The Agile values 20 years later
By: Romeu Moura
Tags: Manifesto, Agility, Agile Manifesto, Agile Methodology, Agile

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

The manifesto was done by software people, and every piece of software is a tool!

Also Agilists keep selling you processes!

because tools and processes are AWESOME, until they are not.

We are but the ape that discovered tools first.

Every object around you? Clothes? Chair? Table? Device you are using to read this? Roof over your head? Language I am using to write this? Electricity?

All tools.

We are the ape of instrumentalisation. It is our very identity.

We are also an ape ridiculously bad doing many small boring and repetitive steps many times without adding mistakes.

Also bad at accepting this deep down.

So there is always an ape within us telling us “you got this, small boring step is easy”.

This is why we need processes!

This is why we have flight checklists because it saves lots of lives:

This is why so much care and effort went into creating surgery checklists because, again, it saves lots of lives:

A process will not make you good at any given task, no checklist will make you a good pilot or a good surgeon.

What they will do is helping you put a lot of little repetitive boring stuff out of your ape brain and into the environment, reducing mistakes:

So process are AWESOME!

IF we see what we are getting out of following the process

IF we own the process and the evolution of the process

IF we care

And people WILL complain about having a process!

In part because deep down our ape is telling us we do not need one.

In part because processes are often forced down our throats and we do not see what we get out of following the process beyond “my boss/compliance told me I ought”.

But also in part because “What is done for us without us is done against us” a process over my work that is decided without my input is hostile and feels infantilising.

Surgeons complained about surgery checklists because: it felt infantilising.

Process and tools are awesome UP AND UNTIL they are detrimental to people and interactions.

Until your colleague is asking you to get a paper receipt and a ticket number before they will talk to you at all.

Up and until your colleague is telling you that they will not help you until the Jira ticket has the information in the format that was convened.

Up and until you feel you need to create/join an underworld within your company just to get your job done at all.

Up and until the system of oppression starts using the process and the tool to bludgeon people.

Come and see the violence inherent in the system!

So we have all seen it right? the point where the process and the tool helps, and the point in which it becomes toxic?

And maybe you have seen that in most big companies we enter deeply into the toxic territory? Why does that happen? And what to do?

For the “why that happens” my answer is :

Every big corporation fetishises control even if nobody within the corporation does

I have a talk about how does that happen recent versions are in french but here is an old version:

For the “What to do?” erm this will come up a lot but it does involve being a pain in the ass:

See, the manifesto invitation is not one of an easy solution in as much that it is a call to arms.

It is inviting the workers of the world to rebel against bureaucracy really.

In a world inviting you to treat anything as a reason to control your peers, you rebel by “Connect before Correct”.

You take the time to interact with people and understand what they need and be understood in your needs.

You ask the eternal spice girls question: Tell me what you want, what you really really want?

This is only possible with safety so you start out by conspiring for safety with your peers, by caring.

And, together, you understand what do you get if anything out of your process and tool, and how could you get something out of it.

Of course taking the time to figure that out is time you are not on the short term producing, is time you are investing in you and your peers, in your health, in understanding the process and the company.

and your enemy becomes then the short sighted lens of productivism:

And that is why you will be a pain when you push towards connection, the system gets you under a state where you are always behind, always late, always not having the time to improve things, always measured by your production on the short term.

taking time to connect feels like wasting time then and it is hence suffered an the first step is to connect to that suffering.