain. If I do
something and it works well, I want the prescription, I want
the script. I want to be able to do it well again tomorrow. I
want my colleagues to be able to inherit that process and do
it better, too. But here's the problem with rules is that you have
to write them for the lowest common denominator. So a
person with no background, no experience, no
intuition, no inherent sense of the role, no
real track record, you have to write this process so there are no
unanswered questions, because unanswered questions open
the possibility for risk or failure. And even
though we should be comfortable with risk or failure, if you really look,
we're not, at least the worst of us. So some of us who
shouldn't be in this role, or maybe shouldn't be in this role fully yet,
need some time to develop and grow, rely on volumes of
data, stories they can read from the trenches, on
Reddit, in books, in YouTube videos, podcasts like this
one, courses and certifications, and communities to learn. What are
the steps? Give me the steps. But here's the problem. If it's never the same
way twice, in my experience, it usually isn't, then all those
rules aren't going to help you. You know what I find interesting? I think if
there's one set of rules that you want to learn that you want a script
for, start with the people stuff. So, for example, how do you run a
retrospective where you get good, clean, useful, honest feedback?
That requires some deftness, doesn't it? Things you can say to
people that won't throw them off, that won't offend them, that won't
knock them back three years, that won't crush their confidence.
How to ask for things. If you got a deadline, things are expected
without seeming pushy or having to rely on power or title or
threats in order to get it. Those are the things where, if
you have no experience, you go to a seasoned coach and you say, how do
you do this without coming off as pushy? How do you do this without hurting
somebody's feelings? How do you do this without having HR come and find you and
say, did you tell this person xyz? Did you give them
this unsolicited feedback? You can't do that. How do you navigate those
waters? That, to me, would be a useful set of rules,
but you won't find that in any agile certification book.
You find it by working with seasoned mentors, or just by doing
the practice and learning the hard way. But we're so afraid of any
negative repercussions that what do we do?
We write rules for when to start your ceremonies, how
many people you're allowed to invite, what color sticky notes you use.
Those things in my book aren't really going to help you get better.
Now that brings up number two. Seeking the perfect way to do
anything. There is no such thing as perfection. So stop chasing
it, stop looking for it. You can't avoid
failure. The only way to get better at not failing is by doing
and failing. The only way to succeed is by
failing first. So get busy failing. Get used to it, get
comfortable with it. Just get out there with your paint and your
paintbrush and cover the canvas. If it sucks, throw it
away, paint over it, do it again, and that's how you become a
painter. But sitting there and trembling to the point where the
brush can't touch the canvas because you're so afraid of doing the wrong
thing, you're never going to improve and you're never going to make great
art by the way. Chasing higher and
higher levels of knowledge and education. Look, I've
studied music for a really long time, since I was 7. I can tell you
this. The guitar player from ACDC doesn't
know the first thing about music theory. Can't read the black dots,
probably doesn't understand intervals, and yet he makes some of the
best selling rock records of all time in the history of music.
How's that possible? Because he listened to the greats,
observed, imitated them, and that's kind of it.
There's rules, yeah, but those rules have been
repeated so heavily and to the delight of so many listeners
that pretty soon the rules become obvious. The things you must
do and the things you must not do, they're not handed down in
an instruction manual. They're handed down by
imitating the greats and seeing what things do they do over and
over and over that create success. Even if you don't know the note
names, the width of an interval, the harmonic relationships, the type of
cadence, those things really don't matter because people
who intuitively feel the music pick up the instrument,
play and things work. And if they don't
work, they keep fidgeting with it until it does. Theory,
on the other hand, is far from useless. But it's
primarily our way of explaining what just happened during the
magic trick. And that's great, but it doesn't make
great musicians. I mean, it doesn't make great music.
Great musicians do. And great musicians get great
by playing, by writing, through trial and error,
practice, repeated experiments. And number four,
we create more confusion, complexity and overwhelm when we think
that more certifications will equal more opportunities.
Now, I've certainly heard stories of people being hired because of the number of
certifications they have. But I've heard as many stories of
people who are highly certified and decorated who can't find
work at all right now. That's because a whole other strata
of skills that you have to have in order to stay successful in
your career aren't obviously teachable through
those quote unquote certified means. For example, your ability to
network, to make connections, to make impact and
highlight your impact, to market yourself, to brand yourself.
These are skills that are not just valuable when you need a job,
but while you're on the job too, your ability to listen
carefully to what other people need so that you build and
maintain trust with the people who pay your bills. Half
the time, the agile people that I meet don't even know who that is.
I ran a program for a long while called Agile Sidekick, and one of the
things we learned by doing it was, is that even a person who's relatively new
to the market with very little experience can
find a way to at least get into the company they want to work with
if they know how to make and back up a solid value proposition,
even if they didn't have years of agile experience, even if they
didn't have any technical background. And it's not through unethical means
of making stuff up or pretending you have experience that you don't. Not at
all. It's by impressing upon a person you're working with that
you understand what value they're striving for, what
gets in the way of them having and realizing
that value and being able to map the experience that
you do have with getting those kinds of results.
Anyway, enough about that. The only time where more is
better is when you focus on the word go.
Go, do, learn, fall on your face, wrap up your
scrapes and try again. More mentors,
definitely. People who you know are doing the job well, whom you admire.
Can you spend time with them, ask questions so that you can accelerate your learning?
Those things, definitely more of. But processes, rules,
certifications, and perfection, I'm afraid, are a bit of a waste
of your time. And in any industry that's really more artistry than it
is science, which we like to think that what we do is
highly technical, but really it isn't. It's a people job.
And whenever you're in one of those, perfection is elusive.
And knowledge in theory, ain't anywhere near as good
as in the field experience. And if you're starting from zero,
be okay with that. Start from zero, be where you are. Let's start
building with bold experiments. Try,
new, do, fail, repeat. That's it for this week.
Thank you for joining me once again. I hope you enjoyed this episode. You can
find me@badassagile.com or at any of the contact points in the show
notes below. I look forward to seeing you next time, and until then,
stay badass.