Pablo: Claudio we have a problem.

Claudio: Yes Pablo, after certifications, a second plague is threatening the agile movement: the plague of assessments. People want to know their level of agility, to know if they have greater agility than their neighbor or competitor.

Pablo: Ah but I do happen to “audit” companies’ agility.

Claudio: Me too in recent years, I’ve conducted numerous agile evaluations or audits, I’ve thought about how to conduct them, particularly with Alexandre Boutin, I’ve discussed with people who were seeking to define an agile assessment model. I’ve read numerous model proposals, the latest being that of Cigref, unusable from my point of view. I’ve come to the following conclusion: what matters is not so much knowing where we are, but the road to follow. Agility is a journey. Mind you, it seems legitimate to me to assess oneself with the goal of improving. But staying within classic assessment frameworks and applying them to agility, that’s where the danger lies.

Pablo: Yes naturally not easy to “audit” in a way something that by definition on one hand emerges and is contextual and on the other hand is based as much on left-brain indicators as right-brain ones: vulnerability, emotion, feeling, values, culture, etc. I really like Spotify’s “scorecard”, or the table presented by Olaf Lewitz and Michael Sahota around the levels of “Reinventing Organisations”, I use both of these elements.

Claudio: It’s with this idea that I became interested in the Agile Fluency model, as soon as it came out. I tried to make it my own. I also tried to share it with others. It’s not so easy to grasp, and it didn’t work well, people didn’t buy in. Except with you, Pablo. We presented the model from the first Raid Agile and since the last one, we’ve actually decided to dedicate a workshop to it, based on the one presented at Spotify and Crisp.

Pablo: I must confess that since you introduced me to Agile Fluency I use it frequently, for assessments or audits, or to start my “Open Adoption” cycles (cycles that I now do more and more on a monthly or bimonthly basis, and outside IT territories, but that’s another topic).

Claudio: Yes, it’s a workshop that makes people think about where they are (but without an agility level) and especially where they want to go (but without being forced to use lots of new agile practices). We’re going to “customize” it a bit more for the next Raid, the one in April.

Pablo: Yes I like the idea of expression spaces instead of levels. A bit like a map with different landscapes, knowing whether you want to build a kingdom, or simply feel good in your region. There’s no better answer.

Claudio: It’s a workshop that talks about music (so there’s talk of Led Zeppelin). We need to give this workshop a name. I propose the agile groove road. Groove because music, groove because it’s a sensation, a dynamic that corresponds well to a flourishing Scrum team. Or simply “groove”. What do you say? The Raiders will leave with their roadmap to agile groove.

Pablo: Ah difficult to resist our common passion for the airship. While we’re at it let’s take one of their titles (even if it’s a cover): “We’re gonna groove”, and let’s not customize, let’s remaster. I like the idea of “groove” it comes close to the idea of “performing” that last level of team dynamic, when everything seems to fit together naturally, when there’s shared intuition, limbic resonance as Daniel Goleman would say. And groove is the same, it’s there, you have to move, shift, it’s intuitive. And the whole group starts moving.

Claude: Groove is when you manage to do things together without realizing it, it becomes routine, and you can take initiatives to go further. Improvise while staying within the team dynamic. For rugby we’d say, to quote Pierre Villepreux, situational intelligence.

Pablo: There’s a very well-known magazine about Led Zep called Tight But Loose, it used to be paper, now it’s web. That’s what they called Led Zeppelin’s way of doing concerts: Tight But Loose: tight but loose at the same time. We’re solid, but inside we’re free. In short I was doing agility in 1997 by doing this: Zepablo’s Led Zeppelin :) (quiz: find my photo with Page & Plant).

Claudio: Come on, since we’re sharing confidences, I was already agile much longer ago still, by climbing the fence to attend the Led Zeppelin concert at the Parc des Expos in Nancy :)

Pablo: I also really appreciated the questions raised by the workshop, the last time I proposed it I simply laid the sheets we adapted on the table and I asked people to make something with them. All the questions that emerged seemed good to me.

Claudio: “Agile Fluency” isn’t so simple to grasp. With this workshop, which is called “we’re gonna groove”, the game framework encourages this emergence, which is reinforced by the musical metaphor.

Pablo: As I was telling you in the context of an agile transformation with teams that are already practicing it’s a fantastic starting point for Open Adoption cycles. We get an interesting landscape, a map, a fascinating starting point for experimentation. But the map is not the territory, let’s not forget that, the discussions will emerge there: practices are the map, the territory is values, culture, agile thinking, and how they translate into daily life.

Claudio: I tried to present this articulation (particularly Agile Fluency, Open Adoption) in chapter 22 of the latest edition of my book, “Transformer les organisations”, which you helped me structure by the way. The We’re gonna groove workshop makes this approach accessible and actionable.

Pablo: At the raid, we also take advantage of the “Scierie à pratiques” workshop to instantiate the list of practices. The list initially provided by the workshop is very “spotify” oriented, so very devops. It’s interesting but not necessarily adapted to everyone. We can also dive into the list you propose in your book, it’s exhaustive.

Well listen I’m delighted to know that we’re going to move forward on this theme together. See you from April 19 to 22 at Raid Agile.

Led Zeppelin We’re gonna groove from the extraordinary concert at Royal Albert Hall 1970.

(article co-signed Claude Aubry & Pablo Pernot)