Killing the Buddha
“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!”
This is a popular saying derived from an old Zen koan. When it comes to working with Agile projects I find this saying very appropriate. People who do Agile transformations typically talk about finding the Way (the road) and often speak with almost religious fervor regarding Agile processes.
In fact, Agile is really just one short step away from organized religion. You have daily meetings, attend retrospectives where we examine our patterns of behavior deeply, we worship idols with bizarre names like “Kanban” and “Scrum” and fight (flame) wars over them. We anoint our priests as guardians of that process (yes, I’m talking about you, Scrum Masters), and agonize endlessly over whether we and others are following the right path.
Wow, maybe Agile actually is a religion. That’s pretty scary. I’ve got to go sit down now.
OK, I’m back. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, killing the Buddha. So, given my little digression above, it would be pretty easy to rewrite that old Zen saying like this:
“If you meet an Agile Guru while on your journey (to excellence, improvement, whatever), kill him!”
Now aside from sounding terribly violent, what the heck do I mean by that? It turns out, that having an Agile guru around is pretty limiting when it comes to learning and continuing to grow. Whenever we have a guru like that, what do we do? We defer to his expertise. We wait for him to provide the answer and we stall our own learning journey. Having an Agile guru around can freeze an organization’s development. You end up limited to whatever level the guru is at.
Many organizations have these characters lurking in their midst. Heck, I was one once. I still have a business card with a title of “Thought Leader” emblazoned on it around somewhere. I’m here to tell you it can happen to anybody. One day you are a perfectly decent, self-respecting developer and then WHAM! you become an Agile Coach, or a Thought Leader, or a Lean Sensei, or any number of other wacky guru code names.
You become, THAT guy.
And trust me, you don’t want to be that guy. You know the one, the Agile guy? The guy who simply must render an Agile judgment every time he opens his mouth. The guy who everyone defers to when it comes to do all things Agile. To paraphrase the old Life cereal commercial “Is it Agile? Hey, let’s get Mikey. He’ll judge anything!”
…oh brother, I think I just dated myself straight back to the stone age.
So what do you do when you have an Agile guru? You get rid of him! What if YOU are the Agile guru? Now that’s awkward. Well, your mission is to eliminate that perception. How do you do that?
Keep your mouth shut
Stop telling people what’s Agile (see #1). Use pantomime or something instead.
Bring in, find, unearth or otherwise manufacture someone who has more expertise than you do. Understand that by doing this, you will run the very real risk of learning something. Sorry.
Rinse and repeat until nobody mentions Agile in your presence. Ever.
So if you find yourself or someone you love has become an Agile guru, take heart! There is a cure! The best thing you can do to avoid stifling (and annoying) everyone in your organization trying to get work done is kill the Buddha.
#mastery #ThoughtLeader #Sensei #Lean #Kanban #Buddha #Scrum