322 Agile has Won. Now what do I do?

This is the Agil Fodds podcast.

Man's car.

Hey, world. This is Quentin Quartel coming at you.

The lover of business innovation.

Business process innovation, business innovation, product innovation.

I love that people think many experiments are not being part of that at all levels.

This is a continuing episode of a series.

Agil coaching a new hope.

I love it.

Do you have any hypothesis why the curve is dropping in 2022?

I think it was.

I think we've reached the saturation.

That Agil, you know, everything is going to follow that curve of adoption.

We've reached the, like Agil is the norm now.

Back when I started, I wouldn't know about Agil 2002.

Agil, like it was you would talk about it in secret corners.

We would have these little meetups.

We were the rebels out there.

We were doing this crazy stuff that no one else was doing.

We're going to take down the evil empire, the evil waterfall empire.

We did.

We got it.

Like Diana Larson said, Agil didn't, Agil isn't dead.

It won.

Interesting.

Now it's won.

The demand for Agil coaches and transformations is dropping drastically because you're at the tail end of the adoption curve.

We're left with the laggots.

You know, you're in the laggots when it's what banks and you know,

insurance companies and banks, right?

Yeah, like there are always the laggots.

And as soon as I think you start doing Agil transformation work there,

you're like, okay, we're nearly done then.

And so we, we, we, I think that's what's happened is we've reached saturation.

It's not a bad thing, you know.

No, no, like that's not.

You're talking about the post movie that isn't shown in Star Wars after the rebels defeat the empire.

What do they do?

Do they keep her belly? No, they probably don't get jars.

They go, we'll get, they become government people.

Yeah, yeah.

It is like, you know, she has to go and work in a cafe and.

And you know, I was just talking.

Yeah, no one needs my lightsaber skills anymore.

Yeah, no, that's cool.

And that's actually a, oh man, you and I have, because we lived through that industry.

And we saw the downward trend.

We've seen some really negative, some negative,

some people who were in the industry who left a little earlier and they're really negative about it.

And they're just like bashing it.

It's like, oh, this has always just been a kind of a fake thing, this, that blah, blah, blah.

And, and I think that, that, I don't know if you know the specific person I'm talking about, but, but I think it's more than just that person.

There's like, there's a group or a collection.

I think they just sort of,

there are angry that they had to get a different job.

And they're attributing, they're putting all the problems at the foot of something and that something happens to be agile.

Yeah, you know, when people scared and, and you know, I opened the keynote like, I'm scared.

Like getting laid off sucks, you know, trying to find work is not fun being getting paid unemployment benefit is, you know, not great.

So yeah, I'm scared and it's easy to, you know, when people scared, they will often lash out.

The real thing to do is to, is to pivot and that's where I was trying to say to people like, it's time to try something else.

There's not, don't try and plug the dead horse. There's no point getting angry.

This is where, this is the reality of where we're at, you know, I don't think it's totally unfounded.

Like I know, well, I love the arguments. So I think there was a lot of silliness, but you know, it's water under the bridge now.

Do you want to put works to those?

Oh, the, the, the agile transformation, what that's been called, the, the agile industrial complex, I think,

and then they're companding around a lot. So I mean, you could make a lot of money in the agile world, you know, when something's in demand, you can say, well, I've got the answer and here it is.

And it's like this. And if you're confident enough in your marketer, right?

People listen to you and you make a lot of money. Doesn't mean it's right. So I think a lot of people made a lot of money.

So I guess that's what, what's in question now? And did they, did they make it bad for everyone else that they destroyed?

I don't know. It was, it was, I think we could have done better.

I think, actually, and this is where I want to get to later, and then part of the pivot. I think I just should have actually gone in a different direction.

But we also did the best we could at the time with what we knew, you know, in part. So a lot of these people weren't evil.

They just did the best with with what they knew. And it maybe was not the best thing to do. But that's why I think.

Can I explore it? So the people not being, or maybe they were weren't being evil.

Are you referring to like, so some of the things they hear, like the agile cargo cult has caused damage.

And so it's to ruin the reputation of agile. There's companies bought transformation, but they didn't get results because they just did the cargo cult activities.

They just did the things that agile asked them to do.

I think we did a poor job as, you know, me looking back, we did a poor job of collecting data.

Why didn't we use data to say, hey, this thing works. And we can prove these things or to do our agile transformations in a lot more data driven way to say, all right, well, what's our hypothesis?

Some big fan of lean, lean change and Jason, Jason, little work. And you'd say, well, what's our hypothesis? And how do we know?

