Author: Admin

I’m no expert on Agile software development or agile working but being more agile in the ways we work is something I have aspired to for many years, so I have an opinion on where we might sometimes go wrong when implementing agile in an organisation.

The problems of the realities of agile not meeting the expectations are rooted, I think, in that many people consider agile an implementation methodology, all about producing work, doing stuff. And it isn’t about doing, it’s about learning. Agile is a learning methodology.

The first five words of the Agile Manifesto, “We are uncovering better ways…” seem very much about learning. It doesn’t say, “We have ‘uncovered’ better ways”, to state that the better ways to do software development have been found, so no need to keep looking. And it doesn’t say, “We have uncovered the ‘best’ way”, to state that the one true answer has been found. No, it says that being agile is about always looking for and uncovering better ways, always learning.

If we view agile in this way, as all about learning, then more things start to make sense. The regular cadence and short time boxes with fast feedback loops facilitate learning, not producing more work.

Recently, I’ve noticed a theme emerging across the ideas I have for side-projects. Broadly, one way or another they are all about ‘learning’. Not just learning in the individual educational sense, but also organisational learning, team learning sense.

When I talk of learning in this way it is within the context of knowledge work, which I think is more fundamentally different to material work than we’ve fully realised. Generally, we treat work as being about producing and moving about ‘things’, because that is what work has been about for a long time. So even if our work is knowledge work we still treat it in this old way.

Modern knowledge work doesn’t really work in this kind of inventory management way. It’s, very generally, about creating new knowledge or organising existing knowledge, and I don’t think we have the mental models to deal with work like this. When knowledge workers talk of their job as producing something, they usually refer to the report they’ve written or spreadsheet they’ve filled in, rather than talking about their work as creating new knowledge.

To create new knowledge you have to learn. You have to learn new information, learn ways to analyse and synthesise, learn ways to communicate. This is what knowledge workers really do. They learn.

So, the side-projects I work on are vaguely centred around some of these ideas about what learning means as a knowledge worker. Not just pedagogical learning of information and techniques to do a job, but learning as a job.