The subject: what happens in an agile environment. The positive? The good feelings?

I turned this article around in many ways, to finally try to summarize this subject down to two feelings that should – in my eyes – be shared when a so-called agile implementation goes well. Like a La Fontaine fable, I would call it "The simple and the termite mound".

Simple and not complex

It may seem strange to you, but it’s obvious, isn’t it?

The whole objective of an agile approach is to be able to evolve more efficiently in a complex universe, complex meaning etymologically: intertwined. One of the objectives of an agile approach is to reduce this complexity. There are many interplays between the simple and the complex and I encourage you to read this short article. Whether it’s the limits in Kanban for example, the iterations in Scrum, the reviews with finished elements, the iterative and incremental breakdown, code modularization, and many other elements you’ll think of, all of this is done to reduce complexity, to reduce entanglements.

So if you speak agile with ease, not everything is intertwined, not everything is a ball of yarn, you’re not daily confronted with a plate of spaghetti. You can handle complex elements, but the feeling of simplicity, of a certain obviousness (not simplistic!) is present. You do something, you get a result. If you can’t do that something because of this or that or that or that… well…

It may be that you are agile but your environment doesn’t allow it. So you try to get there: code renovation to finish with the entanglement, revision of the expression of the need and the pieces we’re working on (you can do that right away). Etc.

Feeling: I can grasp the subjects, and my subjects have an impact when I address them.

Simple and conscious

Be careful, this is absolutely not the simplicity of a mechanical gesture, without thought. It’s about the simple: you can grasp the question, seize the subject. You are in control, conscious control, of what you’re doing, and it’s neither a mechanical nor repetitive gesture.

Feelings: conscious, in control.

Simple as in straightforward

Simple also in the sense of frank. Frankness, integrity, honesty. A job in an agile environment is the anti-bullshit job.¹

That is, your day is filled with things that make sense, that are useful, that are necessary. You have this meeting because you need it, you have this problem because you discovered this or that thing. Yes you have problems, but they’re normal. You don’t have meetings that last unnecessarily, or that exist for no reason, you don’t have problems that shouldn’t exist, nor insoluble ones (since you control –well or poorly– the material you’re manipulating).

And naturally you seek to do something concrete, with meaning.

We’re happy to get up in the morning, because we have the feeling of being able to act, and not of being drowned in politics, in entanglements, etc.

Feeling: no bullshit.

Simple as in useful, essential

You’re not blocked by opaque or useless processes, and if you are you have the ability to precisely remove these blockages. When things are impossible or forbidden, it’s understandable and justified. And everyone understands that if there are too many, well, might as well give up.

A group, a department, a team, we ask ourselves lots of questions to move toward our target, everyone feels they’re taking part in the objective, in their own way. Yes naturally everyone has ups and downs, but if someone is really toxic it becomes obvious and everyone wants to extract them from the system.

Nothing (or very little) is political, turned inward: all questions are turned toward resolving progress toward the objective.

And very quickly lots of things that prove useless disappear: we travel with the essential. For example:

• No more need for supposedly precise estimates, because in reality they’re never precise.
• No more need for slides since they don’t mean anything, we prefer reality: the product, live usage. We judge on evidence.
• Similarly no more need for minutes because we have the result of our reflections directly co-created during the workshops (retro, visual management, review/demo, etc.)

So it’s traveling light. There’s a simple and essential side. Primordial.

Feelings: useful and direct, essential, light (a first small piece).

Simple as in action (dialogues)

Our agile dialogues are:

• How are we going to succeed at this, or how to ensure that, or how… We’re trying to succeed at something.

Non-agile dialogues are:

• Why are they asking us this? What’s the point?

An English officer addresses Robert Surcouf, the famous French privateer:

• “Basically, what distinguishes us, we British, from you French, is that we fight for honor and you for money”,
• “Oh yes”, the Saint-Malo privateer is said to have replied, “everyone fights for what they lack”.

