Said Kung the Philosopher: You think that I have learnt a great deal, and kept the whole of it in my memory?
Sse replied with respect: Of course, isn’t that so?
It is not so. I have reduced it all to one principle.
—
Recently, I was tasked with giving a fifteen minute ‘lightning talk’ about ‘agile software development’ to the company, particularly people who are new to agile.
Fifteen minutes? What could I (or anybody) possibly convey about agile in fifteen minutes? I didn’t know where to start. I thought about narrowing the focus. Maybe I could focus on the principles? There’s only twelve of them. One minute for each? That would require a fast pace. And even then, what would we gain from listening to twelve principles? I can’t even remember half of them! No use trying to ask people to memorise them.
It was important that we learned something meaningful and useful.
I then remembered the lesson from Kung Fu Tze (viz. Confucius). Maybe our objective could be to learn – and understand – one agile principle?
I planned a lesson accordingly.
I began by relating stories and insights from Kung, Reid Hoffman, Joel Spolsky and other greats. We then we sat down and tried to find a corresponding agile principle for each story. Not everyone had the same answer, which was great to see.
After that, we aimed to prioritize the most important of the principles we had just heard about and identified. Collaboratively, we then prioritized this one:
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
It also happens to be the first of the twelve agile principles.
We then, individually, thought about an action to integrate this principle into our daily work. This is important for ‘making it our own’ or taking ownership of something we have learned. We then shared our actions with others.
As long as we could understand this one important principle, then we had learned something valuable, and within fifteen minutes.
Unlike Kung we weren’t able to reduce ‘a great deal’ down to one principle, that was too ambitious. But we were able to do it bit by bit.
By way of metaphor or through the affordance of our exercise, we were able to achieve our goal in an agile manner – which in itself is a learning experience, albeit more subtle but perhaps equally important.
It was also a learning experience for me – some things didn’t quite go to plan, but I’ll work on that for next time.