Agile Enough

When I look back at my career, I’ve been gathering ideas about agile from others since the manifesto. Testing versus checking. Last responsible moment. Make the thing easy. User stories. The ideas were fresh and exciting, from other developers like me, and I leapt into them because they indicated a path to my goals.

They were personal to me.

In my coaching, I’m trying to build a bridge between someone else’s perceptions of the world, and my own. Finding that moment in someone else’s context where an idea might be tasty. It’s less about how many ideas I have, or how tasty they are to me, and more about whether my coachee even wants a strawberry right now, or maybe they’d rather a grape instead.

I feel like if I don’t have the empathy, understanding, time and space to make a good idea personal for someone else, I won’t be leaving a strawberry behind.

Some folks put so much faith in training, dumping a basket of ideas at someone’s doorstep, in hopes at least one will look tasty in the moment. The better courses and trainers try and synthesize a context in which the strawberry might be tasty.

But nothing’s as real as real life.

As a trans woman, and as someone who has spent a significant number of years in service to the trans community, I have a specific perspective on this.

After I realized that I was trans, I couldn’t wait to complete my transition. It couldn’t happen fast enough. I didn’t even understand what transition was. There were dozens of barriers between being seen as the man the world thought I was, and being seen as the woman I am. My goal became transition. Government demanded I take various actions to change my documentation. The medical community demanded I take various actions to show I was serious and wasn’t just fetishizing femininity. Friends and family demanded I take various actions to prove I wasn’t delusional. Everything seemed about the actions I needed to take for others to recognize who I am.

After years of that, I came to realize that transition wasn’t a destination. There was always another step. There was always some way that I wasn’t “woman enough” to be accepted by some part of the world around me. I realized then that my entire journey since the start, was trying to be “woman enough”. I realized that seeking “being woman enough” was just something women struggle with. Just as men struggle with “being man enough” - which I had also experienced pre-transition.

Imagine how it sounds to me when people are measured against being “agile enough”.

Separating “agile” and “not-agile” seems the wrong focus. We set up this dichotomy between these diluted terms, in a world that surrounds the terms with such pomp and circumstance, and then watch in horror as people seek “agile” as a goal unto itself. When all along we just wanted them to build better software by delivering smaller increments sooner and applying what they learned while doing it.