Corporate Babel: What Do You Mean By Agile, Exactly?
When your boss uses the term agile or lean, there’s a good chance that they are not using it the way you think they are. And this can have dramatic consequences for you, your team, and your organization.
I recently encountered a post on social media by a consultant calling for a new word to replace the term Lean. The author was lamenting the fact that the definition of the word had become so twisted and diluted from its original meaning that all hope of clear communication has been lost. It was time to start over with a new word entirely, they suggested.
While their conclusion is a bit drastic, the question is a valid one.
It was by total coincidence then that the article popped up in my feed the same week that a group of innovation consultants I am part of were discussing privately whether the term “MVP” was so grossly distorted that we should throw it out entirely. I certainly lean that way myself sometimes, and have started to use the acronym less frequently in my talks and writing.
But should we really throw out an old term once the definition becomes confused with a variety of clashing, even contradictory meanings?
What do we mean by the word Lean? Is it about startups or manufacturing? Do we mean getting by with less during times of hardship, or continuously reducing waste while creating new value?
For that matter, what do we mean by Agile, or innovation, or MVP, or even startup?
So much confusion has been caused by people running around with these terms, with the sharp ends pointing outward towards the people who have to deal with the consequences, that it is worth slowing down and making clear just what we mean by them.
Labels, Abstractions, and Meanings
During my undergrad years, I studied the social sciences (this whole working-with-computers thing was something of a happy accident for me later on). In those days, I attended countless classes in Economics, Political Science, Anthropology, and so on. I read lots and lots of scholarly works, and even authored a few of my own for publication.
There is a certain style of authorship in social science with which I became familiar and quite comfortable. If you know the domain of social science scholarship, you’ll recall that “big words” are often used in a text by an author who assumes the reader is familiar with them from other scholarly works that, of course, “everyone has read.” Footnotes and references are provided that the uninitiated may pursue if they want to get up to speed. But the author assumes in most cases the target audience is already familiar with the term.
A few great examples of this are words like postmodernism, neoliberalism, and intersectionality. No social science scholar today is going to stop mid-essay to define postmodernism because there are literally hundreds of other books that have thoroughly done that job for them.
Reading a term as vast as postmodern in a scholarly context, the reader is invited to pursue the footnoted background material on their own, and to subjectively form their own opinion of what the term means, before returning to the present text and reading that term in a new context.
Capturing a volumes-thick scholarly debate about the nature of the social body in a single label allows the author to reference a dynamic process that exists in an indeterminate state as if it were a simple object, and then build their own thesis upon it. It is in this way that social sciences build new social knowledge on top of previous works, even if the foundational blocks are not entirely settled. And words like Agile are no different.
This high-falutin wordplay is not for everyone. Some might scoff at the use of words whose definitions are at best imprecise, or in extremis have definitions that continue to be debated back and forth to this day, even decades after they first emerged.
But such a one would fail to appreciate that it is the very scholarly debate itself that forms the basis of what those terms mean. The terms encapsulate zones of intellectual struggle still very much underway. The boundaries of debate mark the territory. The still-contested areas are well-known by its regular combatants. The fact that their meanings are not nailed down precisely in no way prevents a scholar from referencing that term in a new work. In fact, doing so adds a certain dynamism to their text, and adds to rather than detracts from the sum total of human knowledge.
This tactic of scholarship isn’t limited to social sciences. In physics, for example, this might be seen in a paper that references the principle of quantum entanglement. Though I am not a physicist, I understand that a great deal is still unknown about how exactly quantum entanglement works, and that the term is used to describe phenomena that can be observed, and in fact measured, but about which much is still unknown.
An analogy can also be made to the use of medical terms such as autism or chronic fatigue syndrome, terms which both reference a wide range of conditions with a variety of symptoms and a variety recommended procedures for treatment based on the specific conditions of an individual patient. This in no way prevents medical authors in many contexts from using the terms to refer to the same general range of ailments.
This inherent variability doesn’t stop scholars from referring to these terms in some highly technical written or oral content and still convey a good deal of meaning with their use. In fact, that’s what makes up most of scientific discussion.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
But not everyone likes this kind of play with abstraction as building blocks for further abstraction.
People differ in their propensity to deploy language with more or less precision, and anyone in a company environment that is making software will readily recognize this. In fact, while all categorizations of people are inherently arbitrary and capricious on some level, it is still possible to categorize coworkers and colleagues based on their readiness for, and tolerance of, the usage of words that lack precise definitions.
