To Be Good At Agile, you gotta get your hands dirty

I entered college as a music major and played drums professionally for many years and though I opted to switch majors to business (gotta eat right?) I learned some things that actually apply to what we are seeing in Agile today.

As a percussionist, I was part of the rhythm section that supported the vocal majors. There was a group of singers who really couldn’t sing but in their own echo chamber, they were the best singers around and would soon be on Broadway (they weren’t, and they didn’t).

And that is where the singers and agile come together. Those singers did finish their music degrees, two of which majored in vocal arts. They left college with degrees that told the world that they were good at what they did. It’s not the job of the college to tell you that you can’t sing, it’s their job to teach you how to sing, whether you do it well is on you.

Agile is the same way with our certification industry. When you get a certification, it tells the world that you have knowledge about a framework, just like the music degree. What it doesn’t convey is whether you are good at what you learned.

So those vocal arts majors, if they were like most people, went on to teach at some level of education. And people who get certifications go to organizations and tell them how to be agile, many of whom have not ever worked in agile.

Working experience and proven success doing something are key to helping others do it. My professional career spanned numerous gigs, from jazz to musicals and just about everything in between. I worked because I obtained a reputation for being a good drummer and I had the book of work to prove it.

To be good at agile, you need to have worked in it, got your hands dirty, dealt with unexpected situations that the frameworks don’t identify or outright ignore, and regardless, you had to make it work. Many agile coaches today, don’t have that type of experience, it’s not necessarily their fault as demand for coaches has far exceeded supply, so companies are left to hire people who have a degree but can’t sing. You get exceptions, the world is full of them but in general, the coaching community is filled with people in their own echo chamber of greatness.

In music there is the phrase — Those who can’t play, teach.

In agile those that don’t have experience get certified. It gets them hired, but it provides zero assurance that they have the requisite skill sets and experience to make a difference in something as complicated as adopting agile into your organization.

I know may sound harsh and elitist, but if music taught me one thing, to be great at anything requires skill and experience and even with all that success is not guaranteed. If you have neither of them failure is the outcome you will often be left with.