Agile: The Cult, the Hype, and the Reality

 In this episode of Definitely Maybe Agile, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock explore the evolution of Agile methodologies. They discuss how Agile represents solutions to persistent problems that may be rebranded but address fundamental needs. The hosts examine why Agile has faced criticism, drawing parallels to Lean's journey from buzzword to established methodology, while exploring the challenges organizations face in implementation.

This week´s takeaways: 

• The fundamental problems Agile addresses remain constant, even as attitudes toward the methodology evolve.
• Organizations often struggle with Agile implementation due to legacy architecture, leadership buy-in, and organizational context.
• Like Lean before it, Agile is transitioning from a hyped methodology to becoming part of a broader toolkit.

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Chapters

• 0:04 Agile
• 8:47 Navigating Agile in Organizations

Transcript

Peter: 0:04

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello.

Dave: 0:13

Dave, how are you today? Peter, doing very well, thank you, and yourself.

Peter: 0:17

I am doing well. It feels very energizing today. You know it's like ready to get going.

Dave: 0:24

Well, I was going to say last time we talked you were being eaten alive or you were recovering from being eaten alive. This time you've had a good weekend. By the sounds of it, you've kept yourself busy.

Peter: 0:33

Yes, yes, it's been busy, but I'm no longer itchy, which is good, until somebody mentions it and then everything itches again.

Dave: 0:41

I didn't know that. Anyway now that I do, I'll see how many times you mention it. Anyway, what?

Peter: 0:50

are we talking about today? Today, we're going to talk about Agile, the cult, the hype and the reality.

Dave: 0:56

And that just screams AI-generated title to you, does it not?

Peter: 1:01

It's always when it's got the colon in it. But we liked the title, so let's give it a shot.

Dave: 1:10

Yeah, so and I mean there's a lot in the title just to get going, so let me just start the conversation, if you like, which is we've talked a lot about how Agile has been used successfully in digital transformations and lots of organizational change and things like this. We've also talked a little bit about how it has fallen out of favor in recent years, and I guess this title the Cult, the Hype and the Reality is an interesting way of looking at why might it have fallen out of favor or where might things be going or what's the problem space it should be really being used in.

Peter: 1:44

And we've talked about this quite a few times, I think but there's this concept of agile working within a greenfield environment where all the technology is well set up and everybody gets along and everything's wonderful and there's no problems and we don't need to overcome any of the challenges in that environment to get it all working. So we're just going to put all of the pieces into place, we're going to install a framework over the top of it, we're going to have sessions where we come up with a bunch of values and principles and then everybody's off to the races and everything's hunky-dory. And the reality is that human beings aren't like that. And if we just take it as verbatim that the organization will just respond in the way we expect it to to bringing in these new practices, that everything will be wonderful. But I think both of us could agree we haven't seen that happen every single time and that what often happens instead is we run into a set of challenges within the organization. I agree with everything that you're saying.

Dave: 2:45

What often happens instead is we run into a set of challenges within the organization. I agree with everything that you're saying. As you're describing it and this is going to be a bit of an odd conversation, but as you're describing it all I'm thinking is I think we're thinking about this wrong and that agile is like air fryers, and what I mean by that is it's a fad, it's a solution to a problem. Air fryers are a solution to a problem of I want to be able to cook my food, and a lot of my food. I'd like to be able to deep fry, and nowadays we're much more health conscious. So all of a sudden, there's this solution which addresses the current concerns, and in a few years time time, there'll be a whole bunch of air fryers going into recycling bins because the next thing will come along the problem still remains the same I have to cook food. I don't want to. I want it something that allows me to cook it quickly and easily and also serves certain other kind of needs that we may be looking at.

Dave: 3:45

But over time, the problems don't go away. They're the same problems, but the solutions that people are turning to will change over time, and I kind of feel like so much of this, the cult, the hype, and the reality is really just understanding. The problems are all the same. Whether it's you, it's effective product delivery, getting it into the customer's hands faster than your competitors, getting the right thing in customer's hands, getting the right level of quality of the product into customer, whatever they are, those problems are the same. The reality is that today people don't immediately turn to Agile the way they did a few years ago.

Peter: 4:27

At least not if it's called Agile Well there.

Dave: 4:31

yes, so the air fryer is going to be branded something else and, all of a sudden, we'll still be using them.

Peter: 4:38

This is the breath fryer or something.

