Have you ever lived abroad?
They say that this is one of the richest experiences a person can have. I confess that I had this privilege 3 times, twice in Holland and once in Italy, and the impact of the first trip is something that I keep in my memory: the different culture, the different habits, even the language is different. It is a cultural shock that can leave you stunned, or encourage you to live that reality intensely. The same happens in agility.
There are several definitions of what agility is, although it is often confused with a noun, it is actually a change of mindset, and therefore: a culture shock. Just like learning and speaking a new language, in the initial stages it is common to seek parallels with what we are already used to, precisely to facilitate understanding. Daily's look like status reports, backlogs look like EAPs, and it all seems wrong.
What happens is that although "similar" they have totally different purposes and meanings. "In Bocca al lupo" can be translated as "in the mouth of the wolf", but it means something like "good luck" and has a whole connotation of bravery and drive that a simple "good luck" is not able to translate, if it were Italian it would say "buona fortuna", but it wouldn't mean what it means.
Grammatical delirium aside, it is common to see this "translation" of functions to the agile model. Managers becoming tribe leaders, coordinators becoming P.O's and Agile coaches, or even aberrations like "Scrum Master Coordinator" appear in the middle of the road. Although they make it easier to understand a from/to they lose some of their essence and purpose in the middle of the road. Release Train, Sprints, Retrospectives and Backlog, are new words, which can even "be translated" to the traditional, but that certainly do not have the same purpose.
The same happens with habits, in Holland drinking a beer in public or in a park is frowned upon, it can even take you to a police station, if it is in front of a child, even worse. In Brazil it is normal. Strangely enough, in Holland you can drink in the office and many companies actually have a freezer for beers, while in Brazil this would be frowned upon.
Habits of management 2.0 structures are centralizing, the command is a little more dissipated, but the control is still centralized. Management 3.0 is based on the response to the law of required variety, which basically indicates that anything that wants to control a system must be as complex or more complex than the system it wants to control. In practice, it is understood that the number of variables to be controlled is so large that it makes no sense to centralize them, but rather the opposite: decentralize them. In other words, the control variables should be controlled by everyone, not by a select group. In other words, the habit that is well seen in management 2.0 is poorly seen in management 3.0.
All this because agility is a culture, shared values, unfolded into principles and applied through practices. Understanding practices with their artifacts is like reading a cake recipe. But understanding the values, this requires reflection, philosophy, inquiry, analysis, it requires looking at the team and not just the product. There is no product that adapts to change, but people who adapt the product to change, just as there is no winning product with a losing team. There is a cake recipe for some practices, but not for people.
This culture shock usually causes two reactions: the first is that passion for those who embraced the new culture (that's why agilists love to talk about their own work), the second is depression, the feeling of exhaustion, that nothing works out. Usually the second comes from the frustration of trying to live the life of the home country in the destination country. And for this there is no cheese bread that kills the longing for Minas Gerais.
Just like living abroad, when applying agility we will find some similarities, after all we live in the same world, be it planet earth or the world of projects. We just need to understand that it is not because we find similarities that we are finding the same culture.
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