Practice and Preparation

Agility requires practice and preparation.

~ Joshua Kerievsky, Joy of Agility

During my Christmas break, I am catching up with my reading, spending time reading the books I had set aside a while ago.

One of these books is Joy of Agility by Joshua Kerievsky. Having worked with Joshua a few years ago, I was thrilled to see him release this book after all the great work he’s been doing with Modern Agile.

I’m not going to talk about his book just yet (I’ll leave that review to when I finish reading it), but I wanted to highlight this quote as it resonated with me and the way I feel about agility.

Many people think that being agile is just following a set of practices.

”If we follow these practices dictated by method S we will succeed in being Agile” (or so the mantra goes)

Nothing could be further from the truth; agile is much more than a set of practices, but that’s for another day…

Being agile requires you to be good at what you do. You practice daily when your skills are needed to perform without overthinking about it.

Years ago, I was giving a class on Evolutionary design when one of the students told me that this way of working didn’t make much sense unless you know what you want at the end. I asked them what they meant by that. It turns out they didn’t trust their skills and intuition to take them on a journey to explore and code their design as it came along.

The lack of (coding) practice was a barrier to entry for this technique.

This happens with other methods, too; they feel awkward to start, and you will always feel challenged when trying them out without training.

Do you need help with any agile techniques you want to use at your workplace?

Shoot me an email, and we can discuss how I can help you and your team become more agile!