In my weekly stand-up with reed.co.uk‘s wonderful Scrum Masters, Matt and Dave, we were discussing our plans for an Agile event later in the summer. It’s important to us as a business to stay in touch with the processes, success and learnings of other businesses, which we do through company visits and events like Lean Coffee. Our event is planned to continue to give something back to the Agile community in London, and should happen later this summer.
The ever sensible Matt, commented, “we’re not yet quite good enough to talk about our successes, but we want to tell people about the journey we’re on”. Both Dave and I agreed that this was very much the case, and the comment reminded me of some of the practical wisdom I found when I read Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind last year. Zen Mind is considered one of the seminal western texts on Zen Buddhism and accumulates some of the teachings of Shunryu Suzuki. Suzuki Roshi is best known for founding the first Buddhist monastery outside Asia (the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center) and the San Francisco Zen Center. Whether you’re religious or not Zen Mind gives an interesting insight into the practices of modern Zen (or Chán) Buddhism.
I first read Zen Mind after coming across a quote which has fast become one of my favourites: “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few”. This post is really to marvel at how often Suzuki Roshi spoke in a way that would be familiar to many agile practitioners of today. I’ll let his words speak for themselves, and you can make up your own mind.
Disclaimer: some knowledge or interest in Agile methodologies may help if you’re reading this.
Not religions: Zen Buddhism and Agile
One striking thing about the Agile movement is how formless it is. In talking to organizations that claim to be Agile or Lean, or practice Scrum or Kanban methodologies, there is always variation. Every company, and every individual working with an Agile process, has a unique sense of what Agile means to them.
For many people Agile means Scrum, and Scrum is simply another project management methodology. Whilst this isn’t uncommon, it is unfortunate, as developing the understanding that Agile is not a methodology is key to a valuable implementation of Agile practices.
The misunderstanding of Agile is likely responsible for many of the failed or failing ‘agile’ projects that are talked about — and indeed that I have been responsible for. For many fortunate practitioners Agile is not a methodology, just as Zen Buddhism is not a religion. Where Zen Buddhism focuses on the practice of zazen, Agile has the practical methodologies of Scrum and Kanban (and myriad others). Scrum and Kanban themselves are Agile practices that are used to provide a more formulaic and observable distillation of the Agile mindset, but will only really be successful where the differences between the philosophy and the practice are well understood.
While it would be easy to re-cover well trodden ground about the meaning of Agile, I’m less than qualified to do so. Instead, I’d like to turn back to Suzuki Roshi’s teachings and Matt’s comment on success. One of the first statements in Zen Mind quite simply captures the difficulty that is present in trying to ‘be’ an Agile organization:
“People say that practicing Zen is difficult, but there is a misunderstanding as to why. It is not difficult because it is hard to sit in the cross-legged position, or to attain enlightenment. It is difficult because it is hard to keep our mind pure and our practice pure in its fundamental sense”
Just as (for someone more flexible than me) it is not difficult to sit in a Zazen pose, it also isn’t difficult to attend a daily stand-up. However, after a while it can be hard to keep our attention focused on why we are practicing. One trap of a successful rollout of Agile processes is that you may well lose the initial commitment to the fundamental drivers that started you on your journey, and simply hollowly observe the ceremonies. Suzuki Roshi goes on to say,
“In Japan we have the phrase shoshin, which means “beginner’s mind.” The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind. Suppose you recite the Prajna Paramita Sutra only once. It might be a very good recitation. But what would happen to you if you recited it twice, three times, four times, or more? You might easily lose your original attitude towards it. The same thing will happen in your other Zen practices. For a while you will keep your beginner’s mind, but if you continue to practice one, two, three years or more, although you may improve some, you are liable to lose the limitless meaning of original mind.”
In many ways, this encapsulates why ‘being Agile’ is so hard. It’s not trivial to implement an Agile transformation and teach an entire team to observe Scrum practices, but it is an even greater challenge to embed the understanding of the meaning of those practices so that they permeate every level of the company. The job of the Scrum Master here is absolutely critical, as this is not something which will maintain itself; rather it needs constant and passionate support from people that simply won’t tolerate the organization back-sliding.
The challenge for the Scrum Masters themselves is persistent, as they need to challenge themselves to stay fresh and motivated, and to always be teaching Agile. Imagine this statement, substituting the word ‘Zen’ with ‘Agile’:
“Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, “I know what Zen is,” or “I have attained enlightenment.” This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner.”
For experts too, Mastery must always be something perpetually moving beyond their reach.
Working in teams
For developers and others practicing Agile there is often a sense that Scrum or Kanban is a methodology enforced to control projects, but this in itself probably indicates an underlying problem in the way it has been implemented or explained. The Agile philosophy is to value, support and trust teams. Consider how closely the Agile Manifesto and Suzuki Roshi agree on this:
“Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”
Principles behind the Agile Manifesto
“Even though you try to put people under control, it is impossible. You cannot do it. The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in a wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it is with people: first let them do what they want, and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good. That is the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them.”
