In the coming months, I’m going to focus my efforts on trying, at my level, to restore agility to its former glory, too often undermined in recent years. I was told that agility had “a hangover,” and I found the expression perfect. It’s time to give it a good coffee, or even a kebab.

To “restore its former glory” to agility, we won’t avoid returning to the essentials, to the principles, to the “why” of these approaches and the benefits we expect from them. But today, in 2023, it’s also impossible not to attach to it an even more essential attention to the damage we’re causing with respect to planetary boundaries and the danger this poses to our species.

If we question agility in the face of this peril, several things come to mind. We quickly understand all the interest that the dominant thinking, which I would summarize with the word “capitalism,” has in drawing from an approach that maximizes value and minimizes effort. And we quickly understand that it’s this bulimic search for value that’s driving us straight into a wall.

Today I’m focusing my attention on two subjects: the pitfalls of iterative and incremental, the intention in value.

The pitfalls of iterative and incremental

In itself, no direct harm linked to iterative and incremental, the world hasn’t entered a new phase, and the agile principles that promote iterative and incremental remain good principles (hence also the desire and need to restore agility’s reputation). However, we must be vigilant. It’s also thanks to iterative and incremental that we optimize our digital products to perfection when they’re well designed. And it’s thanks to this that we completely capture users’ attention. Every click is observed, scrutinized, and the interface with the user adapted to capture them entirely. We cross a line that we shouldn’t cross. “Attention capture,” beyond being unethical – which should be enough – is the source of problems far more significant than we imagine: psychological, physical, social.

The notebook from the Centre national du numérique “Votre attention s’il vous plait” is eloquent on this subject (January 2022). And the innovation and perspective notebook from CNIL “La forme des choix” (January 2019) points to agile development:

Some platform decisions, particularly those related to how interfaces are designed and presented, are largely inspired and influenced by user reactions and the ways they take control of the tools offered to them. Thus, Facebook's wall was initially only a very limited feature; you had to go to a user's page to view their wall. It wasn't until 2011 that the 'news feed' feature was introduced. It's because users interacted with it, repurposed it, and played with it that the wall evolved. Similarly, Twitter's famous hashtag was invented by users and not by the company, which simply smartly rode this creation. This development through trial and error is facilitated by the ability to implement real-scale experiments on a large pool of guinea pig-users. Access to captive panels allowed Google to test 40 different shades of blue for its hyperlinks, or the dating platform OkCupid to measure the real influence of its 'match percentage' by making members believe they were highly compatible when they had little in common...

It’s possible that agile approaches are also being used to mask incompetence or manipulations

(...) the realities of these services' development methods, which, based on often experimental techniques, frequently reveal their fallibility. It sometimes happens that, claiming they don't really know what they're doing or why, the large platforms also say they're unable to explain the reasons why things work or don't work as expected...
At least that’s what I read here.

So yes to iterative and incremental to build reliable and innovative solutions. No to allowing it to enable capturing each of our actions or thoughts. I’m clearly talking about pitfalls here.

Questioning (again) value

“What is value” is a question we never stop asking ourselves. But maximizing value now seems to be a mistake in a world where resource overexploitation is blowing up in our faces. I proposed in 2022 to use the expression Maximum Tolerable Product, and I haven’t given up hope of hearing it spread.

The direction I’m proposing we integrate into our reflections concerns resilience rather than optimization.

A recurring subject that came to mind again thanks to the indispensable (I weigh my words) presentation by Arthur Keller at Central Supelec in 2021 (thanks again, Guillaume Forestier for the pointer). The idea being that instead of optimizing, sharpening, maximizing, saturating, overexploiting, we try resilience instead, that is, the ability to always land on one’s feet, to overcome, and so this resilience calls not for amplification, but for diversification. There’s an agile fluency path that is resilience versus value focus, or optimization, or streamlining the production apparatus.

We can’t today ask the vast majority of companies and organizations to stop all pursuit of value. But we must orient them toward a diversification strategy that leads to resilience rather than toward optimization.

Today nobody wants to hear about limiting attention capture, or not optimizing. Yet we’ll have to come to terms with it, willingly or by force. So I encourage innovators, leaders, to set the example.