Originally posted on LinkedIn

The Agile ecosystem is, like any social system, composed of people with diverse backgrounds, experiences and viewpoints. What I find interesting about the community is how strongly we embrace certain frameworks, mindsets, processes and tools. This is almost to the exclusion of other camps. 

In his keynote speech at AgileCamp Dallas, Dave Snowden touched on the “this versus that” feuds we sometimes see within the community.  These conflicts cause people outside the Agile community to look at us to wonder if Agile practices are worth the effort because of a degree of infighting within the Agile ecosystem.

While talking with a friend prior to AgileCamp, we touched on this subject as it was causing friction in the workplace between team members. In this case, it was SAFe versus Scrum and intended to highlight deficiency and knowledge gaps between people and frameworks. In my assessment, the events my friend was describing were counter intuitive and potentially damaging to both sides.

In trying to help my friend, I suggested asking questions with genuine curiosity and humility to learn more about specific difference between SAFe and Scrum. I suggested asking about how the roles, like Release Train Engineer (RTE) and Nexus Scrum Master, are similar and/or different.  I often find myself saying when I don’t agree with someone on a subject or topic, “This is not right, this is not wrong, this is different.”

Focus

This brings me to the article title; agility and humility. If I’m exhibiting values like openness and respect, then I don’t have time for arguing a certain framework, mindset, process or tool is better than another. In fact, if I’m approaching my colleagues with humility, I should be willing to listen, learn and adopt a framework, mindset, process or tool if it creates value. For me, I have demonstrated agility when I do what I mentioned above.

As I learned doing projects in my garage, not every framework, mindset, process or tool is useful in every situation. Understanding situation context and using the right approach will achieve more than holding fast to a “hammer” tactic to every project. When a hammer is the only tool I have, I see every project as a nail. It’s time to adjust the Agile ecosystem.

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