Shunryu Suzuki
But, “Aha!”, you exclaim. “You have told me I have to attend meetings every day! Where’s my damn meadow”. Of course, the meadow doesn’t have to exist lawlessly:
“But perfect freedom is not found without some rules. People, especially young people, think that freedom is to do just what they want, that in Zen there is no need for rules. But it is absolutely necessary for us to have some rules. But this does not mean always to be under control. As long as you have rules, you have a chance for freedom. To try to obtain freedom without being aware of the rules means nothing. It is to acquire this perfect freedom that we practice zazen.”
One of the most powerful benefits of the Agile methodologies themselves is that they exist to encourage habitual behaviours within the teams (much like the daily practice of zazen), and contracts with other teams and stakeholders who depend on them. Scrum and Kanban help establish the guidelines of behaviour which beginners — both people and organizations — can rely on while they develop their own mastery of the practice.
Constant practice
One common theme among Suzuki Roshi’s teachings is the importance of practice and the impossibility of achieving perfection:
“We should try to continue our effort forever, but we should not expect to reach some stage when we will forget all about it. We should just try to keep our mind on our breathing. That is our actual practice. That effort will be refined more and more while you are sitting. At first the effort you make is quite rough and impure, but by the power of practice the effort will become purer and purer.”
So, our first efforts will be a little rough, but we will get better — just as with practicing our stand-ups and retrospectives. But when we have some experience under our belt we still need to push ourselves to keep learning, even if the progress starts to slow down:
“After you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little. If your mind has ideas of progress, you may say, “Oh, this pace is terrible!” But actually it is not.”
As we have found through our own journey, the path to mastering Agile is a long and hard one, and there is no magic to make the process easy. There are also no levels, badges, achievements or awards. While progress is measured by our own metrics — velocity and engagement — we learn the most when we are failing the most often. To ensure that we are always learning a common part of Agile practice is the regular retrospective or review. For us, this is perhaps the most important part of our Sprint, as it is an opportunity to reflect honestly on the areas where we have failed to live up to our own expectations, and to acknowledge our successes, and particularly the successes of our teams.
But, “inspect and adapt” isn’t simply part of the Agile process, it is one of the core philosophies, and perhaps the most important to me. The Scrum Manifesto lays this out clearly in its principles:
“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”
While Suzuki Roshi says,
“If your effort is headed in the wrong direction, especially if you are not aware of this, it is deluded effort.”
Inspect and adapt — the process of retrospectives, and of setting clear and achievable targets for the team to improve and address impediments — is the key to the small and continuous improvement that Agile promises. Without this attention to improvement all of the benefits of Agile will slowly wash away.
“Because all of us are doing the same thing, making the same mistake, we do not realize it. So without realizing it, we are making many mistakes. And we create problems among us”
The importance of having the support of a team and particularly of our Scrum Masters is critical as it’s easy to delude ourselves into thinking that what we have achieved was good, or even exceptional,
“Often we think what we have done is good, but it may not actually be so. When we become old, we are often very proud of what we have done. When others listen to someone proudly telling something which he has done, they will feel funny, because they know his recollection is one-sided. They know that what he has told them is not exactly what he did. Moreover, if he is proud of what he did, that pride will create some problem for him. Repeating his recollections in this way, his personality will be twisted more and more, until he becomes quite a disagreeable, stubborn fellow”*
And again, back to Matt’s point. It would be all too easy for us to hold up an increase in customer satisfaction, or velocity or staff engagement as an achievement, but to do so would be to start perpetuating our own myth of our success. Rather, we should focus on our practice and continuing improvement of our practice. It’s tempting to do this by setting goals and metrics, but this is almost as dangerous as not trying to improve at all. Be cautious with your metrics, as they are simply shallow reflections of reality — developers are experts at manipulating data, and a velocity metric can soon become a game if the true benefit of it isn’t clearly understood!
So then, if your metrics just support your improvements, what goals for improvement should we set?
“There are several poor ways of practice which you should understand. Usually when you practice zazen, you become very idealistic, and you set up an ideal or goal which you strive to attain and fulfill. But as I have often said, this is absurd. When you are idealistic, you have some gaining idea within yourself; by the time you attain your ideal or goal, your gaining idea will create another ideal. So as long as your practice is based on a gaining idea, and you practice zazen in an idealistic way, you will have no time actually to attain your ideal. Because your attainment is always ahead, you will always be sacrificing yourself now for some ideal in the future. You end up with nothing. This is absurd; it is not adequate practice at all. But even worse than this idealistic attitude is to practice zazen in competition with someone else. This is a poor, shabby kind of practice.”