Witness the guardian and the explorer archetypes in any organizational setting. These two will quickly polarize every meeting into a semantic whirlpool that drags everyone present into its Charybdian maw. Who hasn’t started quietly checking their Facebook feed for updates out of sheer boredom, while these two wrestle for 20 minutes over the meaning of the term “MVP” during a weekly status meeting?
On the one hand, the guardian feels a great responsibility to make sure that deadlines are kept, resources rationed, and roles and responsibilities respected. There is no shame in this, for these are the people that keep us from descending into mere anarchy and chaos. For them, words have precise meanings because if they did not, all manner of slippery slopes would suddenly emerge from the mist, taking us all down into the rocky pits of failure. They want what is best for all of us, even if we’re too stupid, lazy, or disorganized to appreciate it.
At the other extreme, it is the explorer’s lack of reverence for ceremony and procedure that cradles the very flame of innovation itself. They chafe at constraints, constantly testing the boundaries to see which electric fence is weakest for the inevitable break for the greener pastures beyond the monotony of the daily grind. If it weren’t for them, all would be gray, and cold, and meaningless.
These two both have their place in all organizations. Usually, they stick to their own territory. But when they do come together and clash in their fiery and mythological struggle, it’s nearly always preceded by “wait, what exactly do we mean by the word…?”
In fact, what a word means in the cultural context of a single organization will typically be determined by the relative balance of power between these two classic archetypes.
Don’t Reinvent The Wheel
But meanings are not arbitrary. You don’t get to unilaterally decide to start using a term in an entirely different way from the larger social aggregation that surrounds you without significant consequences. At least not if you want to have any constructive dealings with others outside, or new to, your company.
Just because word usage is determined by the dynamic context in which it occurs, it doesn’t follow that we can use them in just any old way. Nor does it mean that we are justified in making up our own labels for terms that are relatively established in industry to mean something in particular, and distinctly not meaning something else.
Recently, I participated in an hour-long discussion with a small group of engineering leaders about the meaning of the term pair-programming. Sounds like a huge waste of time, right? I assure you it was anything but, and while it was not necessarily the most fun I had that week, I assert that had we not spent that hour together, a great deal more time and value would have been lost down the road.
A suggestion had been made initially that in order to increase speed and quality of software, it might be beneficial that developers start experimenting with pair-programming. Pair-programming has a long and well-documented history of improving software outcomes in numerous ways.
What started the debate was that the leaders in question were afraid that the developers, who were a little old-fashioned in their ways due to isolation of the organization from modern standards of software development, would be frightened by the idea of pair-programming.
The solution initially proposed was to simply call it something else to make it more palatable. Gradually, the group came to their senses and it was agreed that the developers being a stolid and knowledgeable sort about most other things related to software development could very well put on their big boy pants and try something new.
Get On The Same Page Early
People who work at companies with any longevity and size usually have baggage associated with change management programs. They don’t trust new initiatives because they seem like a fad. Past changes didn’t work or didn’t stick, so what makes this one different?
Introducing any unfamiliar terminology is always a challenge in such a context, as people typically associate it with something they already know, whether good or bad. Introducing new terms can be scary. It’s worth taking the time to make everyone comfortable. And words associated with corporate change management programs (because, let’s be honest--that’s what an agile program is now) must be defined in ways that can be safely integrated into the day to day work of the people on the front lines of product development or service delivery.
Investing up-front in building a shared understanding of the terms you plan to use in your collaborative work will save 100x the time wasted if people disagree on their definitions but simply don’t know it. As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Further, much of the strife in modern organizations is the result of leaders and workers not sharing a clear understanding of the words that are being used to describe “what we’re doing now.”
It is incumbent on leaders to not only define the terms they bandy about in their press releases and all-hands meetings, but also to take the time to ensure that everyone in the organization has a clear understanding of what they mean. Failing to do so risks creating a circumstance in which departments and silos transform into distinct cultural tribes with separate context-specific and drastically different definitions for the same words. In such a world, it is only inevitable that battle lines are drawn.
Best to avoid the whole unpleasant business of struggle and redefinition by spending time up front to be precise in your word usage, even if that precision describes a whole volumes-thick pile of scholarly debate. At least we’ll know where the fences are.
