Do you remember an automobile anti-theft device named The CLUB? If you’ve never heard of The CLUB, I present its product page. (TIL that it’s The CLUB and not The Club).
All right, with that picture in mind, imagine you hop into a ride share, your driver points the car in a direction, locks a CLUB (a The CLUB?) in place, and then floors it for 2 minutes before pulling over, readjusting, and repeating.
Would you leave a 5-star review?
Feedback loops
I’m curious what specific objections you would have. Maybe something along the lines of:
- What if a pedestrian suddenly appeared where you didn’t expect there to be one?
- What if a deer did the same thing?
- What if slow traffic appeared?
In all of these objections, you have new, relevant information that is important to your task, but you can’t act on it quickly enough to avoid, ah, unpleasant consequences.
What if your driver told you, “this isn’t so bad. We used to go 10 minutes before we made adjustments!” or “how will I get anywhere if I can’t even focus on driving for two minutes?”
Sprints
Shift to software development. Almost every shop I’ve worked at organized work in two-week iterations, commonly called “sprints.” We typically view this as a sign of “agility.”
Setting aside the absurdity of sprinting for two weeks or permanently operating in sprint mode, what happens if you discover one day 1 of your two-week iteration that what you’re working on has no value to your customer?
As a leader, do you want your people to stay focused working on something that has no value? As a developer, will you feel fulfilled knowing that you spent two weeks on something that has no value?
Take action
Driving happens, ideally, with drivers making continuous adjustments. Indeed, I would posit that drivers who do not drive this way will soon find themselves legally restricted from driving.
You may not be ready to adopt a more continuous flow in your work plans, but do you prevent your people from adapting outside of a two-week cadence? Do you use vocabulary like “failing a sprint?” (who wants to fail?) Are your teams punished for recognizing there’s something better for them work on? Do you insist that all teams in your org operate on the same two-week rhythm even though their work is vastly different?
How is that agile again?
