People love to quote the next part of this quote: that “the sage concerns himself with the fruit, and not the fluff”, but the more I work the more I feel like this particular piece preceding it is more relevant.
When all you’re doing is following strictures without knowing why they exist, you’re doing nothing of value. You’re just going through the motions to not be fired. You do a thing because it is valuable to everyone involved and it is inherently obvious that it is valuable to everyone involved. As soon as that ceases to be true but you still go through the meeting, you are merely following ritual.
If you’re practicing “agile” by performing ceremonies or kanban or waterfall or whatever the heck you do in your nonspare time, that’s neat, but if people don’t understand what you’re trying to achieve by doing so, it’s not meaningful. It’s just a ritual. Just words strung together, regularly sung, for a reason that nobody alive actually knows anymore, or even cares anymore, so long as people perform the ritual, because someone higher up the totem pole than you said “You need to do this specific action because it is Good”. Attend a Catholic mass one of these days and just look at people sputtering nonsense for an hour because they were taught this and that were things they have to say in response to that and this, and that’s all they do. What does sputtering the Nicene creed even matter if for most people it’s just a series of sounds memorized in order? That sounds rude, but I know how these things were taught, because I was forced to do so, and it wasn’t with any reverence from any of the people involved in the process. It was only with expectation that you memorize the magic words, eat your cracker, and drink your wine, and tell the priest how you sinned. There is meaning behind the words but nobody focuses on that, and you could hope that that meaning somehow develops but that is such a poor way of teaching someone something I can’t imagine why you would. To say it in a Western way it feels as if, people are more worried with the message that, if you don’t do these things you go to hell, than the message that you should love your neighbor as you love yourself. To say it in an Eastern way, you have ceased to live in the Way, you have ceased to care about goodness, you have ceased to care of the morality or discipline of the action, you have simply resigned yourself to the motions, and in that way, you sit, like pigeon, pressing the button errantly hoping that the dispenser Dr. Skinner has devised will release birdseed, rather than figuring out how to really be a bird.
Rules and rituals are the last refuge of a failed culture; if people know what they need to do to achieve something great, then the rules aren’t necessary. They simply do, and the results simply follow through their inherent virtue and talent as good people. Good people don’t need to be told to be good. The “ritual” is an obvious byproduct of an actually good process that is an ineffable contract between all involved. And that might happen to have some things tha thet strictures mandate and some things they don’t. You can’t mindlessly copy it. You should not need to point to an Agile bible and say “Well you got to do a retrospective at this time and this place” or “A ticket ought to be evaluated to be this specific point value by this specific ruleset”. That’s rubbish. Any great engineer I have known would have flourished no matter the project development framework, no matter the stack, no matter the specific details of the project, because they know what needs to be done to acheive greatness, and managers that knew how to move out of the way or intercede against upper management in precisely the right manner to accelerate that team’s greatness, and as they build the features, they want some idea that what they built is actually useful to someone out there. When people are present that know how to get things done, you have a team. And that team will be a city on the hill, building a project that will have results. People will stop things when they need to be stopped. People will develop things when and as they need to be developed. The vision from leadership will have been there but people will say that “we did this ourselves”, and it will be true; everyone will have done their part in accord with what is expected.
The reason why you want be “agile” is the reason you will never be agile. Why do you want to be agile? Because I want to be effective! But why aren’t you effective now? If there is a degenerate political heirarchy that does not trust the people they hired to get work done, then adopting a framework is just performing the ritual that an effective organization with a good culture would just naturally have. And because the trust and confidence isn’t actually there to ineffably do what needs to be done, you’re only rearranging a bunch of imaginary nonsense to make yourself feel better.
The more power-hungry and micromanagy the world becomes, the more miserable it is to work in its confines, and less will be done as people think more about what tickets happened to land on their docket than the overall quality of the product, because you will be raising something between cattle and cogs, and not people. They will unquestioningly go through the motions and maybe at the end you’ll have exactly what you expected, but not what customers did. If you aren’t involving your engineers in what your customers are doing, why aren’t you? Any failure their customer goes through would be a blight upon their own work; they would be naturally shamed to correct it, because that stupid button means something to them just as much as it means something to the customer! It is their work, after all. Anything else, and you’re just falling behind.
You want to define the world by its prickles but it is just as much goo. The whole point of agile is that you are trying to define “goo” that people pretend is “prickles”, so you have to iterate again and again until you make a prickly goo that everyone can deal with. Not even the people that you consult really know what they really want until they see it! Yet you try to define the desires of children like they are absolutely and concretely definable out of the gate. As soon as you pretend you are in a world of prickles, you’re in trouble. Business processes are ultimately human relations and human politics, and those ultimately get messier than anyone wants to admit.
As always, write to me on the fediverse at @tmk@social.lugal.io if you enjoyed this article,or if you have feedback!