Dave: 4:40

Well, but I think you're. I mean, we've talked a lot about from a principles base. We look at these and we say there are particular contexts where Agile is going to perform way better than other possible solutions in the market and so on. But the reality is it feels to me like nobody wants to buy the air fryer. And so, to your point, now it changes its name, it's going to adjust, but the problems are still there. We're still going to need things and it's highly effective in a particular context, as we've talked about many times.

Peter: 5:14

Yes, yeah, I mean, if you understand the problem that you're looking to solve and it's all very well defined and you know what the right pieces are and what order they go in, then breaking it down into smaller pieces, treating those as small incremental delivery value, or looking at how I'm going to go about solving this, isn't such a problem because I already know how I go about solving this. Isn't such a problem because I already know how I go about solving this. It's just about operating it more efficiently, and that's a very different set of problems to solve. And so the reality is trying to take this and it's the hammer and nail problem right. I've got a hammer and everything looks like a nail, but, exactly to your point, we still have all the same underlying problems.

Peter: 5:56

I still talk to organizations all the time that are struggling to work out how to get aligned, delivering the value. How do I stop having so many different things all happening at once? How do I make sure my teams understand what the most important thing to work on right now is? All of these are still problems. It's just the current way the wind is blowing. Agile is not seen as a solution to those problems.

Dave: 6:21

And I think there's another element, as you're describing that, I'm kind of realizing there's another piece to that which is a few years ago, a lot of people hadn't heard about it or fully understood it, whereas today, when you walk into most organizations, it's almost like they'll describe that problem and then they'll say and we're agile, or and we've tried agile and it didn't work, or some variation of it. Right, and again, we can argue about how well it's been implemented and so on, but any time that you're arguing with an end user or a customer about whether they've used something well, what you actually mean is the usability is lousy and you don't know. You know it's a problem on the product side. It's not the problem on the user side. Yes, so I think we're now in a situation where it has to go into, you know, more principle based.

Dave: 7:09

There's other solutions coming in, there's other ways of thinking about it, and I liked what you said. It's really about principles. We know what's going to be used, but we're not necessarily going to apply the label of agile to it, or iterative and incremental, or whatever it is, devops and so on. We're just going to say, hey, you know what, why don't we make the pieces of work smaller. Let's get more pieces out more frequently. How can we structure teams around this so that you're getting transparency into what's going on and various things like that?

Peter: 7:38

Yeah, exactly. And as we understand what those common problems are and think about how do we structure solutions around it, we get to draw upon the body of knowledge that we already have because we've spent the last couple of decades learning about this stuff. So there's a lot of value to come out of understanding all of the learning we have within organizations, of trying to apply these practices. It's now how do we continue to help organizations with the same problems that they're looking at, using, for the most part, the same problems and for the most part the same solutions.

Dave: 8:14

Now, if I go back to the title of our podcast, the cult, the hype and the reality, why do you think there's cult and hype around agile?

Peter: 8:23

well, we could talk about the industrialization of agile and the, the uh. You know, fifteen hundred dollars, uh, for a scrum master course of two days, which means everybody now has a Scrum Master course because it's so easy to get. I've got my little certificate that says I'm a CSM.

Dave: 8:41

You're really prodding at this one, aren't you? Go ahead, karen. What else?

Peter: 8:47

But that piece is a part of it. There's a belief that comes along with that that I have all of these things that I need to do and if I set all of this up, then my organization will get all of these benefits, because that's what the promise was. The promise from the cult of Agile was that if you take this set of practices and you apply them to your organization, you will see these benefits. Well, organizations went and did that and they didn't necessarily see the benefits, so that hence the hype. And the reality is they didn't see the benefits. So there's a piece there where that definitely happened for a number of organizations and over time those organizations spoke about it and started to say, well, this isn't really working for me.

Peter: 9:35

That's not to say there hasn't been organizations that had a great deal of success adopting these practices and built very high performing teams, and very often they've adopted a lot of other practices alongside Agile to make all of that happen. It's not Agile alone and if I say Agile alone, I think that's a bit of a misnomer, because it depends what you describe as Agile, what your point of view is of that. When you start to think about, has the organization got better at adapting to change, better at how it implements, better at being able to more rapidly understand its problem sets and implement solutions to them, if it has it's become more agile and it's managed to adopt some of the core principles underlying these practices.

Dave: 10:50

Yeah, I think you're calling out there's a little bit of when lean went through. Exactly the same thing now, when we think about lean manufacturing and lean approaches and a lean mindset today, we don't immediately associate it with a hype or with a cult status. What we actually look at now is lean is one of many different tool sets, frameworks, mindsets so sets of principles and mindsets, as well as practices and tools that are incredibly valuable to anybody who's working on the effectiveness and efficiency of organizations and processes in those. But if I think back to GE and the noise that Jack Welch made around, the sort of leaning out in those and I'm forgetting which decades it was, but it was about 20 years ago, right, that would have been a period when Lean the cult, the hype and the reality would have been an absolutely contemporary and relevant podcast, and I think a lot of that is this.