It’s the same in the dialogues I’m presenting, what we want, what’s missing, on the agile side is doing. So we do, and it’s exciting. On the other side, what we want is to understand, we don’t know why we’re doing it. There’s no engagement, no motivation, no quality.

Be careful my presentation is quick and easy. One could even say it’s misleading: we need to question the why very often. For example: why does the user have this problem? Why does he want to go faster? Etc. Doing has become the activity because we’ve made a big effort to simplify doing, to make it possible again. (But as I said before, not simple mechanics).

Doing, trying has become exciting, because we know what we’re trying to do and why. The “why” is oriented outward: why the customer, why the user, why do we need this: outward, we’re not navel-gazing, it’s not an internal political issue.

My demonstration remains fragile, I’m trying to give you a sense of what dialogues should be and what we turn toward in an agile context.

Naturally questioning one’s identity, one’s convictions and therefore what one wants to bring, what value to create, is legitimate and good. Especially to get out of the entanglement of complexity.

Feeling: we’re building something and we see it being built.

Simple according to context, Startup or established company, two different paths of simplification

If I take a step aside: there are two ways to travel light, without bullshit, without useless things, with real meaning. To move toward this essential, this primordial. Two different ways depending on the type of structure you’re evolving in.

• If I’m in a startup I probably need to acquire discipline, rigor. This essentialism: it’s not dispersing oneself, going straight to the point, but in an organized way. Properly detecting what’s useful versus what’s gesticulation. In this case we try to give maximum clarity to objectives, and to the approach, understand things, reasons, implications. Generally this involves simplifying the exaltation that generates a lot of entropy in startups.

• If I’m in a large group, often historic, the need is often to free oneself from the weight of the past, processes, the anxiety of risk, to go straight to the point with far fewer constraints. Remove all the political layers, remove all the useless processes, all the minutes and laborious meetings. Bring back simplicity, utilitarianism.

In both cases, we focus.

Feeling: focus.

Simple: Are we going fast?

The question doesn’t arise. We’re going neither fast nor slow. We’re going straight to the point, straight toward the next step. But then why does it give a feeling of acceleration, or fluidity: because we’re dealing with the essential, the useful, the meaningful. And so we avoid doing lots of things.

Feeling: we think value, impact, the rest becomes secondary.

Simple: conclusion

Make no mistake, this requires lots of efforts, particularly in coaching, management, leadership to make things obvious, simple, and so that everyone can grasp them. But if you live in an agile environment: you can grasp your subjects, otherwise not.

Feeling: non-mechanical mastery of one’s perimeter.

The termite mound

This reductionism implies building iteratively, incrementally. Without this simplification, complexity drowns us. If you must foresee everything, know everything, include everything, integrate everything, both content and politics, what you’re trying to achieve explodes, a bit like the face of Buttle’s mother in Brazil by Terry Gilliam, it explodes from tensions, contradictions, impossibilities, changes.

So living in an agile environment means feeling that what we’re building is like a termite mound. We know what a termite mound is, but we don’t know in advance the form it will really take, we know it “in broad strokes”.

It’s not ignorance of the form things will take because you don’t control what you’re doing. It’s conscious, assumed ignorance, that it’s useless to know too much. But you know perfectly well what you’re doing.

It’s the unfinished, the assumed incomplete. It’s not the unfinished, the suffered incomplete (and because you’re afraid of suffering it, you put in lots of processes and reams of specifications to fill this void that frightens you, in this second case).

So in an agile environment you regularly talk about where you’re going: the postcard of the termite mound. And you do. And it emancipates.

Feeling: we see what we’re building and we adapt it, and seeing what we’re building as we go along is exciting.

Conclusion

Unsurprisingly we come back to what the literature says, for example Drive by Daniel Pink, autonomy, mastery of one’s perimeter, meaning, for example. We come back to what I was saying already 6 years ago in Grenoble.

And to conclude the most important thing: we see people who in this environment, with this engagement, flourish, emancipate themselves.