Agile Tai Chi 101

As its 101, Agile Tai Chi uses the number 518. Historically, this number, pronounced Wu Yao Ba in Chinese, was considered lucky because it sounds like Wu Yao Fa – or “I will grow/prosper”. In Agile Tai Chi, the number refers to the number of steps in the Agile Tai Chi Long Form, but also to the sources or ingredients that were baked into the art.

The further meaning of 518 comes from splitting the 5 – 1 – 8.

Five represents the five major sources that originally influenced Agile Tai Chi’s approach to Agile, as follows:

·      Scrum

·      XP (eXtreme Programming, an example of One-Piece-Flow)

·      Kanban

·      Kaizen/TPS (Continuous Improvement/Toyota Production System)

·      BDD (Behaviour Driven Development)

Five also refers to the Five Coloured Stones that in legend Nuwa used to repair the heavens. These represent five phases of energy, as follows:

·      Vermillion Stone

·      Yellow Stone

·      Cerulean Stone

·      White Stone

·      Dark Stone

Five also refers to the five schools of Tai Chi Chuan that were incorporated into Agile Tai Chi. In decreasing order of the influence that they have had on Agile Tai Chi, these are:

1.     Old Yang Style Tai Chi Chuan (of Yang Jian Hou/Li Jing Lin lineage)

2.     Old Yang Style Tai Chi Chuan (of Wu Chuan Yu lineage)

3.     Wu Style Tai Chi Chuan

4.     Sun Style Tai Chi Chuan

5.     Chen Style Tai Chi Chuan

The number one refers to Tai Chi as the Unity that gives rise to the Yin and Yang experiences of energy change. It also represents the use of the I-Ching, or Book of Changes, as the unifying manual of Agile Tai Chi.

Eight refers to the eight trigrams that represent commonly recurring patterns of energy change. The eight trigrams form the basis of the 64 hexagrams of the Book of Changes. In Agile Tai Chi, the Book of Changes was the unifying agent that was used to bring all of the sources together in a single harmonious art, and remains the manual of Agile Tai Chi.

Eight also refers to the eight internal arts that were incorporated into Agile Tai Chi:

·      Tai Chi Chuan

·      Xing Yi

·      Baguazhang

·      Baji

·      Qigong

·      Liu He Ba Fa

·      Bai Mei

·      Meihua Zhuang

Eight also refers to the eight different types of Tui Shou or “Push Hands” that are employed in learning and testing Agile Tai Chi:

1.     Silk Reeling Push Hands

2.     Golden Rooster Push Hands

3.     Praying Mantis Push Hands

4.     Foaming Waves Push Hands

5.     Double Hand Push Hands

6.     Coiling Snake Push Hands

7.     Key Turning Push Hands

8.     Five Elements Push Hands

As it stands today, Agile Tai Chi is a single, unified art, but understanding where it came from is useful in understanding its broad scope of application. Thus 5-1-8 refers both to the original sources and to current practice.

Appropriate processes fall out of healthy culture

From the late 1940s onwards Toyota started to put their house in order. Through the next few decades they developed the most spectacularly successful business culture based around their core value of respect for people. This effort saw them rise to become, arguably, the no.1 automotive manufacturer in the world. A lot of people noticed what was happening at Toyota and thought that they would have a go at doing the same thing. They studied and copied Toyota’s processes and called it “Lean”, then tried to apply it in other businesses as well.

Now some businesses did indeed get benefits from adopting “Lean” processes, but getting benefits is not the same thing as spectacular success. Many found that the processes didn’t work quite as well elsewhere as they did at Toyota. They had actually missed the point. Toyota processes had become good because they were progressively evolved and fine tuned to Toyota’s situation. What was it that did the fine tuning? Toyota’s culture.

Culture can be a powerful business tool, and many of the most successful organisations in the world just so happen to have exceptionally healthy cultures. If the culture is right, great processes almost seem to happen. If the culture is wrong, no amount of process change seems to help much. Many people in the Agile world think that changing process can help to improve culture. This may be true, but the converse is where the real power is. Change your culture and you’ll get great processes - it’ll just happen.

In Agile Tai Chi we set out deliberately to build a healthy culture. Among the things we did were place a much heavier emphasis on constant testing through activities like multiple types of push hands, five elements fighting, twelve animals fighting, san shou, weapons sparring and even ground fighting (the latter almost unheard of in traditional Tai Chi Chuan). We test at every step of the way, so our people know where they are at and don’t get too delusional. There is nothing healthier than getting dumped on your backside by someone who is better at Tai Chi than you.

At Toyota they learned to highlight problems and defects as early as possible in the process, and in Agile Tai Chi we do the same. One of the biggest difficulties they had was persuading people to stop the production line. Quality is a way of being, not a process to be tacked on the end. Again, it's about culture - a culture of quality is just a far more effective thing than a quality process.

Coloured sashes embody this problem a bit like Lean Black Belts and Certified Scrum Masters. There are so many easy-to-get qualifications now in the Agile community that they are de-valuing the effort and attitude that gave rise to agile working in the first place. I have met endless certified scrum masters, for instance, who have no experience to speak of and don’t really know how to get their teams productive.

So what did we do about this problem in Agile Tai Chi? Very simple, we made our certifications almost ridiculously difficult to get. Candidates are hands-on tested (a lot), it is entirely practical (no multi-choice questions here), and they have to prove they can do it by doing it - there is no other way - and time served means absolutely nothing (another departure from many, though not all, traditional Tai Chi Chuan schools). We admired the status that CCIE holds in the networking industry, and we set out to build our certification pathway with the same kind of attitude.