Dave: 11:52

Agile's in the same place. That lean was 10 or 20 years ago overused, over applied, poorly applied by people who think you can just cookie cutter it in lots of different ways. That way of thinking and of course, we all know it's a complex system, so you can't just do it in those ways, right. You can't just implement it by copying what your neighbors are doing.

Peter: 12:12

Yeah Well, we get a new set of practices every 10 years, isn't it Something like that? I think Mary can answer that.

Dave: 12:18

Well or a new. You know, they're dressed up differently and built on things, and I think that's a totally reasonable thing. We've ridden the wave in some ways of that that sort of when the limelight was on agile and all of the frameworks and so on and I think we're in the middle of transitioning to agile and the mindset and the tools and practices becoming part of the same world that lean is in today. And in that transition we have to kind of go through the period when everybody says it's a cult, it's hype, it never worked. Why did we ever do it? Because that's just part of the journey that any framework with any kind of I don't know level of impact that that lean and agile have both had is going to have to go through.

Peter: 13:04

Yeah, well, well, this is your, and as much as I love to call out to places like Ghana, but this is your hype cycle, right? It's like we're in the trough of disillusionment. The next management practice that's going to come out of that onto the plateau of usability or whatever the other side?

Dave: 13:25

of disillusionment is. So how do we maybe wrap things up? Or what's the findings and conclusions from underlie?

Peter: 13:32

Agile are very, very effective in addressing those types of problems.

Peter: 13:54

The reality is that quite often, they don't get applied to the right problems or that there are surrounding issues within the organization that are never going to allow it to succeed.

Peter: 14:06

You're operating off an old architecture that is incapable of easily being adaptable, you have leadership which isn't bought in, or you've got very dysfunctional leadership that isn't going to allow the organization to adopt the new practices. You're paying lip service to buying into some of the ways of executing and when you have all of these types of headwinds, it's really going to struggle and to get to the benefits that you're looking for. It's not going to solve those problems, those underlying problems that we talk about, and it might be good actually to do an episode just talking about, like here, uh, and because within within zodiac, we, we have seven problems that we solve. That's the way we think of it. It's like if you have one of these seven problems, then talk to us and we can help you think through how, about how to go about solving them, and it's exactly the way that we would go and talk to customers about that. So there's a definite um relation there between between we understand and see these problems across organizations, and many organizations have them and they're still looking to solve them.

Dave: 15:26

And quite often the practices that we're going to bring, sort of consulting professional services firm that understands where they sit, they know what the problems are, that they consult, because you don't sell a solution, you sell an answer to a problem. And I totally wear the same and I'm sure if we listed our problems they'd probably overlap considerably the problems we would go to talk to our prospects about. Um, what I find really stands out. I think there's two things that struck me in the conversation that we've just had that dovetail really well into this outline of the problems. Number one is the problems are the same problems. They were a decade, two decades ago and were many decades before then. The problems are not going away. They're complicated by different technology, environments and the various other things in the market as well, but the core problems are still there. That's the first thing. So it's not agile, isn't a cult or hype because it solved everything. The problems are still there.

Dave: 16:35

And I think what's really interesting and you mentioned the hype cycle, I think that's really what we're beginning to see is people are kind of tired of that conversation and they're looking to hear a different conversation.

Dave: 16:48

And that brings us to that second piece, which is, if I think of lean and the tool set and the set of mindsets and principles that come together, because lean is complex, it's not one single tool or one mindset, there's a lot that goes into it. Well, agile fits in that same sort of model. There, I think, the sooner Agile becomes yet a broader, like systems thinking, like lean, something that just anybody who goes into an organization is expected to be familiar with, these various different ways of thinking. I think that's where we want to get to kind of as quickly as we can so we can get past the hype and the cult conversation and into the reality, which is your problems are the same. The tool set is growing all the time, but we've got a tool set and a set of principles that we can apply in the world of lean, and agile specifically brings a lot to that.

Peter: 17:43

And I think we can help solve those problems, and we work with organizations to do so. I think that's a good way of summing it up. So with that, I'd like to say thank you, Dave. Always an interesting conversation. I think I hope our listeners got some value out of this as well, and I look forward to next time. Yeah, till next time, Thanks again. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.