Update (3/29/14): I published a post in October 2013 that lays out much more detailed arguments on this topic. Read “Math, Trolls, Haters, and Internet Discussions”.

The year was 2001. A group of senior programmers gathered at a ski resort in Snowbird, Utah. The main names of programming in the United States were there. Kent Beck, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler, Jim Highsmith, Ron Jeffries, Brian Marick, Bob Martin, Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland, Andy Hunt, Dave Thomas, Mike Beedle, Arie van Bennekum, James Grenning, Jon Kern, Steve Mellor. It’s a “who’s who” list of programming.

From that historic meeting a manifesto of 4 values and 12 principles emerged. It became known as the “Agile Manifesto.”

Thirteen years later, Dave Thomas, the “Pragmatic Programmer” — who was one of the most directly involved in the actual writing of the manifesto text — published a frustrated article called “Agile is Dead, Long Live Agility”.

The intention of the original agilists was to cause a break in the outdated way of thinking about and executing software engineering — the same obsolete kind still taught today in most of the country’s universities. This caused a huge stir in the industry. Derivations, trainings, tools, certifications, conferences, consultancies were created. A huge portfolio of options of any size at any price. And in the middle of this whole circus, what it really means to be an agilist was forgotten.

And as Dave Thomas summed it up well in his vent, you don’t “do” Agile or “buy” Agile. Agility is a quality, an adjective. To be agile we have to go back to the principles, quoting:

• Find out where you are.
• Take a small step toward your goal.
• Adjust your understanding based on what you learned.
• Repeat

How to do this:

“When faced with two or more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, choose the path that makes future changes easier.”

And that’s all — 4 lines and 1 practice.

Thirteen years after something simple was first published, it seems the world has become extremely complicated. Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, Lean Programming, Lean Six Sigma, Agile PMI. And in a moment where chaos reigns, whoever “seems” able to explain the chaos becomes a guru. And so associations, certifications, trainings, and conferences emerge. That’s how it works for diets, how it works for therapies, how it worked for software engineering. And that’s what Dave Thomas laments. But it’s an inevitable result. People are easy to fool — they always look for someone or something to follow and rarely question — they’ve been dogmatized never to question authority and to root for soccer teams without any criteria.

In 2010 I was at a conference in Baltimore, where I had the chance to talk to Bob Martin, who organized the Snowbird meeting. It was in his Object Mentor office that Ken Schwaber’s first Scrum certification training took place. I was already immune to the “Agile Hype.” But I wanted to tell Bob Martin what I thought of it. For those who don’t know, the “official” Scrum Master training is a 2-day course, and at the end you’re certified. You don’t even need to show up — just pay for the course. I told him, cynically, that Ken’s idea probably backfired. “Ken probably thought ‘man, how do I convince these large corporations to adopt agile practices?’ and then he thought ‘of course, large companies love certifications,’ and then he created a Trojan Horse, a joke 2-day course where serious people would know you can’t learn anything serious in 2 days, but that way he could insert the idea into the companies. But everyone took it seriously, and that’s when the shot backfired.” Skip straight to minute 6:24 of the video below if you want to hear that story.

Learning to Learn

Now let’s step out of software a bit and enter the world of “startups.” That world has its own “Agile” in what’s called “Lean Startup.” Eric Ries made the term famous in 2009, in his book of the same name, and it’s a direct derivation of Toyota’s Lean principles. It’s not a new idea — just new packaging. This Lean originates from the same ideas of W. Edwards Deming about PDCA — “Plan, Do, Check, Act”. You’ll notice the resemblance to Dave Thomas’s 4 principles I cited above.

Pompous names, celebrities, gurus, expensive tools, prominent titles don’t matter. The basic principles of Agile and Lean are the same: deliver value as fast as possible with the least waste possible, learning and using that learning in the process, planning and replanning to reach goals that become clearer during the process. That’s it.

The biggest problem is when an amateur programmer thinks: “what’s the next step?” And the answer is: “the goal is to set up a Kanban.” Or when an amateur entrepreneur thinks: “what’s the next step?” And the answer is: “the goal is to build a Business Canvas.”

No, those aren’t goals, they’re means. And if those means don’t collaborate to reach the ends — delivering value to the customer, achieving profit in your business — then they’re disposable. Your goal is not to create an MVP/prototype, create a Lean UX, create a Business Canvas. Your goal is to have profit. What are the means to obtain profit?

If you want to learn anything, the steps to start are simple:

• Don’t create idols, never “idolize” anyone, at least not seriously.
• Ignore everything you see or hear in groups. Take notes, but don’t take everything seriously.
• Ignore advice and mentoring. It’s like a bank manager advising on investment shares — if they were any good they’d be rich. But they aren’t. They’re just salespeople by another name.
• Everything, absolutely everything, starts with a few principles. You’ll never be a heart surgeon wanting to learn first how to cut the aorta without ever having learned to wash your hands first. Look for the principles. Ignore the pompous titles.
• Assume you know little, always. You know nothing. Approach anything with the eyes of an ignorant person. If you think you already know something, you’ll learn nothing more. But you don’t have to be a dumb ignoramus — be a smart ignoramus.

Learn to question. The monumental general world of the Sciences, which goes from the absolutely small quantum world to the infinite and immense cosmological world, only exists if you accept its one principle: the Scientific Method. It’s basically PDCA: define the problem, make hypotheses, do controlled experiments, discard hypotheses proven wrong, repeat. Or to be more accurate: Deming’s PDCA is directly inspired by the Scientific Method. Here is the principle of everything — from Agile to Lean to PDCA — we come back to Karl Popper and his philosophy of “Critical Rationalism”, which teaches us that everything should be open to being rationally criticized.

That’s exactly why Lean, as an umbrella for selling products and services you don’t need, is dead. Long live the principle: achieving value while avoiding waste through continuous learning — in other words, Efficiency. There are no magic formulas. If magic diets worked, there would be no obesity in the world.

PS: I know, there’s #tongueincheek in the title and in the article, but the intention — as usual — is actually to provoke ;-)