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).
