Look! A Substack!
It's where the cool kids are. Y'know, the ones who'll want to talk about the philosopical underpinnings of agile and how to use them to make things better.
I really enjoy writing, but really struggle to do it consistently. It’s a strange thing. Or perhaps it just feels like a strange thing, because my writer friends assure me that it’s a completely normal thing, unless you’re Charles Bukowski.
Anyway: I did some writing earlier in the year, stalled a bit as tends to happen, and now have some more things I’d like to talk about. I’m hoping that a bit of community might help me keep momentum on the whole thing, and that more people might come across these posts if they’re here. So I’m going to move the old things over and zap the self-hosted blog (it is a bit 2005, after all).
In particular I’d like to think out loud about how organisations plan and get things done. I’m thinking mostly of government, as that’s where my experience is, but I think similar dynamics are at play in most big/complex organisations.
There’s a long history of technologists who are agile practitioners bemoaning the fact that the organisations they work for don’t really embrace agile principles, and in fact, work mostly in very non-agile ways. And an assumption that things would be better if that changed.
There’s some truth to this, but also a little déformation professionnelle. And perhaps, occasionally, a smidge of hubris. I think part of what makes agile software engineering principles fail to stick in wider contexts is the presence of an unfortunate and not very convincing assumption that “this works for software, so it’ll work for everything else too”.
But there are some deeper themes at play. There are some philosophical foundations that are useful: about how we see the world, how we come to know things, and what it even means to know things in the first place. Agile practices build on many of these ideas, making them practical and more straightforwardly implementable. And while we may not need or want our SLTs and boardrooms to be “agile”, I think we do need and want them to work with some of the same philosophical foundations in mind.
I think it’s possible for organisations to be more efficient, more productive, more effective at managing risk, more adept at acting on opportunities and more able to operate in ways more conductive to the flourishing of the people who work for them. Procurement doesn’t have to be broken, and HR doesn’t have to be soulless. Fairness and process are not synonymous. We don’t need policies to cover every eventuality. We can do things differently. We can’t manage everything with post-its on a wall, but we don’t need spreadsheets to manage everything either.
There are people doing these things differently, and places (and times) where procurement works pretty well actually, HR is alright, and proceses work pretty well. But there are a lot of places that are far from that ideal, and needn’t be.
I’d like to get some of this out of my head, and even more than that, I’d like to start a conversation: I have ideas, not solutions, and I think the solutions that do exist are ones we’ll find in practice, not in theory. So I’m very keen to talk, and to hear about people’s experiences. If you’re up for that, please do let me know!