Update (3/29/14): I published a post in October 2013 that lays out much more detailed arguments on this topic. Read “Math, Trolls, Haters, and Internet Discussions”.

The year was 2001. A group of senior programmers gathered at a ski resort in Snowbird, Utah. The main names of programming in the United States were there: Kent Beck, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler, Jim Highsmith, Ron Jeffries, Brian Marick, Bob Martin, Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland, Andy Hunt, Dave Thomas, Mike Beedle, Arie van Bennekum, James Grenning, Jon Kern, Steve Mellor. A “who’s who” list of the field.

From that historic meeting a manifesto of 4 values and 12 principles emerged, which became known as the “Agile Manifesto.”

Thirteen years later, Dave Thomas, author of “The Pragmatic Programmer” and one of the people most directly involved in writing the manifesto text, published a frustrated article called “Agile is Dead, Long Live Agility”.

The original agilists meant to break the outdated way of thinking about and executing software engineering, the same obsolete model still taught today in most of the country’s universities. It caused a huge stir in the industry.

Along came the derivations, the trainings, the tools, the certifications, the conferences, the consultancies. A huge portfolio of options, for any size and any price. In the middle of this whole circus, what it really means to be an agilist got forgotten.

And, as Dave Thomas summed it up well in his vent, you don’t “do” Agile or “buy” Agile. Agility is a quality, an adjective. To be agile, you have to go back to the principles. Quoting:

• Find out where you are
• Take a small step towards your goal
• Adjust your understanding based on what you learned
• Repeat

How to do this:

“When faced with two or more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier.”

And that’s it: four lines and one practice.

Thirteen years after something so simple was first published, the world seems to have gotten way too complicated. Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, Lean Programming, Lean Six Sigma, Agile PMI. In a moment where chaos reigns, whoever “seems” able to explain the chaos becomes a guru.

And so associations, certifications, trainings, and conferences emerge. That’s how it works for diets, how it works for therapies, how it worked for software engineering. That’s what Dave Thomas laments.

But it’s an inevitable result. People are easy to fool: they always look for someone or something to follow and rarely question. They’ve been dogmatized never to challenge authority and to root for soccer teams without any criteria.

In 2010 I was at a conference in Baltimore and had the chance to talk to Bob Martin, who organized the Snowbird meeting. It was in his Object Mentor office that Ken Schwaber’s first Scrum certification training took place.

I was already immune to the “Agile Hype,” but I wanted to tell Bob Martin what I thought of it. For those who don’t know, the “official” Scrum Master training is a two-day course, and at the end you walk out certified. You don’t even need to show up: just pay for the course.

I told him, cynically, that Ken’s idea probably backfired. “Ken probably thought ‘man, how do I convince these large corporations to adopt agile practices?’ and then he thought ‘of course, large companies love certifications,’ and then he created a Trojan Horse, a joke 2-day course where serious people would know you can’t learn anything serious in 2 days, but that way he could insert the idea into the companies. But everyone took it seriously, and that’s when the shot backfired.” Skip straight to minute 6:24 of the video below if you want to hear that story.

Learning to Learn

Now let’s step out of software a bit and enter the world of “startups.” That world has its own “Agile,” dubbed “Lean Startup.” Eric Ries coined the term in 2008 and made it famous with the book of the same name, from 2011, a direct derivation of Toyota’s Lean principles. It’s a repackaging of old ideas.

This Lean comes from the same ideas of W. Edwards Deming about PDCA, “Plan, Do, Check, Act”. You’ll notice the resemblance to Dave Thomas’s four principles I cited above.

Pompous names, celebrities, gurus, expensive tools, and prominent titles don’t matter. The basic principles of Agile and Lean are the same: deliver value as fast as possible with the least waste possible, learning and using that learning in the process, planning and replanning to reach goals that become clearer along the way. That’s it.

The biggest problem shows up when an amateur programmer asks “what’s the next step?” and the answer is “the goal is to set up a Kanban.” Or when an amateur entrepreneur asks “what’s the next step?” and the answer is “the goal is to build a Business Canvas.”

Kanban and Business Canvas aren’t goals, they’re means. If those means don’t help reach the ends, delivering value to the customer and turning a profit in your business, then they’re disposable. The goal is to have profit. MVP, prototype, Lean UX, and Business Canvas are just possible paths to get there. Which of them serve?

If you want to learn anything, the steps to start are simple:

• Don’t create idols, never “idolize” anyone, at least not seriously.
• Ignore almost everything you see or hear in groups. Take notes, but don’t take everything seriously.
• Ignore advice and mentoring. It’s like a bank manager giving investment tips: if he were any good, he’d be rich instead of selling advice. He’s a salesperson by another name.
• Everything, absolutely everything, starts with a few principles. Nobody becomes a heart surgeon wanting to cut the aorta before learning to wash their hands. Look for the principles and ignore the pompous titles.
• Assume you know little, always. Approach every subject with the eyes of an ignorant person. Whoever thinks they already know everything learns nothing more. But be a smart ignoramus, not a dumb one.

Learn to question. The whole world of the Sciences, from the absolutely small quantum world to the infinite and immense cosmological world, only exists because it accepts one principle: the Scientific Method.

It’s basically PDCA: define the problem, make hypotheses, run controlled experiments, discard the hypotheses proven wrong, repeat. To be more accurate, Deming’s PDCA is the one that draws directly on the Scientific Method.

There is the principle of everything. From Agile to Lean to PDCA, we come back to Karl Popper and his philosophy of “Critical Rationalism”, which teaches that everything should stay open to rational criticism.

That’s why Lean, as an umbrella for selling products and services you don’t need, is dead. Long live the principle of achieving value while avoiding waste through continuous learning, in other words, Efficiency. There are no magic formulas. If magic diets worked, there would be no obesity in the world.

PS: I know, there’s #tongueincheek in the title and in the article, but the intention, as usual, is actually to provoke ;-)