Agile lessons learned #4 : The red pill

A man’s life is primarly interesting when he has failed.
For it’s a sign that he tried to surpass himself.

– George Clemenceau

Tim was an Agile coach. One morning, he bumped into Andrew, a senior manager over at FreeFall inc, a fortune 500 company.

“Hey Tim! How about that Agile thing? Do you guys still have a daily Scrum in the morning?
“How’s that coming along?”
“I don’t know how to put this Andrew, but we don’t ‘do the Scrum thing’ in the morning.
Being Agile is way more than doing daily meetings.”
“Oh really? What else is there to be Agile?”
“You might wanna grab a doughnut with that coffee, I’ve got a few things to show you.”

Tim went on explaining the different aspects of scrum, the roles and the different ceremonies. But he knew the selling point to the manager was the continuous improvement brought by the frequent inspection and adaptation the team puts itself through.

You see, with Scrum all you problems will become apparent. Think of the problems as cream being poured into a coffee. If you just keep on pouring and stirring all the time everything stays in a confused mess. But if you take time to stop stirring your mess, the cream will rise to the top and you’ll get a clearer view of what’s going on.

To achieve this here are some important steps:

Courage:
You can call yourself Agile if you want to. For that matter, you can call a cat a dog if you want to. But you are not Agile without frequent introspection and a true and deep desire to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This all start with courage. Courage to admit that you can be wrong. Courage to tell someone else that he/she was wrong. Courage to truly listen when someone is criticizing you. Courage to take what is on the table and make yourself a better you. A better team starts with a better you.

Desire:
Why do you desire to become better today than you were yesterday? What is your source of motivation? Are you so disgusted by your current situation that you wish not to have to experience it in the future? Have you seen better and want to recreate it? Do you see change as a desirable thing? As a source of motivation?

Failure must be an option:
If you are now allowed to fail, you cannot become better. You must be allowed to fail in order to be able to freely admit your failure in order to get feedback to help yourself get better. You should never seek failure, but you should not fear it.

Awareness of consequences:

Once you start into this continuous self-introspection game you will be cursed. Cursed for life. You see, most people have exactly the same problems as you and might still go through for the rest of their life. But you WILL see them. Just like Neo in the Matrix can see the code of the Matrix, you will see the problems when people within the mess have no idea how deep they’re in.

So you have two choices. To quote Morpheus talking to Neo:

“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

So what’s it gonna be? The red pill or the blue pill? Because once you take the red pill, there is no turning back.

- Nicholas Lemay