Hello agile, from zombies to onions
I love an onion, all onions, but let's talk specifically about Simon Powers sexy agile onion. (He doesn’t call it sexy, but I think it is)
If you have been in a learning session with me you may have met one of my slight variations of it, the leadership leek, UCD shallot or facilitation Red Baron (what a name!). Different labels, but IMHO the same core thinking. Because people love a tool, booooooy they love a tool, work in my world and you will see it, and that's cool, I love a tool to, tools are useful, practical and give us somewhere to start.
They are also incredibly easy to adopt badly.
There are plenty of organisations doing agile. A stand-up here, a retro there, Jira boards bpopping up left right and centre, yep we are AGILE BABY WHOOOOP, the upper echalons maybe niavely happy as everyone is dutifully marching through the rituals… but the problem is very little about how decisions are made, how people are trusted or how learning happens has actually changed.
We are not agile… baby (il stop that now)
There are a million names for this, agile theatre, AINO (Agile In Name Only) and one I heard recently Zombie agile/scrum…. Zombie agile can feel a bit like The Last of Us. The ceremonies are still wandering around the organisation, stifled stand-ups, shuffling sprints, rotting retros, all recognisable as the things they once were, but something infected them along the way. The mindsets not there, the rituals are, and lets face it Pedro Pascal isn’t turning up to save you (no spoilers)… These names exist for a reason.
Lets get peeling
Simon Powers’ Agile Onion moves from the things that are most visible and easier to adopt, to those that are less visible but much more powerful. Its that deeper stuff that needs unearthing, but it is also much harder to change.
Lets start at the centre
Tools and processes are the tangible stuff. Boards, backlogs, sprints, stand-ups, retrospectives, we can see them happening, buy the software, put the ceremonies in calendars and teach people how to use them…. lovely, thats a simple fix… but its not
Practices are the things we repeatedly do. Prioritising work, working iteratively, testing, reviewing, reflecting and adapting. They start to shape how work happens rather than simply organising it…. ok we are getting somewhere
Principles help us make decisions when there isn’t a handy template. Deliver value early, work in small increments, get feedback, lovely lovely feedback loops. Respond to what we learn, and keep learning… they give us something to navigate by when the process doesn’t quite fit the situation…. OK great that helps us with all this ambiguty!
Values shape how we behave with each other, collaboration, openness, trust, respect, courage. These are harder to point at on a Trello board, but you notice pretty quickly when they are missing… the peopley bit be peopling
Then we get to mindset… OH HELLLLLLO. We are at the least visible and most powerful part.
Powers describes the agile mindset through three beliefs: complexity, people and proactivity and nods to another fave framework Cynefin, I have added the illustration, but will not go deeper in this blog . The reality of work at the moment, especially in public sector, is that we accept that many of the problems we are working with cannot be fully understood or predicted upfront. We believe people can organise, collaborate and make good decisions when the conditions support them and we continually look for ways to learn and improve.
And then there’s AI…
Yep… is it even a Medium post if I don’t mention AI?
AI is changing the landscape we’re doing all of this in, it can make some parts of agile delivery faster, help us synthesise information, spot patterns, explore options, prototype ideas and get from a blank page to something we can respond to much quicker…. great I use it for lots of these things
Used well, it can multiply the team’s thinking, but there’s a trap here… we can use AI in exactly the same way we’ve sometimes used agile tools… adopt the shiny, shinyyyyy thing, automate the visible bits and accidentally squeeze out the thinking that made them valuable in the first place.
A retro summary generated in seconds is useful, a retro where nobody has really reflected isn’t, fed back or shared, not so.
Ai can also lose some of the valuable friction, the spicy conversation while moving Post-its around or disagreement over what something means that longggg awkward silence thats held by a good DM, the tension quivering till somebody eventually says, “Actually, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.”
Those moments can look inefficient, feel frikking HARD, but most of the time when I have been in those retros and team terminations that’s where the real learning has been hiding.
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Being agile in an AI-shaped working world I feel is knowing what to accelerate and what to protect, use AI to remove the drudgery that actually no one want to or needs to do, widen possibilities and multiply what a team can do. Then deliberately push the human judgement, curiosity, challenge, feedback and thinking, the harder stuff, that sometimes we can hide under the drudgery to avoid
DAHHHHLING he ceremonies won’t save you…
We can introduce all the tools and processes we want through command and control and, in fact, that is partly why they are so seductive. Like Odysseus hearing the Sirens calling him towards the rocks, there is something incredibly tempting about the visible stuff. Buy the tool, introduce the framework, mandate the stand-up. LOOK, we’re agile now, sometimes we need to tie ourselves to the mast and resist the urge to mistake activity for change.
The thing is at this tooly layer we cannot mandate curiosity, or demand trust, reflection, challenge or a genuine desire to learn, you can’t put psychological safety in Jira (well you could write on a ticket I spose) or schedule trust for 10am every Tuesday.
And one of my biggest beefs, a retrospective where nobody feels able to say what is actually going wrong, surface the tensions and issues, have the crunch convos, wel…. it’s just another meeting.
Moving from doing agile towards being agile means creating the conditions where teams can learn continuously and change what they are doing because of what they learn.
I like how we describe delivery management at TPXimpact… a delivery manager “creates the right conditions for project teams to work in so that they can deliver as effectively, quickly and efficiently as possible.”
‘CONDITIONS’, for me thats the important word, culture is what allows the rest of the onion to work. People need enough autonomy to respond rather than constantly seek permission, but that autonomy comes with their own personal responsibility.
They also need access to users and feedback rather than assumptions passed down a chain, they need leaders who can tolerate uncertainty rather than demanding false certainty through plans, space to experiment, reflect and admit when something hasn’t worked and not sit waiting to be punished even tho the org is championing a test and learn mentality. They need short feedback loops where learning actually changes what happens next and they need measures that focus on value and outcomes rather than rewarding teams for looking busy….. I could go on but you get the idea
That takes leadership, trust, challenge. Plus it takes organisations being prepared to change some of the structures, incentives and behaviours that made the shiny new agile tools necessary in the first place.
The tools matter, the whole onion is needed, keep the retros, boards and stand-ups if they are USEFUL. Just keep peeling, feeling and unreeling till that mindset is the thing running the show and the zombies have all returned to their graves.
Three ways to encourage an agile mindset
1. Microdose discomfort (yes yes I will keep going on about this!)
Learning often has a little friction in it, the first honest retro might hurt, but hold the silence, keep asking hard questions of each other and building tust and a brave space a little at a time. Create small, regular opportunities to practise sitting with that discomfort as indies and a team, reflecting on it and doing something with what you learn.
2. Reward learning, not just delivery
If success only means hitting the deadline, sticking to the plan and shipping the thing, people quickly learn to hide uncertainty and mistakes. Make it valuable to say we tried this, it didn’t work, and here’s what we learned. Lets start celebrating the changed mind as much as the completed milestone.
3. Give people something real to respond to
Agility needs feedback, get work in front of users earlier and LISTEN. Prototype before polishing, work in the open and share the messy versions.
Feedback from users, feedback to and from each other, feedback to and from stakeholders, it works, its free… actively listen and use it!
Because if the thinking underneath never changes, eventually the onion starts to stink worse than the zombies.
If you didn’t think we’d have smelly onion ref you’ve not been here before
Rabbit holes for your brain
Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable … me
delivery management at TPXimpact
complexity, people and proactivity… Simon powers
Cynefin… Dave Snowden
