I discovered Agile three years ago, right when I launched my entrepreneurial life. Then, just to satisfy my curiosity after so many corporate years, I explored the tech and app development ecosystem. I started to practice tools and methodologies such as Scrum and Canvas. I found them so logical, simple and practical, it was love at first sight. Since then, Agile and its toolkit, applied in one thousand different scenarios, are always present in my projects: from Scrum to help a team of Beauty Advisors develop their own appraisal tool, to Canvas to help an Operations Team to run their projects more efficiently.
Some months ago, a very dear friend of mine who leads the Learning area of one of today’s sexiest companies, showed me a Digitalisation project (a current classic in the corporate world) proposed by a very prestigious organisation. The project, of course, included an episode about Agile. My friend, who knows I am a big fan of the Agile environment, asked for my opinion about the project. Actually, it was a real soup of words where all the Agile concepts appeared tangled with other trending topic words which didn’t have anything to do with it. The facilitators, beyond their various certificates (which is great), didn’t have any field experience and no success case was mentioned in their bios (which would be something one would expect in a project with such a budget). After reading the PowerPoint document, I felt as if attending this introduction session to Agile was more similar to spending a morning at NASA analysing rocket paths with its engineers. If Agile is, precisely, Agile, what’s the point in introducing a model, which is precisely meant to bring clarity, with absolutely no clarity? Why does something which is so empirical have to be introduced only from a theoretical perspective? How then would the attendees praise the magic of a concept whose strongest power is its simplicity to generate a product (tangible or intangible)?
Simple, logical methodologies and tools bring clarity. And clarity is essential for organisations to navigate our complex, quick and infoxicated world. However, we cheat ourselves by creating scenarios contrary to clarity: hyper-hierarchical organisations, complicated methodologies or deliberately complicated tools which do not help anyone.
Please, let’s do ourselves a favour: let’s keep simple, simple. Let Agile be Agile.