What experiment are we going to run and how do we know if it worked? The leading metrics and what are the lagging metrics? But we never did that.

We just charge them. We did scramble work or campaign work and this framework or work and this will all work and trust us and make sure to pay me every month.

Trust me, but let me think about this. I feel like that worked for a lot of things.

It made it didn't come. You know, we didn't.

That's great. Quite in here. It's early enough. I was reading software in 30 days by Ken Schuver and Jeff Sullivan.

They're talking about agile transformations and they said, you know, we've done loads of them. But every time we come back, it's always degraded.

Here we go. And the transformation to scrum entire org is upheaval, worked in controlled chaos for several years.

We've been in several years. The organization is not as bad as it was when it started, but it's not an agile scrum organization either.

Opportunity has been lost. When we compare notes, we found this to be true for almost every enterprise transformation that we know of and have been a part of.

And that's that's like been my experience as well. Like we made things better. We did make it better.

I didn't think we reached an avana point. And I think we could have honestly if we if we'd use some different tools.

But like I said, we didn't have that. We didn't have that mindset of that tool set. Now I certainly didn't.

So yeah, yeah, I think my big my big pivot. This is what I've seen with the audience in Australia is when I started reading all the books on product management.

So my path through agile was, you know, as a developer. And it's been very much developer focus for a long time. And then, you know, then I became like agile coach.

You see, you kind of get the process coaching. You know, it's a scum.

It's gone master for a while. So, you know, I've always seen it from from that that place.

I even taught the product. And I was a coach trainer for the product owner class. And I was really curious like what he what he teach product owners.

So which I think is totally ridiculous. Like why am I a coach trainer for product and I've never even been a product and I think that which gets in the way.

Which gets into another lot of the ridiculous or part of the ridiculous seems.

We've done in the agile world is like, hey, why are the people teaching product classes that have never actually been a product person.

So now I'm starting to read product books. I don't get on to product books. I don't know. But totally fascinating.

I'm like, wow, this is this is where agile should have gone to. Well, could this idea of of treating your product like a and your market like a hypothesis like lean startup, you know, that core of like lean startup and scientific thinking.

And I'll make why didn't we do that without transformations.

Because we didn't know better like essentially I didn't want to put my hand up now I do. And I would do things that way now.

But yeah, I think I think that whole I think that's why we should have gone down this on this product path of fun.

You know, there's just so that's one of the many routes. I think that is there is another one too. I want to get on to.

So back in 2008, I was in downtown Seattle. You may, you know, crystalline, I think. And there was another fellow he was introducing me to who was a he was a lean, a lean fella.

And he was complaining to me. He says, you know, you you agile consultants. You always go into the organization like you have an like you have the answer.

You don't go in and observe and set baselines and things like that. So he's talking about basically creating measurements and measuring there.

What's different? He says you guys are making assumptions on what the solution is. And he was right.

But I feel like nine times out of 10 getting an or a small organization at least doing scrum or a con bond.

So I solved a lot of the problems they were looking at or at least impacted or how to a measurable result.

I really agree. We did know. It made them better than where I was. I totally agree.

And it makes them start thinking differently, which is really important. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. And and I want to like we tried a little bit. I said earlier, I say, oh, I don't think I we did much on measurements.

You and I did probably more measurements when we worked for our later company because it would they were pretty obsessed with it.

But before that, the measurements were ad hoc and not.

Okay, I'm going to speak on my side. So the type of some measurements I got involved with as a as a technical coach was usually related to defite counts and maybe a little bit on cycle time.

But certainly defite counts. Those that was the main thing people wanted to like make go away. And and and then the metric that when I was brought into work on automation.

The other metric was well, how many automated tests are you delivering since that's the change you want.

Let's measure the change that you want. You want more automation? Well, let's measure how many you do per sprint and just let the team look at see if the number keeps going up and watch that.

And so those are those are the two that worked well for me because that was when I think about the the the the narrow margin of technical coaching that that was that was something that I frequently did, but it was always up to me.

It wasn't like a like if I was doing process coaching, I had a lot more fuzziness about how to measure the results other than again could measure defects.

But most of the time organizations just wanted people to operate the same way and the measuring the result of that.

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This is a continuing episode of a series that started with episode three twenty one.

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Next episode more Quentin Quartel my aha looking back.

I've been a technical coach and we know we know that the technical coaches and they're all like you have technical coach and I'm like technical coaching is important but only in the context of certain things being in place.

And the very first thing that has to be in place is you have a business model that actually works.

Thank you.