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Agile exists to address the idea that no predetermined set of steps will lead to a predefined outcome. The problem has never been solved, nor has the solution ever been created, so you don’t know what you don’t know. No formula is going to guarantee a desired outcome.
Why does Agile focus on values and principles rather than a prescribed set of steps?
Complicated versus Complex work.
In complicated work, such as civil engineering, we can apply a set of best practices and be relatively certain that a desired outcome will be achieved. We need a bridge, know the best way to build that bridge, and we bring experienced bridge builders in to build a new one.
Problem solved. There may be slight differences in variables, such as cost, time, and materials, but they will most likely be within a tolerance we can accept and plan for.
Even though the work is hard and complicated, a team of people has performed the work many times before. It can solve every problem and develop every solution with almost 100% certainty before you even start the project.
So, in complicated work, it is hard if you don’t have the knowledge but it becomes very simple and straightforward when you do possess that knowledge and skill.
Complex work lives in the domain of problems that have never been solved before, products and services and solutions that have never existed before, and deep uncertainty about how to do the work even when you have a team of deeply experienced, skilled, and knowledgeable people.
A team of subject matter experts, in possession of all the knowledge and skills available, are still not guaranteed to solve the problem or create the solution you want. They won’t know the answer, the process, or have a predefined set of steps until they have created the solution or built the product.
Only then will they know, with certainty, how to do the work.
That is complex work.
Continuous Complexity.
As we make advances in the work we do and understand more about some of the work, we can shift work that was in a complex environment into a complicated environment. We had to apply significant effort (energy) in order to achieve this.
We can take what we have done and create automation using everything we learned in the complex work to replicate success for the work that is no longer complex. This automation, or production line, allows you to create a repeatable and consistent outcome. In software that the production line may take the form of an automated build and deployment.
We never solve the exact same problem again in software engineering and other creative work.
The code that solved the previous problem won’t work on the next one; we design a new solution and must write code or develop a creative solution that has never been tried or written before.
It is continuous complex work.
In this scenario, we can use the framework and empirical process control as a guide to creating the solution or solving the complex problem, but we can’t create a production line for the complete work.
There are no best practices; there are only emergent practices.
We start with the best thing we can do right now, using what we have learned up until that point, but in a few hours, we may make a discovery or breakthrough that means we need to explore a whole new line of discovery or invent a whole new set of practices.
It’s a world of surprises.
Some of these are pleasant surprises that help us evolve, and others are nasty surprises where we discover that what we are doing isn’t working, nor will it work in the future. We must return to the drawing board and pursue a new line of reasoning, experimentation, and discovery.
Values and Principles
In this world, values guide how we do the work. A great example of that are scrum values.
Commitment
Courage
Focus
Openness
Respect
These are our guardrails, and these are the behaviours, practices, and mindset that governs how we navigate volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
We can’t use a prescribed set of steps because they don’t exist.
Agile and Scrum provide the tools and help develop the culture that allows a team or organization to adapt to any set of circumstances, both positive and negative.
A framework that allows an organization to frequently inspect what they are doing, adapt based on what they have learned, and use the process of discovery and experimentation to help them continuously improve.
About NKD Agility
Naked Agility is an #agile consultancy that specializes in #scrumtraining, #agilecoaching and #agileconsulting to help teams evolve, integrate, and continuously improve.
We recognize the positive impact that a happy AND inspired workforce can have on customer experience, and we actively help organizations to tap into the power of creative, collaborative, and high-performing teams that is unique to #agile and #scrum environments.
But why does agile focus on values and principles instead of a predefined set of steps?
Um, because there’s no predefined set of steps that will get the same outcome every time in an agile space. So that’s where we start having that conversation about the difference between, and however people want to phrase it, right? Because there’s different stories about how you would articulate this. But the way I articulate it is that you’ve got complicated work, right? So this is about the work that we’re doing. We’ve got complicated work, and if we apply best practices or good practices, we can turn this into something simple, right?
