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Courage: The Root of All Agile
Doug is the author of the landmark book, Extreme Project Management®: Using Leadership, Principles and Tools to Deliver Value in the Face of Volatility. He works with clients who undertake projects in very demanding environments: those settings that feature high speed, high change, high unpredictability and high stress. Doug has lived in the trenches—from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to Beijing, China—with over 275 project teams with budgets that ranged from $25,000 to over $25 million. He is one of the founders of the Agile Leadership Network, an organization dedicated to connecting, developing and supporting great project leaders. He is known for his hard-hitting and humorous keynote speeches that address vital issues facing today’s project-based organizations. You can visit Doug at www.dougdecarlo.com.
Why is it that a team can be skilled in fundamental agile practices, have access to agile tools and still not be able to achieve the benefits of agile, namely faster delivery, higher quality, lower cost and greater business value?
In my experience, the answer nearly always boils down to a failure to exercise Courage. Wikipedia defines courage as the ability to confront fear, pain, danger, uncertainty or intimidation. You might say, courage means to “do it scared”.
Courage is the common denominator that belies all brands of agile, be it SCRUM, FDD, Crystal, extreme programming and others. Moreover, if you take a look at the Agile Manifesto as espoused by the Agile Alliance and the Declaration of Interdependence developed by the founders of the Agile Project Leadership Network, you’ll see that courage is the silent servant of most of the esteemed practices described therein.
Got Courage at the Organizational Level?
The overarching reason that agile requires courage is that it usually involves bucking the project management status quo, which is typically deeply rooted in a Newtonian mindset rather than what I like to refer to as a Quantum mindset.
Notice in Table 1 that the two mindsets are mirror opposites:
Table 1: Newtonian and Quantum Mindsets
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Newtonian Mindset
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"Impartial observers from other planets would consider ours an utterly bizarre enclave if it were populated by birds, defined as flying animals, that nevertheless rarely or never actually flew. They would also be perplexed if they encountered in our seas, lakes, rivers and ponds, creatures defined as swimmers that never did any swimming. But they would be even more surprised to encounter a species defined as a thinking animal if, in fact, the creature very rarely indulged in actual thinking." - Steve Allen |