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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been digging into links, blogs, forums using this term (Post-Agile)… Have you seen this term? Followed it’s discussions? Any comments?

…Pliant Software is another term that seems to be associating itself with Post-Agile…

I think the software world is sort of like a customer who has an idea of what they want or need, but can’t put it into words. But, and after several iterations of “Requirements Gathering”, has come out of the room with more terms and an RD that is better than it was at the start — but not perfect, yet!

(italics mine)

Yes, I have comments!

1. I agree that the newness of agile has worn off, and the immediate benefits from it have been tapped dry by many.
2. I’m annoyed at the PliantAlliance site’s claim for “a new way of thinking about developing software” — pliant sounds like adaptive to me, and Scrum has been saying this for a while.
3. While the immediate benefits of agile have been tapped, the deeper benefits that can be realized by changing the way we collaboratively build product — not just the way developers write code — have a long way to go. Before we decide that “agile didn’t work,” I’d like to see more organizations actually practicing basic agile behaviour, and I’d like to see actual practices in use catch up to the huge body of literature describing deeper agile practices.

Good Software is a craft, like smithing or theatre. There was never a school that turned out expert blacksmiths; novices had to progress from apprentice to journeyman to master. The “Fame” school doesn’t promise its graduates fame, they have to go out and earn it through experience.

Good Software is the result of human thought — not just human labor — and is highly resistant to being made into a detailed process/algorithm, or body of knowledge.

Good Software is the result of collaboration. Social Science and more enlightened ways of interacting can help, but trying to describe them is missing the point.

I understand that post-Agilists see themselves as giving a name to an existing movement, rather than trying to create a new movement. But it smacks of picking a new name for your club because one member of your club is acting silly, and people are now making fun of you: you fragment the group, you tacitly approve of the bad behavior by distancing yourself from it rather than correcting it, and you spend too much time and energy on labels rather than action.

My friend’s point is right on: the SD world is like a user with a poor Requirements Doc, who “knows what they want, they just can’t describe it yet.” Trying to describe it, trying to codify it, is ulitimately a losing game and a waste of time — just like writing big RDs is a waste of time.

Build successful, adaptive teams who can make good, useful software, point to them and say “THAT is what Agile is.”

I’ve been writing quite a lot already, what with obituaries and funeral programs, so for now I’ll let the feature article in our local paper do the talking for me:

Local historian, intellectual Wyn Wade dies at age 62
(South Bend Tribune)

born 1993?
arrived in our lives December 28, 2002
moved on June 23, 2006

such an unusual cat
such an excellent friend

I’m pumped.

You have a nice four-hour block for your working requirements / product planning / process re-engineering / whatever meeting. You allot a “generous” 30-minute chunk near the beginning for the definition of terms. You put a few domain-specific words up on a flipchart to get ideas flowing, point to the first term, and prompt the team:

“So, everybody, what is the definition of _______ ?”

(Two hours later…)

One phrase is detailed to a precision that would satisfy most German engineers, the total number of terms to define has tripled — but none of them have been defined — and you have had to break up three near fist-fights.

A common vocabulary is important, but does it have to be this hard? I recently had a delightful experience which suggests that it does not.

If the team goal is a body of work which must be as clear and precise as possible, then perhaps you have some collaborative writing ahead… it’s time to scrap the original agenda and buckle down to it.

However, if all you are trying to do is “get all on the same page” — ack, sorry about that, I mean “develop a common vocabulary such that each word or phrase maps to the same concepts for each member of the team,” then you might benefit from what I’m calling the Affinity Definition Game. To play:

First, generate your list of terms in the usual groupthink team way (seed list, brainstorming, group writing, etc.)

Second, have the “is the pope a bachelor” discussion:

1. Ask, “is the pope a bachelor?”
2. For people who say he isn’t, ask what they think a bachelor is.
3. You’ll probably get some concepts like “single, bar-hopping, swank apartment, expensive stereo equipment, sports car,” etc.
4. Point out the concept of affinity: a young single man with a sports car has more “bachelor-ness” than an older unmarried man, who has more bachelorness than the pope.

