Antiagile

The problem with the word agility

The concept of agility has been causing trouble ever since the Middle Ages. Consider what Saint Thomas Aquinas says in his “Prayer for ordering one’s own life”¹.

“Lord, my God, help me to be obedient without talking back, poor without complaining, chaste without corruption, patient without grumbling, humble without pretense, cheerful without excess, mature without heaviness, agile without being careless, fearful without despair, truthful without duplicity; that when I do good I not claim it as my own merit; that when I correct my neighbor I not do it from a position of superiority, but build him up by word and example without pretending.”

I have to say I don’t agree with much of what this paragraph says, but let’s ignore that for now. Let’s also ignore the bit about being obedient without talking back, poor without complaining and chaste without corruption, because we’ve seen that doesn’t work very well. But at the end there is a remarkable phrase, one that’s worth keeping: “that when I correct my neighbor I not do it from a position of superiority, but build him up by word and example without pretending”.

But let’s move on. What I want to highlight is that Thomas Aquinas talks about being agile without being careless (agilem sine levitate, in the original Latin). That phrase seems to be the key to understanding why so many organizations are sometimes reluctant to adopt agile.

The Real Academia Española (RAE), the official authority on the Spanish language, defines agility (agilidad) as:

Agilidad:

[From Lat. agilĭtas, -ātis.]

1. f. Quality of being agile.

2. f. Rel. In traditional Catholic doctrine, one of the four gifts of glorified bodies, which consists of the ability to move from one place to another instantly, however great the distance.

The second definition smells a lot like teleportation, so it’s no use to us, and the first sends us to agile (ágil), which would be:

Ágil:

From Lat. agĭlis

1. adj. That moves with ease and speed. He was very agile and dodged the blow.

2. adj. Said of a movement: Skillful and quick. She walks with an agile step.

3. adj. That acts or develops with speed or promptness. He has an agile prose.

It would seem that, in our language at least, agile implies speed. What’s more, among the antonyms of agile the following are listed: slow, sluggish, heavy, tardy, clumsy²

Let’s see what the etymology says.

Agilis, the Latin word from which agile derives, means “light”, “quick to act”, active. The root of this word comes from the Latin verb agere, which is to move, to set in motion, to carry forward or simply to act. From the Latin agere we get many derivatives, such as active, action, agent, agitate, litigate, exigent and of course agile.

But in turn, the word agilis comes from combining the suffix -ilis, which is capacity or possibility, and the prefix, or the Indo-European root, ag-, which is to drive or lead³.

So in a certain sense agilis would be “the ability to lead”.

In Greek, the prefix ag- gave rise to the word agein, which is to lead, and which we see in words that came down to us from that ancient language, like pedagogy or strategy. Another word derived from ag- is agón, which means struggle, and that’s where words like agony or protagonist come from⁴.

What happens with agility is what happens with many words: we use them in one sense, but originally they meant something else. It also happens that we all think we’ve mastered a term, and when a specialist uses it in his specific field, we assume it has the same ordinary meaning, when in fact that may not be the case.

Agility, when we speak from the perspective of software development, has a meaning closer to the Latin origin than to the sense it’s given in our everyday language.

When we talk about agile, in software development, we are not promising to do things faster, because doing things with nothing but speed can ruin everything.

Dress me slowly, I’m in a hurry

According to Benito Pérez Galdós, King Ferdinand VII of Spain was with his valet moments before attending an important meeting. The valet was very nervous, trying to dress the monarch in a rush, and couldn’t manage to do his job properly, so the king snapped at him: “dress me slowly, I’m in a hurry”, and ever since the phrase has been part of the stock of Spanish sayings. Some people attribute the phrase to Napoleon. But according to the historian Suetonius, the emperor Augustus himself used to tell his aides: “make haste slowly”⁵.

“Getting up earlier won’t make the sun rise any sooner”, says another popular saying. Rushing things doesn’t necessarily guarantee success.

Consider the old fable of the tortoise and the hare. The hare was so sure of victory, trusting in her speed, that she got careless and fell asleep in the shade of a tree, while “the tortoise, very calm and rested, slowly, slowly, but walking without stopping, had reached the finish line several hours earlier, while the hare was sleeping”⁶.

Agile, as a process, is like the tortoise: what it promises is to move forward one small step at a time to reach the goal. The interesting part is that along the way we keep figuring out whether we need to change the route.

So agile is moving forward, incrementally, so that if we have to go back, the setback is minimal and not that costly.

Antiagile

Nassim Taleb invents the term Antifragility because he can’t find one that captures the opposite of fragile.

What is the opposite of fragile?
Robust? Resilient?
Well, no, because the robust withstands the blows and is still there; it takes a shock and stays the same. A resilient person adapts to difficult situations, but doesn’t necessarily overcome them, or confront them in order to change or eliminate them⁷.

So, what is the opposite of agile? Slow? Rigid?

Well, no, because just as the tortoise gets the job done, despite being slow and somewhat rigid, I say those terms are not the opposite of agility. You can be agile while being slow, because agility is the ability to lead.

As for processes, some say that waterfall processes are the opposite of agile methodologies. Or that using Gantt charts is what people who aren’t agile do.

I don’t think those techniques are antiagile. If with those instruments you manage to move forward, clearing stage after stage, and you can adapt to changes and adjust your direction, then you are being agile.

Antiagile is not moving forward. Antiagile is letting time go by without correcting course. Antiagile is putting the methodology ahead of achieving a concrete result.

Picture two agile teams competing. One of them spends most of its time trying to “understand the problem”, because some agile guru once said that you have to “fall in love with the problem, rather than the solution”, and they produced nothing beyond a wireframe. In the same amount of time, another team writes code and puts together a first version of an application, crude, full of bugs, but something you could start working on. Which group would you choose?

In his post titled “A la agilidad le falta rock” (“Agile needs more rock”)⁸, David Lay says:

“I’ve already seen plenty of people get excited about agile as a magical way of doing things in which nothing can go wrong under the protection of the paladin scrum master, and everyone follows the wise guidance of the mystical product owner, only to be confronted with the reality that they’re still working with people just like before, and the challenges are the same as before, and everyone still has flaws and their shit still stinks.”

Antiagility wears a disguise; it’s like “a sheep in sheep’s clothing”, as Winston Churchill would say. Agile is not about enlightenment, or good vibes, or infinite joy at work; it’s not about seeing our users dancing happily with rainbow unicorns.

Let’s quote Lay again:

“Enough of selling agile as the cure for every ill, because in reality the only thing it does (when done well) is expose the flaws and leave open wounds. From there it’s the team’s job (and a very complex and dirty job it is) to fix those flaws and patch up the wounds.
Agile is not for cowards or for people lacking judgment; on the contrary, it makes you mature fast or exposes you as the fraud you always were… very few people like being exposed…
It’s true, if you get through all these tribulations, you end up in an ideal and very productive place, but it’s not the fruit of magic, it’s the fruit of everyone’s work and effort, along with the pain of the sacrifices made along the way.”

Agile is hard work, focused, step by step, like the tortoise, clearing stage after stage, delivering concrete, useful and usable things along the way, delivering value in every iteration.

Anything that doesn’t help you lead your team to a successful outcome, that doesn’t let you deliver value to your customers, that is Antiagile and you should avoid it.

Notes and sources: