Agile Development Blog

This is #3 in a Series on the Culture of Innovation with guest blogger Lee Devin.

Plan to do what you want. Prepare to do what you must.

Don’t get us wrong, we value planning: it’s important and highly creative work. But in the Culture of Innovation preparation means much more.  In a world that defines success as a result and failure as a step along the way , we plan regularly as we adjust to results, outside stimulus, and feedback.  Preparation marches us up the stairs faster and ensures that we’ll arrive someplace new and valuable.

Planning is an exercise for imagination and not spreadsheets.

In planning we figure out what we need to accomplish this task.  It‘s a process of creative thinking, dialogue, narrowing to convergence, healthy skepticism, and risk mitigation.  In planning we need to treat difficulties as a challenge; to resolve a creative tension between reality and what we want.  Teams brush away perceived limits as they press toward understanding by asking WHY?  Thinking in the 5 Why’s of Fishbone diagrams, these teams do not simply work with WHAT and HOW.  Once done and aligned, the plan becomes a communication of intent and result and NOT a goal or commitment.   Dependable results come from a focus on the limits to throughput, sources of failure, and lack of preparation.

In our experience with Agile teams, we see advanced Scrum teams begin to let go of some planning practices as their expertise grows. The benefits of pull-based planning and smooth flow delivery create new space for them in the market.  As a result of their growing confidence, they increase their ownership of their process, a key step on the way to a culture of innovation.   That culture creates, not just one off innovations, but an environment ready to take advantage of opportunities and happy accidents.   A big part of creating that environment comes from a focus on preparation.

Let’s consider preparation. Teams and managers must learn and practice a set of skills that taken together can help them create a culture of innovation. These skills often seem off the subject, not to the point, and therefore difficult for teams and managers to make time for. We think of preparation in three main categories: for collaboration and leadership; for comfort in ambiguity; and for daily productivity. In this brief introduction we won’t suggest a detailed program. Instead, we’ll outline an abstract of the culture, seen through the lens of preparation.

Collaboration and leadership

You can prepare for collaboration (innovative team work) and leadership (team direction and support) by learning and practicing release and concentration. Teams and their leaders need release from tension, as a way to increase available energy and flexibility; and release from inhibition and vanity for freedom, to include the work of others in their own and to regard the success of the team as their own success.

Take a look at athletes for good examples of release from tension; at actors in a play or movie for good examples of release from inhibition.

Watch Sharapova’s face as she looks up at the ball she’s about to whack; see the pitcher take a big breath and whoosh it out before he throws the ball. Look at a still photo of what the pitcher does to his arm in the delivery: it’s not hard to imagine what would happen to those muscles if they weren’t completely released, free of any kind of tension. Look at Paul Newman’s famous eyes blaze with rage (as Harry Manning, dumped in the river: Where the Money Is) or fear (Buffalo Bill astride a fractious horse: Buffalo Bill and the Indians).

We’ll use a story to illustrate what we mean by concentration. Once upon a time two students of Zen walked along the lake shore. They spoke as follows:

First Student: “I have the world’s most amazing Master.”
Second Student: “Have you?”

First Student: “He performs miraculous deeds. The other day he walked right out on this lake and spoke to us, standing on the surface of the water. Then he walked back, and his shoes weren’t even damp.”
Second Student: “That’s certainly amazing. I congratulate you. My master, however, can do something much more important and amazing.”

First Student: “No way.”
Second Student: “Yes way. My master can do one thing at a time.”

Who among us can do one thing at a time?

As you plan your week next Monday, think about these questions.

• What is the #1 Thing you have to get done right this week? Be clear about that to yourself and with your team and put your best time and focus on this one item.
• What preparation or practice can you do to release tensions with regards to this item?
• Who can you collaborate with to make this an outstanding result?
• What can you do to celebrate the results of this effort?

What might you do to prepare to execute these choices? What kinds of practice might you build into your daily, weekly, monthly, routine?

Comfort in ambiguity

Accident, serendipity, new things. Innovation confronts the team with all of these sources of ambiguity. What’s gonna happen? What should I do? What on earth is this thing? How do we know when it’s complete?

How does preparation contribute to comfort in ambiguity? It gives us grounds for confidence in our ability to manage the new, the surprising, the unpredicted. We don’t need to dread the uncertainty of innovation because we know that we can make good use of whatever comes up.

Teams and managers who do innovation find ways to live with uncertainty about the outcomes of their work. They know that outcomes will be unexpected and surprising. If they could anticipate them, how new could they be? Preparation will involve getting free of the reflexive invocation of the past: “That isn’t how we do things here”; and embracing the uncertain future: “Let’s see what happens when we do this.”

Preparation will sometimes replace planning.

Of course we plan, so that we can do what we need to do. We plan to have the materials we need, space to work in, the right people on the team, to make an efficient schedule. Planning creates sequential progress toward a known goal. Preparation, on the other hand, aims at collaborative iteration toward an emergent outcome. No one can predict the results of a true collaboration. We prepare to cope with whatever happens. In a culture of innovation, whatever happens is likely to be new. It will elude any kind of sequential progress toward a known goal. When an outcome doesn’t seem to have any immediate value, we recognize that nothing is lost: we set it aside (Might come in handy some day.) and press on.

The notion of emergent design conditions any serious innovation.  At Rally Software, we do a number of things in the context of Agile software development to keep from planning too much and to hold space for reaction to ambiguity.  First, we acknowledge multiple levels of planning with less precision as the time frame goes out.  Second, we insert free time into our schedule in the form of slack and programmed innovation time.  Third, we work “sets” of designs through a narrowing process to keep from choosing the design before we learn.  Finally, we do not plan until after we have closed the last cycle: We check the results of that last cycle and consciously review our goals.  We “Plan to get lucky” and provide room for that to affect our next cycle.

We took a young engineer to visit an acting class at People’s Light, the theatre we know best. A bunch of teenagers were practicing improvisation. One sat on a bench in the park. Another passed by, stopped to talk. A story began to develop. Suddenly from the class a third jumped up and walked into the park, joining the two. This newcomer brought an entirely new slant to the story. After a moment the first actor remembered an appointment and left the other two. Someone else from the class joined in. And so on. The story grew, got elaborate, got simple, got turned inside out: the kids never repeated themselves, never stopped. No one ever refused the new material offered by an other. The engineer turned to us and whispered: “This is exactly what my guys need to learn how to do.”

This kind of practice fairly closely resembles the desired skills. Engineers like to look for an answer in the back of the book; they need practice in making up answers out of the available material. The kind of preparation we’ll call exercise strays from the skills it prepares for; it’s off subject, away from the actual work. Athletes exemplify this kind of preparation. “The champ,” goes the saying, “is always in the gym.” Larry Byrd was famous for staying in the gym after practice. Why? To shoot 100 free throws. To build a reflexive confidence that supports the hectic innovations of the game. What’s more, the champ has decided, has made the choice, to like being in the gym; how could he do the work otherwise?

As you plan your week next Monday, think about these ways of practicing or preparing for emergent innovations:

• Schedule some creative time into your schedule to spend in a creative place and time.
• Step back from your #1 item for the week and ask yourself a question about its value: What other things could I do to deliver even more of this value?
• Find one example of yourself closing down to new solutions based on the concept that “This is the way we always do it.” Can you release that constraint?
• Ask yourself: What is the most important thing I have to do this month or quarter?  Not urgent. Important. Do I have enough time, support, and space to do this right?  Try removing less important or merely urgent things from your calendar to make room for this.

Daily productivity

In a culture of innovation, everyone chooses a professional obligation to work happily, enthusiastically and at maximum energy.

Artists and athletes again serve as models. Neither group can do what they do unless they’re totally fired up. High morale and physical readiness are basic conditions of their work and they must learn how to create and maintain them, no matter what. An actor arrives at the theatre well before the half hour call (On time is already late.), and begins the day’s work with an extensive warm up. Vocal exercises, calisthenics, stretches, lines; actors have routines they follow religiously.

An actor we know told us this story. He used the 30 minute drive to the theatre as his time for vocal warm up. One night, distracted by some domestic emergency, he only got through part of his routine by the time he arrived at the theatre. In rehearsal he had discovered a way of saying one of the lines in the 2^nd act that every one liked a lot: his voice got deep and sexy, very nice moment. On this night the performance went very well, in spite of the truncated warm up. Until that deep sexy part. He said that line exactly as he had done dozens of times before. But instead of deep sexiness, what came out of his mouth was tired little squeakiness. The audience were too embarrassed even to laugh. You can bet that actor never missed another warm up.

In software development, this is akin to doing some manual work outside the scope of your automated build, deploy, test cycle.  It can seem quicker to do a simple, one-off integration or system test outside that environment, but unintended consequences always catch-up .  In our experience, cutting the preparation corners usually costs 10X more in the whole lifecycle than it saves in the short-term. Beyond the interrupts of customer-impacting defects, the team loses a bit of the pride and belief necessary for the Culture of Innovation

Team work demands a no less total performance than acting or tennis playing. It needs, but rarely gets, the preparation of a warm-up. A basketball team combines individual warm ups (stretches, shooting around) with group work (lay up and passing drills). Why should knowledge work be any different? Imagine the energy available if your morning stand up included a vigorous warm up led by a different person each day. Jump back!

As teams and organizations reach an Innovate level of Agile adoption or Ri , they take ownership of their process and environment.  Their improved throughput, collaboration, and preparation have brought them to a place where many of the vanilla iteration, planning, and estimating practices of Scrum and XP stop serving them.  These structures helped the incremental transition down a path of increasing agility, but in a Culture of Innovation, where smooth, continuous flow of one thing at a time is the goal, the focus moves from planning to preparation.

Next up in our series – Options, Fall-back and Design Sets

About the Authors: Ryan Martens is a goat cheese maker,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development.

Lee Devin is a dramaturg at the People’s Light and Theatre, a Senior Research Scholar at Swarthmore College and a senior consultant with the Cutter Consortium. These activities often interfere with his fishing, and cause him to neglect his grandchildren.

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