Are you an agile robot?

I had this sort of revelation when I read Neil Strauss's ”The Game” last week. The book is about the community that exist on the net that relates to pick-up artists and how to seduce women. The particular thing that caught in my mind was a short post he had made called ”Are you social robots?” on a seduction forum  (step 8: chapter 10 in the book). It describes how some people becomes social robots – defined as someone who knows all the theory and has the rotines and methods trained to perfection, but uses all their time solely on this – the routines and methods – they have no other interests and therefore often fail when they run out of material (hence social robots – if they have no program for it they do not know how to react).

This made me think because both from personal experience, from talking to people at conferences and reading about how to introduce agile methods in a company and how it oftens fails, I think that it is because systems thinking leads people to become agile robots instead og agile humans. People get caught up in this athing and says: ”OK - how do you do it? Where is the checklist?”, and then get caught up in the thousands of different agile methods out there and tries to implement them all or try to find the best practices out there and then introduce them.

This in itself is not bad – but it can become bad if you concentrate to much on the methods and routines and forget the first statement in the agile manifesto: ”Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. And there you have to remember that any method or tools – even if it is an agile method or tool – is just that – a tool – something that you can use to faciliate interaction, but holds no value in itself – you need to add something yourself be it creativity, mastery of analysis and design or just plain old common sense to create value. If you can only follow the agile methods, run the routines, then you are an agile robot. And you are likely to fail if your project hit something unexpected that there are no routines for.

I have tried below to ask a couple of questions that you should ask yourself to find out if you are an agile robot. If you answer yes to all or most of these questions, you are most likely an agile robot. This is by no measure a complete list so feel free to add more questions in the comments, if you have observed other signs of people becoming agile robots. I will myself try to revise and update the list in the coming months.

1. Have you stopped reading books and articles that are not about agile methods?
2. Is your reaction to something unexpected to search the net for a new method that handles it?
3. Are you unable to talk about a story without first asking how many story points it is?
4. Is your backlog your bible where everything holds true now and forever?
5. Do you always use an estimation technique (e.g. planningpoker) to get estimates?
6. Is producing and updating your burndown chart the most important thing?

Don't become an agile robots - remember that there is more to mastering development and delivering value to customers than mastering agile methods and techniques.

By the way – Neils book is in itself a good book and well worth a read. Allthough it describes the rise and fall of a particular subculure, the questions it raises can be used on other subcultures and my claim is that the agile community is sort of a subculcure. And much of todays society is riddled with different subcultures of which most of us are members og at least 1 or 2 if not more.