Start from where you are

It’s not uncommon in Agile implementations to see organisations standing up cross-functional teams, putting post-its on the wall, holding planning sessions, stand ups and retrospectives virtually overnight. Then they start estimating and tracking their velocity, and producing burn-down graphs. This is all well and good, but often they have no idea WHY they are doing this stuff, but rather take it on faith that it’s all a good idea. It’s all very well until after a while certain people start getting annoyed. Who? Project managers, change managers, portfolio managers, finance people and just, in general, bosses. Why do they get annoyed? Their worldview is different, and they see all of this as disruption and “bad practice”. They are wrong about that, of course, just as the people who do overnight Agile transformations without knowing why are also wrong. There is another way….

Tai Chi Chuan is often described as a “soft”, whereas muscular or vigorous types of Kung Fu that rely on physical power are described as “hard”. To put it another way, forcing something is a “hard” approach, a disruptive approach. In Agile Tai Chi there is no such thing as “best practice”, there is only practice that is appropriate to the current situation. Agile Tai Chi was distilled from several martial arts, but two in particular are prominent: Tai Chi Chuan and Xing Yi. Both of these are “soft” arts, seeking the path of least resistance to a successful outcome. One of the principles of Xing Yi is “one root, a thousand branches and ten thousand endings”. This means that you accept the current situation as is, then exploit one of the thousands of ways that you could improve it. After that you have ten thousand options for further improvement steps.

Agile implementations don’t always have to be hard-style like Kung Fu - they can be done soft-style like Tai Chi Chuan. Maybe mucking your teams around and making them do ceremonies as a starting point is quite a disruptive thing to do in your particular situation, and it might lead to conflict in the organisation with those who haven’t caught the Agile bug yet. There are no right and wrong answers for a starting place, there are only appropriate and inappropriate answers for your particular starting place. Hang in the moment, don’t change everything at once. Think fluidly and laterally. For instance, one of the places that Agile practices lead to conflict early on is reporting - perhaps for you sorting out your reporting could be a first step so that it places more emphasis on stuff that is actually delivered rather than on tracking against imaginary plans. I’m not saying that is the right place to start, but it has as much right to be the staring point as sticking post-it notes on a wall.

Whatever you do, do it softly and well. Focus on one aspect and move forwards. It’s okay to have an idea of what the Emerald City looks like, but build your road one yellow brick at a time, just like we build our technique in Agile Tai Chi. Make your technique appropriate and avoid the arrogance of the “best practice” pedants. There is no such thing as best practice, there is only appropriate and inappropriate practice in any given situation. The point being that hard-style Agile implementations are likely to fall foul of trying to do too much at once without setting up a healthy foundation first. Buying an expensive pair of basketball shoes will not in itself turn you into a pro basketball player. It’s the long years of practice, with a heavy emphasis on fundamentals that do that.

In Agile Tai Chi we use the Chinese word “Man” to mean hanging in the moment. We don’t seek stagnation, but we don’t usually seek sudden and drastic change either. Rather, CHANGE IS BUSINESS AS USUAL. When you see the world as a continuous pattern of evolving change everything seems different, and options that you failed to spot before become clear. Sometimes you can’t just force a problem to be solved, but if you have the clarity of “Man” you can snatch an opportunity to solve it out of the air just as it floats past you.

If you start your Agile implementation from where you are and build forwards you can also build on top of your existing strengths, rather than wiping them out in your implementation. Pick out those parts and aspects of your organisation or group that are already agile, and build on them - amplify and expand them into other areas. If you do that you stand a chance of moving beyond Agile (uppercase A) and reaching the appropriateness and timeliness of agile (lowercase a).

What's in a name?

Last week a friend of mine commented that there isn’t much stuff on Agile Tai Chi on the Internet. There is an official Agile Tai Chi website, which is at:
https://www.agiletaichi.com
But that is more of a members' site and doesn’t have much public information available. One of the reasons for this is that Agile Tai Chi is a very “hands on” thing, and is generally disseminated through the people involved.
So here goes my attempt at rectifying the situation….
A bit about me:
Everyone in the Agile Tai Chi world gets a nickname, and I mean everyone, even people who are just starting out. This is about teams gelling and team members feeling like friends rather than colleagues. Mine is Rocboy, and I kind of like it. “ROC” was one of the former names of one part of Agile Tai Chi. Agile Tai Chi has had a lot of names over the years as the people involved got used to the idea - it’s been “in development” - they were kind of like the code names that car companies give their cars before they reveal them under their official names.
But one of the things that we all like to do is put things in little boxes, and viewing Agile Tai Chi as a framework that might be equivalent to something like Scrum or XP would be a mistake. It is a framework, but it’s much looser and more expansive than those frameworks. It’s more like a massive collection of wisdom about team working that uses somatics as a platform for continual growth and learning.
One of the constants in the world is change, and Agile Tai Chi is very much of the opinion that agile > Agile, that is to say, being agile (in it’s common dictionary definition) is a much bigger thing that adopting Agile (the group of competing frameworks and their associated world-views).
Agile Tai Chi is about getting teams to work on the way that they are collaborating as much as they do on the work that they are doing. It is the very opposite of a prescriptive framework, indeed it enshrines principles that are intended to divert people from their natural inclination to focus on processes and tools, rather than on the much more important issue of people and their interactions.