Ode to Scrum Masters
Scrum Masters aren’t Project Managers, nor are they Development Managers or a spare tester for their team. Scrum Masters are equal parts evangelist, teacher, motivator, agony aunt (or uncle), disciplinarian, milk monitor and Chief Plugger Inner of Things. Their main, overarching goal within a team should be to facilitate the team delivering valuable software, and their main tool to achieve this is the established Agile methodology of the company. Importantly, if the company has given them the wrong tool, it’s the Scrum Master’s job to take the tool away so the company doesn’t hurt itself, and replace it with something less dangerous.
A key question for us when looking for our first Scrum Masters was, “How many do we need?”, which later evolved into “How busy should they be?”. We now strongly believe that our ideal is one, dedicated, Scrum Master per team, and that each Scrum Master needs ample time outside of daily tasks to respond to the needs of the team and the wider business. Scrum Masters should help teams to understand the value of the entire Agile philosophy by ensuring that it is correctly practiced, not dominate team members or demand acquiescence.
“So as long as you continue your practice, you are quite safe, but as it is very difficult to continue, you must find some way to encourage yourself. As it is hard to encourage yourself without becoming involved in some poor kind of practice, to continue our pure practice by yourself may be rather difficult. This is why we have a teacher. With your teacher you will correct your practice. Of course you will have a very hard time with him, but even so, you will always be safe from wrong practice.”
The Scrum Masters push us, in the face of our daily tasks and the pressure to excel in a myriad of other ways, to continue our Agile practice. Practice is hard to maintain and easy to let slip, and the Scrum Masters are our supporters in the face of those challenges, and to push us to maintain our commitment even as we address the reality of ongoing irritations and failures.
“If you find some difficulty in your practice, that is the warning that you have some wrong idea, so you have to be careful. But do not give up your practice; continue it, knowing your weakness. Here there is no gaining idea. Here there is no fixed idea of attainment. You do not say, “This is enlightenment,” or “That is not right practice.” Even in wrong practice, when you realize it and continue, there is right practice. Our practice cannot be perfect, but without being discouraged by this, we should continue it. This is the secret of practice.”
It is important to manage the ego of the team, the business and the Scrum Masters when it comes to our own progress with Agile. The Scrum Masters are the guardians of the organization’s Agile practice, and as with Zen Buddhism, Agile will work best when tailored to the business and the individuals within it. It must be a careful balance of understanding how best to tune and adapt Agile, while not letting a personal belief of the ‘rightness’ of our own interpretation make us evangelical about our way being ‘the best’, or even just ‘better’.
“If you do not realize this point you will be easily caught by some particular way, and you will say, “This is enlightenment! This is perfect practice. This is our way. The rest of the ways are not perfect. This is the best way.” This is a big mistake. There is no particular way in true practice. You should find your own way, and you should know what kind of practice you have right now.”
The pervading influence of Agile
Dave recently wrote a great blog post about his use of Agile techniques to plan his social events at home throughout the year. While I was the first to gently mock him about this, it was a wonderful example of how the essence of the Agile philosophy can become pervasive. It proves that the regular practice of the principles can be beneficial — and if Dave got more value from his holidays, who can question the usefulness? Suzuki Roshi even mentions this himself (although, in his case, not using Kanban for planning drinking sessions…)
“While you are continuing this practice, week after week, year after year, your experience will become deeper and deeper, and your experience will cover everything you do in your everyday life.”
Another similarity between the teachings of Suzuki Roshi and Dave is the applicability of your Agile, or Zen, mindset to everyday life — whether it’s for a two week sprint, or just for a fleeting moment:
“So our practice is not a matter of one hour or two hours, or one day or one year. If you practice zazen with your whole body and mind, even for a moment, that is zazen. So moment after moment you should devote yourself to your practice”
One of the beauties of the Agile mindset is that it requires very little time or paraphernalia to take value from. Just as Zen Buddhism can be practiced in a moment, so Agile teaches us how to prioritise and deliver, and react to demanding and changing requirements. While we may place a value on team rooms, kanban boards and stand-ups, the real value of Agile is in how we approach work, and communicate with those around us. So with Zen Buddhism:
“In the zendo there is nothing fancy. We just come and sit. After communicating with each other we go home and resume our own everyday activity as a continuity of our pure practice, enjoying our true way of life. Yet this is very unusual. Wherever I go people ask me, “What is Buddhism?” with their notebooks ready to write down my answer. You can imagine how I feel! But here we just practice zazen. That is all we do, and we are happy in this practice. For us there is no need to understand what Zen is. We are practicing zazen”
The reason I became a web developer nearly 20 years ago was for the pure joy of creating something without the baggage of designing for print or developing an ugly software application. That sense of creating something meaningful is present in both Zen Buddhism and Agile, and stands to remind us of why we do the jobs we do…
“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”
Put rather more beautifully by Suzuki Roshi:
“Moment after moment we are creating something, and this is the joy of our life.”
* I’m probably the first to acknowledge that I’m considered a disagreeable, stubborn fellow.
Originally published at www.ridley.co on June 18, 2014.