Agile Lessons Learned #1 : Challenge Everything.

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them – Le petit prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Jonathan was in a rut. Despite his best efforts on FreeFall’s brand new mega-project, nothing seemed to click. Everything just felt wrong. He could not quite put his finger on it, but he just knew something was going terribly wrong. Feeling powerless, everyday he got more and more anxious about the whole ordeal.

Once the project started to go haywire, FreeFall started to panic. Having a limited budget for outside ressources, despite losing millions on the project, they decided to hire Erol as a single Agile coach to do an assessment of the situation.

One day Jonathan and Erol met at the cafeteria where Erol had basically set up his office. Erol felt there was no better place to start conversations with people than the cafeteria. Things that people would never of said in official meetings, Erol was told in a matter of minutes. This jump-started his information collection like nothing else.

“I know you are here to help us” said Jonathan.
“I also feel that everything seems wrong but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Can you help me with that ?”
“If you’ve got five minutes, I’ve got a real story that might help you.”

Jonathan grabbed himself a coffee while Erol told him the following story:
“When I was young, I grew up in Haiti. I lived on the same street as all of my family. This was great when parties were thrown. We’d just get all together outside and party until the sun came up and then we’d party some more.”

“Christmas tradition was to cook a huge turkey based on the family recipe that came all the way from my great-grandmother.”

“The final step of the recipe was to chop a part of the turkey off before putting it in the oven”

“At six years old, my sister asked my mother why she was cutting off a part of the turkey. She said it was because her mother did it like that”

“So my sister asked my grandmother why she did it like that.”
“She said because your great-grand mother did it like that.”

“She then went on to see her great grand-mother”
“She asked her why she cut off a part of her turkey”
“She said, that she used to do it like that because her oven was too small to fit a turkey back then”

“You see, for generations, my family had been throwing away a part of their turkey for no good reason. If my sister did not challenge every member of my family until she found the root of the problem, we would of been throwing away turkey for generations to come even though the answer had lied next door for years.”

“Maybe I should start challenging what seems wrong” – said Jonathan
“Maybe you should Jon, maybe you should…”

-Nicholas Lemay