SILICONGLENCraig Cockburn

Insights

Unbiased Agile Principles

Twelve framework-neutral principles for putting culture, people, flow, quality and value at the centre of agile adoption.

First published on Medium on 23 May 2022 as two linked pieces, “Unbiased Agile” and “Unbiased Agile Principles”.

I see from agile surveys, conversations with other coaches, and talks I go to that agile adoption keeps running into the same obstacles. Issues of culture and leadership remain problems years after they were first documented.

Part of the pattern is that organisations default to well-marketed, popular frameworks and tools without first stopping to think about what they actually want from agile, which frameworks are genuinely suitable, or what tooling can support that. Big consultancies don’t help, favouring a framework-led approach from a narrow choice of options rather than a culture-led approach with people at the centre. People and collaboration should come before frameworks and processes.

Frameworks also tend to assume you’ve already validated which one to use and are up and running with it; they describe the static state once training is complete. The earlier stages, the transformational work around organisational complexity, assessing real needs, and deciding what framework (if any) is best, are often skipped entirely.

To counter this premature anchoring towards well-marketed frameworks, I’ve set out twelve principles below, framework-neutral and focused on people, process and data. Ivar Jacobson describes practices as the “first-class citizens” of software development, with method or process simply a composition of practices. It’s practices in line with principles that embed a genuine attitude shift, rather than just telling people to “be agile”.

Summary

Focus on Culture, Engagement, Flow, Quality and Value through Collaborating, Delivering, Reflecting and Improving. Optimise feedback. Consider alternatives. Put people first through organisational health.

  1. Start with who, then why. Who are your customers? Are your leaders effective? Are they leaders? Why does your organisation exist? Is this the right problem to solve? Purpose and mission shouldn’t stifle variety and innovation.
  2. Leaders go first. Effective leadership is essential to a successful transformation, not just something that happens at team level. Compassionate, human, transparent, accountable, trustworthy leaders who articulate common purpose and values. Lead the culture change by example; be the change you wish to see.
  3. Honesty and clarity. Uncover the organisational lies you tell yourselves so you can collaborate honestly, challenge assumptions, and build psychological safety. Use minimal jargon; agree a common vocabulary where you need one. Keep messages clear and simple.
  4. Stop self-destruction. Find the self-destructive activities and contain them quickly; left unattended, they cause more damage. Remove duplication. Bring people with authority together to enable rapid decisions.
  5. Map constraints. Understand the constraints of the system. Create constraints where they establish useful order. Understand which constraints can be modified for favourable outcomes, and use changing them as a lever for change.
  6. Outcome led. Think long-term: future customer needs, and the organisation you’ll need to meet them. Don’t over-focus on yesterday’s problems. Balance optionality with optimisation; this is a journey, not a destination, and your goal sets the direction.
  7. Support everyone. Give people the skills, training, structures and tools to do their jobs the way that works for them. Invite rather than inflict. Help remove impediments. Slow down to speed up. Respect how people prefer to work, and give them clarity of role and space to think.
  8. Bias towards open data. Flatten the distribution of information so everyone sees the same data at the same time. Widen information silos first, then knowledge silos. Changing processes and interactions matters as much as changing people, since that’s how communities form.
  9. Scale problem solving. Detecting antipatterns and problems should be distributed, not centralised. Detect, prioritise and resolve problems early, and use that capability fully.
  10. Optimise flow. Organisational complexity, technical debt and legacy process slow everything down. Understand the feedback loops that matter and reduce feedback time by eliminating waste. Shipping product isn’t enough on its own; the culture and system of work across the whole organisation needs reflection too.
  11. Use valuable metrics, not vanity stats. Default to empirical, validated data: customer and employee feedback; flow metrics (item age, flow velocity, cycle time, flow load); organisational complexity, lead time and flow distribution.
  12. Whole-organisation thinking. Employ critical thinking and psychological safety to make good decisions, faster, at every level. Good ideas can come from anywhere.

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