So I’ve noticed a trend in recent years. Whereby a lot of people are hungry for “advanced” Agile and Lean techniques (whether it be at a conference, in the classroom or in a coaching engagement)
So far so good, both Agile and Lean have been around for decades – and so it should not be a surprise that people are passed the basics and ready for some more advanced stuff.
But a conundrum often arises in these situations whereby the organisations and people most eager to learn the more advanced techniques are the very same ones that are yet come to grips with (let alone having mastered) the basics of Agile or Lean.1 (This is obviously a generalisation and not true in every case, but it’s sufficiently widespread for me to consider it a trend)
As I tweeted back in January:
It’s only the advanced practitioners that do the #agile basics
— cgosimon (@cgosimon) January 16, 2014
And talking to other established consultants, trainers and practitioners it seems that I’m not alone in this observation.
So what’s going on?
There seem to be two fundamentally different views on what “the basics” are actually comprised of.2
And these two views may be an attribute that is unique to (or at the very least exacerbated by) the very nature of Lean, Agile & Systems Thinking.
(So again making a gross generalisation here)
Many people tend to class the basics as things that you do.3
Whereas “we in community” tend to class the basics as concepts you understand.
And thus many feel that they have mastered the basics when they can go through the motions – they write things on post-it’s or enter them into a tool – perhaps they set WIP limits, and they almost certainly know which three magic questions lead to hyperproductivity
But because they’ve not mastered the basics by the community’s definition – they often fail to yield any benefits from these changes (sometimes they do however, but that’s a topic for another time) – and thus they feel the hunger for something more advanced. Something more to do.
So this explains the phenomena – at least to my satisfaction – but it does not necessarily provide an answer 😉
Except perhaps that we should more carefully consider how we use our language and how we label things; because Basic Practices != Fundamental Concepts.4
- This does however put me in mind of an episode of House (“House vs God”) – where Wilson convinces a child who believes that he is a saint and thus does not need surgery to have surgery through the argument that an actual saint would have the humility to believe that they were in fact just sick and not in fact special. ↩
- This being an entirely different question to “what the basics actually are” – I’m arguing ontology here. ↩
- As soon as you do that, it’s also easy to apply models like Dreyfus ↩
- Ease of measurement and evaluation plays a big part here too. It’s much quicker and easier to determine whether or not somebody is having a 15 minute Daily Scrum than it is to determine whether or not everybody has internalised the value of (say) slack. ↩