Agile Native
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More than ever, companies are under pressure to be more productive and effective.
Yet it seems inevitable: as your company grows, so does complexity, leading to inefficiencies.
Is all this complexity truly inevitable?
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If there is one Agile principle that doesn’t get the attention it deserves, it’s this one: “Maximize the amount of work not done.”
In fact, it’s normal—expected, even—to do just the opposite: get work done, and the more work, the better.
Agile values work done too, especially working software. But Agile values “work not done” just as much. Without it, things quickly get messy, and what may look like “agility” to some is anything but.
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“Agile” is everywhere and for good reasons.
If only you could reverse-engineer all that agility and mass-reproduce it.
Specialists and experts alike have been working hard at it, playbooks in hand, with tools in tow and metrics to boot.
You will want to follow their lead but the truth is, you will be misguided.
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Your venture is like writing a book: you can work your way through it one chapter at a time, or you can put in some serious work upfront to carefully craft an outline.
Which is best: get going or carefully outline?
Don’t listen to me, listen to Amor Towles.
Amor Towles spent seven years writing his first book and ended up with, well, no book at all.
After that, before writing the first chapter of his next book, Amor Towles committed himself to creating a detailed outline of the entire book, “so I can then focus on the poetry, bringing things to light.”
The result is bestselling novels: Rules of Civility (2011) and A Gentleman in Moscow (2016).
What does this have to do with Agile?
Agile values incremental implementation (think of it as writing your book as you go along) over strategy and overarching solution design (writing an outline)—and as Amor Towles warns us, this can have unfortunate consequences.
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Come to think of it, you won’t find “just enough” in the list of principles behind the Agile Manifesto—but it’s always something worth aiming for.
To be clear, “just enough” doesn’t mean “just OK.” Striving for one is good, while settling for the other is not. Simply put: just OK is not OK.
So don’t settle for “just OK.” Don’t settle for “good enough” either. Instead, go for “just enough.”
Go for “just enough”—and keep working at it. It’s harder than you think. Just enough means not only the right amount, but also the right kind, at the right time.
Just enough: the right amount, of the right kind, at the right time.
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