How the lack of critical thinking is killing Agile

 

There are two common flaws I see in the logic in the Agile community. These are conflation and polarization. By conflation I mean taking two concepts and speaking about them as if they were the same. For example, the concepts of:
1. The ease of using something
2. The ease of configuring something so it can be used
3. The design of what is being configured and used
are all different.

It is true that we'd like each of them to be "simple". But focusing on the simplicity of one often makes another more complex. For Agile approaches, being easy to use is much more important than the cost of configuration. And this is more important than the ease of its design. This conflation is one of the reasons Scrum is "simple to understand, but difficult to master." While simple in design, it is not readily configurable which makes it often not fit for purpose while also providing few insights on going beyond it.
 
Polarization (going to extremes) is also common. We see this in complexity thinking. It is true that organizations doing knowledge work are complex adaptive systems. We cannot take a mechanistic or reductionist view of things and be totally effective. But even complex systems have causes and effects that, when ignored, create havoc. In knowledge work this is often seen as people violating basic laws of flow and lean. That is having large batches of work, slow feedback, handoffs, etc. While a fully linear approach doesn't work, abandoning it completely can be even more problematic.
 
Another example of polarization is presenting the extremes of a position while ignoring a third, integrated alternative. For example, one is not limited to viewing a system as a whole without any decomposition or doing reductionist thinking. Using Christopher Alexander's approach he calls "complexification" provides a way to decompose systems without losing the relationships between the components.

The lack of critical thinking when people fall prey to conflation and polarization has many follow preset frameworks that are based on these mindsets. Disciplined Agile avoids both weaknesses by avoiding dogma and being pragmatic. While we have theory, we look to see what works and adjust accordingly.