How Disciplined Agile Avoids the Blind Men and the Elephant of Agile

 

The parable of the blind men and the elephant describes how 5  blind men come across an elephant. Touching the tail, one says “it’s a rope.” Another, touching the leg says “it’s a pillar.” A third, touching the trunk, says “it’s a snake.” The fourth, touching the body says “it’s a wall.” And the fifth, touching the ears, says “it’s a fan.” They argue and state how the others are liars and don’t know the truth.

The point is that we are all blind in that we only see part of the truth and get into trouble when we think we see “the truth.”

Sound familiar? Agile is about “iterations”, about “cross-functional teams”, about “starting where you are”, about “flow”, about “lean”, about “…”. They are missing the other side of the story – if all of the blind Agilists understood they are only looking at one aspect of Agile and put what they knew together, they’d “see” the elephant (Agile).

Disciplined Agile avoids the issue of the blind Agilists by having been and expanded by almost a dozen people, at least 7 of which are authors. It’s based on pragmatism and agnosticism (no dogma). It integrates the best of flow, Lean, Theory of Constraints, Scrum, XP, organizational development, leader-leader and more. They key is everyone on the team contributes - we don't appeal to authority. This broad experience is a great battle against any one person's cognitive bias adversely affecting DA as a whole.

This enables DA to be an integration of many paradigms. While at first glance this may appear to make it more complicated, that's like saying an AM/FM radio is more complicated to use. While theoretically, maybe that one extra button is more complicated. But it enables the radio to be used in a better way.

Disciplined Agile consultants understand the issues of Agile deeper than those who ascribe to only one Agile approach. They can provide you with “simpler” in the form of fit for purpose. Arguing for the “one true way” is the anti-thesis of Agile and usually causes challenges down the road. You can avoid these by understanding that Agile is multi-dimensional and that looking at it from one perspective is little different than calling an elephant a wall.