Heather McLean comments on her blog in response to James Shore's work on "The Decline and Fall of Agile". What a fascinating subject - I couldn't resist responding by pointing out that the Human is agile and in fact life is agile. This is what I said...

I read the original a few weeks ago and was tempted to respond following an experience I had this year on a major integration project. Reading your article has prompted me again.

Driving is the perfect analogy not just because of the adaptation aspect. I think it’s also that before you learn, it seems so un-natural – but we adapt to this new domain very quickly – we go from walking and occasionally running relying on our legs and arms for balance to sitting in a machine with many instruments and controls and travelling as much as 10 times faster. Even a child of 3 is capable of this when they sit on a bike for the first time. We are built to be agile.

So why are most organisations unable to behave in this way? The major difference is that when we drive we’re on our own, but at work we are a team. When we’re driving and we have a nervous passenger on board our ability to be agile is interrupted and probably reduced by their begging you to “slow down” and “brake now” or quizzing whether you are in the right gear for the situation. This is what happens in a team – another aspect of our nature takes over – competition and innate mistrust.

So, agile is all about relationships – we all have it in us to be agile we just need to trust each other – look each other in the eye and say “lets do it”. In human nature the ability to create successful relationships around us is related to our maturity. Generally senior citizens are better at relationships than teenagers – however in the work place there are people at all levels at various degrees of maturity in relation to the job. But there is another problem humans are stubborn, and this is why they find it hard to mature – it requires effort to admit that you could make more balanced decisions, listen more, counsel more and basically “grow up”. Finally the aspect of human nature that prevents us from dealing with this is laziness. As well as simply not putting in the effort this also includes such things as being responsible, caring and co-operating.

Its not just the human that is agile – all of life is – capable even of adapting to the catastrophic change brought about by the KT boundary event that rid us of the dinosaurs.

For an organisation that’s struggling to be more agile – introducing scrum is not going to deal with these issues – but employing a life coach will. I firmly believe that there are fundamental aspects of team behaviour that need to be recognised and managed before introducing pure practice - to ensure its success.

I recently heard my peer in the UK operative of my major global corporate customer say that they were going to get more agile but they weren’t calling it agile. I’m looking forward to seeing what transpires here and I'm strangly encouraged by the comment. This year we completed a major web integration project that was promoted as an agile project but ended up falling foul of all the usual traditional challenges of project (mis)management. I guess this is why they don’t like the “A” word any more but hopefully there will be someone who really knows what it means.