Third, give out the instructions for the game:

1. The team is looking for nearby concepts. These are concepts with strong affinity to the term in the way that “swank apartment” has strong affinity to “bachelor.”
2. The nearby concepts should not contain any words which appear in the term itself. Synonyms should probably be avoided. Think of the board game Taboo™.
3. No wordsmithing.
4. Don’t get sidetracked by the words in the term, focus on the associations. Remember the “is the pope a bachelor?” discussion.

Game on! Collect concepts with strong affinity to the term in the participants’ minds:

1. Ask “what do you most strongly associate with ____?” Write down key adjectives or descriptive phrases from the responses.
2. Filter or correct the suggestion only if words in the term (or synonyms) are appearing.
3. Highlight any associations with especially strong emotional agreement; shouts of “oh yeah!” or loud groans could both mean that something has really hit the mark.
4. When the flow of associated words/phrases seems to be winding down, move on. Be patient, but don’t try to pump the well dry. If a strong association pops up later, you can record it later.
5. Did I mention no wordsmithing?

When you are done, you will not have a list of terms and their definitions. You will have a list of terms and the nearby concepts which the group most strongly associates with the terms. To abuse the Tao Te Ching a bit, the term will be “defined” by the nearby concepts just as a wheel’s hub is defined at the point where a spokes meet.

How is this useful? If, for “engineering design review” the team generated

• validation
• technical details, blueprints
• mindless tedium
• approval of plans (group decided it was a synonym)
• correction
• stamp-of-approval document

then what you have is a set of qualities which can be used to test the “engineering design review-ness” of something. You also have a shared understanding of an engineering design review, even if the term has not been detailed to a dictionary-like level of precision.

If you can get the team to generate an entire vocabulary with that level of shared understanding in less time than it takes to create full definitions for three words, then you have that much more time to get on with accomplishing your goal together.

And that’s what it’s all about.

Meg: …sometimes it seems as if everyone on the internet is an idiot.

Me: Well, it used to be that the ‘net was the place for geeks to go and converse with other geeks. Then the web made using the ‘net easy, everyone got on, and now it’s just like the real world.

Meg: Yeah, like all the new settlers moving into the frontier.
Me: I think you can still find some bastions of geekdom though, via media that have higher barriers to entry like a wiki, or IRC.

Meg: So, don’t hang out in the AOL Chatrooms, is what you’re saying.

Me: Not unless it’s the AOL FreeBSD Chatroom… sorry, I couldn’t say that with a straight face.

• the spontaneous co-invention by Brian Marick, Jason Huggins, and myself of “the affinity definition game” as an alternative way to capture team vocabulary
• the lunch-table conversation about dev team members, Maslow’s Hierarchy, and the dangers of labelling non-conformist developers as “cowboys”
• Jeffery Fredrick’s talk about training and education in agile methods, and the dissatisfaction expressed both by recent university graduates and by hiring managers at the poor emphasis on agile techniques in the academic world
• the whole OpenSpaces format, and how asking a question could turn into the opportunity for a talk of my own

The one thing about the conference that really stood out for me, though, was the amount of — well, not exactly surprise at — but interest in the social aspect of software teams. Or, as expressed by one participant at the final wrap-up session: “I never realized how much psychology is involved in making software.”

I was both dismayed and gratified to hear this. Dismayed because as we like to say at 3Back, “software is product and product is produced by people,” so it makes sense to us that hardest remaining problems in software are about people.

But such talk was pretty New-Agey less than five years ago, so I’m gratified to see these topics getting more attention these days.

Part of it could be the experience of travel itself, and not just the destination. Unless travel has become routine to you, being forced to consciously manage your clothes, toiletries, time, current location and navigation around a new city has a way of focusing your attention on what are otherwise everyday activities. The drive to the airport (and more notably, from your destination airport) is quite a bit different from the routine drive to work. You pay attention, and the meditation folks out there might agree that a mind that practices paying attention is more awake than those that don’t get such practice.

But being in a different place and among different people has its own benefits. When my wife and I return home from a trip, we feel like our senses and thoughts have been stretched, as if we’ve learned to see in a new range of colors and can now enjoy all the ways our home neighborhood shines in the ultraviolet and x-ray portions of the spectrum. The feeling decays slowly, however; I’ve come to modify the Holmes quote to “takes a long time to return to its original dimensions.”

