If something is good, then more of it is better, right? Wrong. That's this week on the Badass Agile Podcast. Greetings, team. Welcome to the Badass Agile Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Williams. All right, come on in. Happy to see you. Thank you for being in an age when we complain about burnout, overwhelm, endless work and expectations. Sometimes we have to look and see where we're responsible for those expectations. But first, let's take a moment to remember why we're here.
To create an elite tribe of leaders who truly serve their clients and communities by doing what matters and what works, relentlessly chasing value and excellence like a badass. There's so many resources out there about what you need to do to be agile, but we're focused on who you need to become in order to lead teams. So let's hammer down those fundamentals to create a truly unique and powerful force in this industry. If you love this episode, do me a favor, share it with your friends.
Now, look, I don't know about you, but I was attracted to Agile because the principles were simple, easy to learn, easy to apply. And the fact that we're here now, where some people proudly hail themselves as badge collectors, is a bit of a concern. I have a hunch that easily half of those people, if you put them in a room and ask them to figure out what real business value is or how to deliver it
efficiently, they probably couldn't answer. And if you ask them to create an experiment where failure is likely, they might just as well call in sick. The bottom line is that all of this agile knowledge isn't making us better. So what's happening here? What's happening is that too much knowledge, too much information, too many certifications, too much education, is actually making things worse. It's creating confusion, it's creating complexity, it's
creating overwhelm all on its own. You know, when we talk about agile failure and the root cause of Agile or agile transformation problems, it's not always the boss, it's not always the job, it's not always the scope. That's the problem. It's the extent to which we do the following. Overburden ourselves with process. Wait a second. Don't rules make things better? And if they do, wouldn't even more rules make things even better? No. We devise rules and processes
so that things are repeatable and certain. If I do something and it works well, I want the prescription, I want the script. I want to be able to do it well again tomorrow. I want my colleagues to be able to inherit that process and do it better, too. But here's the problem with rules is that you have
to write them for the lowest common denominator. So a person with no background, no experience, no intuition, no inherent sense of the role, no real track record, you have to write this process so there are no unanswered questions, because unanswered questions open the possibility for risk or failure. And even though we should be comfortable with risk or failure, if you really look,
we're not, at least the worst of us. So some of us who shouldn't be in this role, or maybe shouldn't be in this role fully yet, need some time to develop and grow, rely on volumes of data, stories they can read from the trenches, on Reddit, in books, in YouTube videos, podcasts like this one, courses and certifications, and communities to learn. What are the steps? Give me the steps. But here's the problem. If it's never the same way twice, in my experience, it usually isn't, then all those
rules aren't going to help you. You know what I find interesting? I think if there's one set of rules that you want to learn that you want a script for, start with the people stuff. So, for example, how do you run a retrospective where you get good, clean, useful, honest feedback? That requires some deftness, doesn't it? Things you can say to people that won't throw them off, that won't offend them, that won't knock them back three years, that won't crush their confidence.
How to ask for things. If you got a deadline, things are expected without seeming pushy or having to rely on power or title or threats in order to get it. Those are the things where, if you have no experience, you go to a seasoned coach and you say, how do you do this without coming off as pushy? How do you do this without hurting somebody's feelings? How do you do this without having HR come and find you and say, did you tell this person xyz? Did you give them
this unsolicited feedback? You can't do that. How do you navigate those waters? That, to me, would be a useful set of rules, but you won't find that in any agile certification book. You find it by working with seasoned mentors, or just by doing the practice and learning the hard way. But we're so afraid of any negative repercussions that what do we do? We write rules for when to start your ceremonies, how many people you're allowed to invite, what color sticky notes you use.
Those things in my book aren't really going to help you get better. Now that brings up number two. Seeking the perfect way to do anything. There is no such thing as perfection. So stop chasing it, stop looking for it. You can't avoid failure. The only way to get better at not failing is by doing and failing. The only way to succeed is by failing first. So get busy failing. Get used to it, get comfortable with it. Just get out there with your paint and your
paintbrush and cover the canvas. If it sucks, throw it away, paint over it, do it again, and that's how you become a painter. But sitting there and trembling to the point where the brush can't touch the canvas because you're so afraid of doing the wrong thing, you're never going to improve and you're never going to make great art by the way. Chasing higher and higher levels of knowledge and education. Look, I've studied music for a really long time, since I was 7. I can tell you
this. The guitar player from ACDC doesn't know the first thing about music theory. Can't read the black dots, probably doesn't understand intervals, and yet he makes some of the best selling rock records of all time in the history of music. How's that possible? Because he listened to the greats, observed, imitated them, and that's kind of it. There's rules, yeah, but those rules have been repeated so heavily and to the delight of so many listeners
that pretty soon the rules become obvious. The things you must do and the things you must not do, they're not handed down in an instruction manual. They're handed down by imitating the greats and seeing what things do they do over and over and over that create success. Even if you don't know the note names, the width of an interval, the harmonic relationships, the type of cadence, those things really don't matter because people who intuitively feel the music pick up the instrument,
play and things work. And if they don't work, they keep fidgeting with it until it does. Theory, on the other hand, is far from useless. But it's primarily our way of explaining what just happened during the magic trick. And that's great, but it doesn't make great musicians. I mean, it doesn't make great music. Great musicians do. And great musicians get great by playing, by writing, through trial and error,
practice, repeated experiments. And number four, we create more confusion, complexity and overwhelm when we think that more certifications will equal more opportunities. Now, I've certainly heard stories of people being hired because of the number of certifications they have. But I've heard as many stories of people who are highly certified and decorated who can't find
work at all right now. That's because a whole other strata of skills that you have to have in order to stay successful in your career aren't obviously teachable through those quote unquote certified means. For example, your ability to network, to make connections, to make impact and highlight your impact, to market yourself, to brand yourself.
These are skills that are not just valuable when you need a job, but while you're on the job too, your ability to listen carefully to what other people need so that you build and maintain trust with the people who pay your bills. Half the time, the agile people that I meet don't even know who that is.
I ran a program for a long while called Agile Sidekick, and one of the things we learned by doing it was, is that even a person who's relatively new to the market with very little experience can find a way to at least get into the company they want to work with if they know how to make and back up a solid value proposition, even if they didn't have years of agile experience, even if they didn't have any technical background. And it's not through unethical means
of making stuff up or pretending you have experience that you don't. Not at all. It's by impressing upon a person you're working with that you understand what value they're striving for, what gets in the way of them having and realizing that value and being able to map the experience that you do have with getting those kinds of results. Anyway, enough about that. The only time where more is better is when you focus on the word go. Go, do, learn, fall on your face, wrap up your
scrapes and try again. More mentors, definitely. People who you know are doing the job well, whom you admire. Can you spend time with them, ask questions so that you can accelerate your learning? Those things, definitely more of. But processes, rules, certifications, and perfection, I'm afraid, are a bit of a waste of your time. And in any industry that's really more artistry than it is science, which we like to think that what we do is highly technical, but really it isn't. It's a people job.
And whenever you're in one of those, perfection is elusive. And knowledge in theory, ain't anywhere near as good as in the field experience. And if you're starting from zero, be okay with that. Start from zero, be where you are. Let's start building with bold experiments. Try, new, do, fail, repeat. That's it for this week. Thank you for joining me once again. I hope you enjoyed this episode. You can find me@badassagile.com or at any of the contact points in the show
notes below. I look forward to seeing you next time, and until then, stay badass.