So that’s like, um, whenever you go, let’s say you want to do some DIY in the house, uh, DIY, do it yourself in the house, uh, you want to do some home improvements, and you don’t know how to safely remove the u-bend in the sink. You don’t know how to do that. I guarantee you, you can go to YouTube and type in “remove u-bend in sink,” hit enter, and you’ll find 20 YouTube videos. You’ll watch three of them, and now it’s a simple problem. It’s not a complex, a complicated problem at all anymore, right? Because you know how to do it. You could probably even find a video that has the exact same fixings as you have on your sink, right, if you watched a few of those videos.
These are not hard tasks if you know how to do them. They’re only hard because you don’t know how to do them. You don’t have the knowledge. You’ve got this complicated work that when you apply knowledge, it becomes simple, right? But then you’ve got this other type of work, which is any time you’re building stuff that doesn’t exist yet.
Right? If you’re building something that doesn’t exist yet, there’s no predefined set of rules yet. Somebody has to design the thing, and then we create a predefined set of rules. Like if you wanted to design a brand new car platform, um, you’re not gonna, it’s not complicated, it’s complex because you don’t know what the outcome is going to be.
Um, but once you’ve built it, you can then create a production line and serve out lots of them. That’s you turning that complex problem of designing the new product. Okay, now we’ve got the complicated problem of building the new product. We create the production line, and then we generate lots of lots of things off it.
But in the complex space, every single thing we do is complex. Every single thing we do is something that we’ve not done before. So if you’re, um, writing code, right, you don’t go write code that you’ve written before because there would be no point. It’s been written before. So you would package it up in a little framework, and you would reuse that little framework on a constant basis. So then that’s not complex work, but everything you’re doing to wire up that thing is complex work.
Everything we do in software is brand new. Anytime you’re developing a product that doesn’t exist yet, there are no best practices. There are only emergent practices. Like what’s the right thing just now for what we understand just now? Tomorrow it might be different. In fact, in a couple of hours, it might be different, right? Because it’s changing so much.
And the thing that happens in this space, you can’t make this complicated, right? You can’t make it complicated. There’s no change between that. And what happens in this space is we get lots of surprises, right? And some of them are positive surprises that we want to go grab and take advantage of, and some of them are negative surprises that we want to make sure that we don’t get, you know, don’t get messed up by that particular surprise.
Loads of those types of things in the software world, but in almost any industry, when you’re building brand new products, you’re going to have surprises, right? Things aren’t like you expect them to be for whatever reason, or something happens, the impacts on what it is that you’re doing.
So the reason that agile focuses on those values and principles is that you and your team and your company need the tools to be able to adapt to any circumstance. Whereas as soon as you write down a way to do things, like here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do it, and then the world changes, right? Your world of how it’s going to work changes. It’s actually harder to adapt to this because you’re like, but I’m following this set of steps, right? I want to follow this, and this one’s failing. Why is this failing now?
Well, it’s because the world’s changed. And when we enshrine things in, here’s a way of doing something, here’s one way that you should do this, we suddenly hit that problem of we want to keep doing it that way, and it’s harder to change. Whereas, so we focus on values and principles so we don’t enshrine. If the word I normally use for these enshrined things is bureaucracy, right? The way we work, you don’t enshrine them in the bureaucracy, and you keep yourself nimble and adaptable.
And then hopefully what you’ll learn is to document and create processes for the things that you can move into that complicated space, i.e., we’ve built something, we need a process for resetting users’ passwords. We’ve built a system, here’s the process to interact with the system. But if we’re adding new things to this system, we don’t need the bureaucracy in order to handle how we’re doing that because we want to be dynamic and adaptable.
But then over here in using the thing, we can have the documentation, and we can have the processes and the rules on how to do that.
So that’s why we focus on values and principles and not just a set of rules.
If you've made it this far, it's worth connecting with our principal consultant and coach, Martin Hinshelwood, for a 30-minute 'ask me anything' call.
Schedule a Teams Call with Martin Hinshelwood
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