Getting to the Heart of Agile with Alistair Cockburn, Co-Author of the Agile Manifesto
Getting to the Heart of Agile with Alistair Cockburn, Co-Author of the Agile Manifesto
Last week, as part of the BeNext Agile Culture for HR Teams program, we were lucky enough to be joined by one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, Alistair Cockburn. In addition to being one of the initiators of the Agile Movement, Alistair is an IT expert, a former software developer at IBM and a co-founder of the International Consortium for Agile in 2009.
Alistair’s Power Hour presentation touched on how agile methodologies have evolved over the years, homing in on the elements at the heart of Agile: Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve.
“These four words are everything you need to know,” Alistair states. “These are not put as values, or nice things to do, these are put as commands. These are imperatives.”
Nowadays, Alistair shares, he doesn’t use the Agile Manifesto to describe Agile. Instead, he prefers to use the dictionary definition: the ability to move & change direction quickly and with ease.
But why is this distinction important, particularly these days?
Agility in a VUCA World
“Because the world is so uncertain, everybody needs this ability to move and change direction quickly and with ease. That means these ideas from the Agile mindset need to be understood by everybody,” Alistair explains. However, because this mindset is so essential and needs to be ubiquitous, we need more accessible and easily-understood words than are available in Scrum, SAFe and other Agile frameworks, practices and methodologies. Really, Alistair explains, we are looking for something that is simpler, more general and therefore more powerful.
What is Agile?
As Alistair pointed out, just because Agile is about speed doesn’t mean twice the work in half the time. “People are already working as fast as they can,” Alistair says. “They cannot do twice the work in half the time. That’s a false message to the executives that think they’re going to get twice the work in half the time.” Rather, Agile means “more value from the same amount of work. That’s plenty good enough. That’s magical enough.”
How can HR help?
“When we talk about Agile in an organisation, HR has a critical role to play in helping to change the culture, increase trust and change the rewards and evaluations structures from the lowest employee up to the highest executive,” Alistair explains.
When looking at the Heart of Agile’s four terms from an HR perspective, ‘Collaborate’ is where Alistair says there is the most potential for impact. “HR can help with the quality of collaboration inside the company. I’m not talking about HR departments using Scrum for HR projects, because that’s ordinary project management. I’m talking about HR helping the organization as a whole to learn to collaborate better.”
Agile as a Compass
Next, Alistair quoted his collaborator, Sole Pinter. “The Heart of Agile is a compass, to decide in which direction to advance the conversations.” What is meant by this striking metaphor is that when you use a compass, you think of your destination and go in that direction for a while, whether that be towards Improvement, Collaboration, Reflection or Delivery. “We’re now talking about using these concepts of Agile outside of Project Development. These have to be used everywhere,” Alistair says. “…whatever we deliver into the world is a result of a number of people making decisions.”
The Organization as a Brain
“If the organization is a brain, people within that organization are the neurons. We have people building decisions on top of decisions, and people make errors in decisions every 5–10 decisions,” Alistair explains. “Designing is like manufacturing, where ‘decisions’ are the inventory. It looks like building car parts, but instead of car parts, we’re talking about decisions.” In this sense — and what we can learn from manufacturing — that we want small packets going down the line, moving small quantities of decisions to balance the flow. “From moving big initiatives, big designs and big sections of decisions into small decisions so it’s a continuous flow, this is how we get more value from the same amount of work.”
Collaboration at the Smallest Level
What can people do to increase the inclination to collaborate on a minute-by-minute basis? According to Alistair, there are five things anyone can do to boost collaboration. He calls these Collaboration Cards:
- Lift Others — help other people feel stronger and feel better.
- Get Results — getting results makes others more inclined to collaborate
- Increase Safety — you add humor, make people feel comfortable
- Add Energy — change your posture, play games, shift the conversation
- Lift Yourself — find your own center and feel comfortable in yourself
The Delta-delta Technique
In fact, as Alistair points out, making small improvements is the magic technique that can be applied to anything, anywhere. Here are the steps:
- What are your best hopes?
- Where are you now on a scale of 1–10?
- What’s already working? What are your ‘assets’?
- How can you get a tiny bit further? Don’t ask, ‘how do we get from 4–8?’ Instead, ask ‘how do we get from 4 to 4 and a half?’
“This idea of making microchanges is core to getting big successes because people say ‘I can do that,’” Alistair says.
In closing, Alistair encourages us to ‘prioritize attitudes over structure,’ as ‘success comes from improved attitudes more than new structures,’ but points out that ‘the difficulty is that executives can buy new structures, but they can’t buy improved attitudes.’
Offering an insightful and thorough dive into the current and future landscape of Agile, Alistair’s Power Hour presentation left BeNext learners with much to consider as they enter the second half of the year, one that will no doubt bring about an even greater need to collaborate more effectively and navigate uncertainty one small step at a time.