But while it lasts, we find ourselves — for example — being more chatty with strangers than we used to be (after returning from Oklahoma); being more aware of nature, the sky, and recycling (after Seattle); using more public transportation and choosing to pay a little more for better quality food (France). As we lived immersed in these other cultures we adjusted ourselves to them, at first consciously and then automatically taking our behavioral cues from the people and environment around us.

In a way, we became Oklahomans, island-dwellers, Brits, or French. Just as we noticed all the differences about our travel destinations when we first arrived there, upon returning we noticed all the ways — for good or ill — that our hometown might appear different to a foreign traveller.

Having to pay attention. Letting yourself be shaped by a different environment. Seeing your own hometown with the eyes of an outsider.

These are the reasons we love travel beyond just the food or the attractions, and the reasons why, even as we wearily unpack our bags, we feel so alive and awake afterwards. As my wife observes, it makes you wonder about those people who prefer to stay home for the very same reasons!

“a leader has to have the courage to say ‘this far, no further’ and be willing to act when the cause is just and it is the right thing to do.”

Well, of course a leader has to have courage, of course a leader has to be willing to act. We can take that as a given. I think the point that’s missing here is the distinction between two meanings of “leader.” It’s an important distinction and the second meaning is usually forgotten.

In one sense (and the most popular sense) the “leader” is at best:

• the person “at the front,”
• the role who takes action,
• the one who takes the ideas of the group and makes them happen.

At its worst, this kind of leadership is:

• the person “on top,”
• the role in control,
• the one who decides what to do and then does it (or tells everyone what to do)

In another sense (and the meaning that many miss) a “leader” is, at their best:

• the coordinator, the one who brings dissenting voices together fairly,
• the one who enables the group to achieve their own goals through their own efforts,
• the one who brings the people together and makes them far stronger than any individual could ever be.

…and at their worst:

• the bureaucrat,
• the endless debater,
• the do-nothing.

If you focus only on the worst ways that people can exercise these two types of leadership, you’ll hear a lot of what the two factions are shouting at each other. Those who are afraid of a domineering dictator will talk about “fairness” and “not limiting options.” Those who don’t want a do-nothing bureaucrat will talk about “action” and “courage to make tough choices.”Many people forget about these two meanings of “leadership” and focus only on the first meaning, the Person In Charge. If he’s a good leader, he’ll be at the front of the action, he’ll make things happen, he’ll take our ideas and see them through. And why not think this way? We have our lives to live, our jobs to do, we’re busy… we want the Guy In Charge to take care of it so we don’t have to worry about it. That’s why he’s the leader and we’re not, right?

Here’s the problem: a leader cannot do it all on their own. The quarterback cannot win the big game without his teammates. The CEO can’t produce her company’s widgets without the folks on the factory floor. The General cannot fight the war without the troops.

The “Guy In Charge” is an illusion.

There cannot really be a Guy in Charge unless everyone under him gives up their own free will. Unless the rest of the football team blindly does whatever the quarterback says. Unless the workers decide they don’t care about their home lives and work whenever the CEO tells them to. Unless the platoons stop reporting enemy positions and go wherever the General tells them, even if it’s to attack a lump of rock. Unless the Guy In Charge is in charge of a bunch of puppets.

We want to believe in the Guy In Charge because we don’t take responsibility for the results ourselves. We don’t want to be responsible if we lose the big game, don’t sell enough widgets, don’t win the battle. Let the Guy In Charge be responsible for that!

And that brings us to the second meaning of leadership — the person who brings the group together, who overcomes that fear of responsibility. Who gets the rest of the football team to work together. Who gives her employees what they need in order to do their best work in the factory. Who coordinates all the intel and recon reports from the troops, and ensures that they can all cover each other.

The first kind of leader wants to limit options, in order to achieve more control, because they think that will enable them to “get the job done” all by themselves.
The second kind of leader wants to find more options, in order to make their group as effective as possible, because the leader realizes that they could never have enough control to be able “get the job done” by themselves.

I’ve played on teams with a star player who did all the work. Sometimes we won a game or two when our star player carried the game. And I’ve played on teams where our leader worked for us. When our leader gave us what we needed in order to be an effective team. We won a lot — and we were proud of ourselves.

Which kind of leader do you want?