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(all media is from the great book “Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design” – Whitney Quesenbery & Kevin Brooks (2014)Rosenfeld ed. )

I have been, of late, promoted to (drum roll, please!) Global Leader of Business Storytelling at IBM.
Now, this is one of those Linkedin updates that, besides the usual congrats tends to generate questions; questions that, like a bad case of political commentary can be boiled down to, basically, just one question.

“What’s that thing, Storytelling”

So I tell them; “I help people tell stories about what they want, to craft stories with meaning and emotion. And that helps them work and communicate better”.

And almost always, there it comes. Like the tide, like taxes, like the next big thing that ends up just like the old, tired thing. The follow up question. “Oh, can they just tell you the requirements? It’s not a big deal…they can tell you what they want and you can go work on that”.

Oh, sweet summer child; the winter of a client’s discontent has not wilted thee yet, but it will come to pass.

Any of us that has worked for some time in Scrum remembers when we called the User Stories “Backlog Items”. Why did we make the switch? Why don’t we call them requirements anymore?

Let me answer this with another question.

Who remembers Claude Shannon?

This dapper gent right here

So Claude Shannon, mathematician, engineer and the motherlovin’ Father of Information Technologies (Hi, dad!) thought that a story was, essentially a way to move a message from one place to another. That is, he thought of stories as quintessential data carriers.

In his view, that for a lot of years has been the default, when a client talks to a developer he only transmits flawlessly information, and just information about a rational decision that he or she has made and how he or she came to that conclusion.

And yet…has any of us that has truly worked on development had a case like this? I suspect not. Let’s talk, for example, about the Online Prospectus.

The Open University (http://www.open.ac.uk/) is the largest University in the UK. In order to enroll into a course, you have to go through an Online Prospectus (https://www.open.ac.uk/request/prospectus). When they designed that part, they just offered a course listing.

After some time, the people from OU found out something strange: they had the largest rates for enrollment in the UK…but also the largest drop rates. So, they thought, perhaps we haven’t included enough information. So they modified the Prospectus…but still, they found the rates unchanged.

So they did something truly revolutionary: they talked to the prospective students.

And when they talked, the OU people found out, firsthand, that the students weren’t interested as much in pure info than in how the courses aligned with their dreams and hopes. I don’t care as much for a course, they said, as long as it is a path for me to be a banker/footy player/shipwright, etc.

They also talked with dropouts. Like Priti, a Pakistani woman who had enrolled into an English course after she had put his career on hold to raise a family. But being a Pakistani emigré had its challenges, challenges that weren’t being met by a course listing. On how many courses is there a “Are you an immigrant from a former colony from South Asia?” check-box?

So what they do now, what they have found out keeps the best enrollment rates but reduces the dropout rates to almost nothing is…they talk to people. Just that. They hear the prospective students; they listen to their dreams and expectations. They have found out that they have to engage in the level of emotions and sell them into an idea before talking courses. And that they have to empower the student to be the co-creator of his or hers career path.

This is done via understanding the requirement of the student and the realization that a story is not something that moves information from a place to another, but rather a co-creation.

And yet…we know this. At some level, we know it. But we don’t use it in the traditional development approach.

Let’s say that you want to take a date to a fancy dinner. Not just fancy, but downright swanky. You find out the best place, a new place that you’ve never been into and make a reservation in advance; you fix your hair and meet your date at the door in your best clothes.

You are an Ace, that night. Witty and charming, you make small talk with the Maitre D’ and the waiter. Everyone is pleased, everyone is charmed. The wine, entrée and dinner menus are brought to you.

Now, at this point…do you just wave them down and say “I know what we want. Give us two burgers, medium rare, some fries and two Coors light, please”?

Of course not; you browse the menu. The Maitre might ask a quick question and offer a suggestion. You will review it and think how this is fitting. Perhaps the wine is white: should we have seafood? Or is it a deep red and some savory meet? What will we have for dessert? What will we have with dessert?. You decide based on a series of feedback clues and your own desire.

This situation is analogous to a development project. If you go into a restaurant, of course…you want to be fed. This is the general requirement. But what, how and in which order is not a given. Your date preferences, your own, the specialty of the house, what you will be drinking…the specific requirements will not be set in stone beforehand you walk into that place. It will be constructed by a dance of factors and will be rechecked at each course (if the Maitre is good) for feedback. While we know that we want to have a memorable dinner, we don’t know exactly what we will get; and that finding out is what makes it great. The story not only provides pure information, but also motivation and context: what are we looking for?

And yet…when we expect to work in something much more complex than a dinner, something as complex as a development project…we assume more and have less time and interest than when we go to a fancy dinner. We end up ordering burgers, all the time and then complaining that they weren’t as good as McDonalds. We have to get to grips that while we can have a general idea, this is more a framework than a real requirement. The specific needs to be worked on, distilled like a good whiskey from the malt.

And the distillery is the Storytelling act. If you don’t think that it is important…try drinking dried malt.

NUNS fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ‘twas pastime to be bound 10
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.
1806. William Wordsworth

Wordsworth certainly knew what probably is the main stumbling block to an Agile coach after we start a Transformation, the wailing that won’t quit. Why so much structure? Why do we have to have Sprint Reviews? Can’t we do everything in the Retrospective?

When one starts an Agile transition or an Agile transformation, there are, always, forever, two big stumbling blocks. One is hit with the toe right away: the roles. How come there are no Managers? Hey, I’m a Business Analyst, why I’m grouped with the Developers? And so on. This usually is solved with a two-pronged approach: some clear concepts and some good working techniques deployed by the Coach usually are enough for the team to start working and from there, the methodology itself works its magic.

But the second stumbling block rears its head later, stubbing our little toe. Why, oh why, do we have to do all the sprints the same way? Why can’t we do the daily when we need it? Why don’t we plan the meetings in an ad-hoc basis? Sure, that’s more Agile and flexible?

This questions have a very simple answer: because Constancy Reduces Complexity

Let’s go back to our elementary education. In my case, I went to a state school where we were supposed to express poetry. To this day, I still don’t know exactly what they meant. When I was in the 4rd grade, they had poetry reading and composition, which meant that you had to go to the front of the class and read something you wrote.
Now, I was never a particularly bright kid, but the depths of my confusion were unplumbed by human mind. Having some time to prepare, I took some books on poetry and basically mock-copied the metric (a copy-paste before there was copy-paste) and wrote something about a bird in my window. I don’t have it anymore and repression, having done its work in preserving my sanity (such as it is) has divorced me from the exact lines, but they were unimpressive, but certainly metric.

So, being called Andino in a school that used alphabetic order meant that I was going to go first and didn’t know what to expect, which didn’t help. But anyway, I did the work and the next Monday I was trying to not giggle while I recited my fourteen line shade of a sonnet.

There were some giggles in my fellow classmates (which didn’t mean anything, we at that age giggled at everything) but glacial silence from my teacher, which I knew it meant that I did something wrong. This particular teacher was also not very communicative, so I waited in silence while she decided on what to say.

After a short while, she spoke

“Federico”, she said in that cold, disappointed voice “that is not a poem”.

“well…” I tried “I thought that fourteen lines makes a sonnet. My book says so”.

“That might as well be” she said “but as usual, you missed the main point”.

And silence again

Now, I was then, as now, a little bit of a contrarian spirit. If she didn’t get around to say what was wrong, far from me to ask her. So she stared at me and I stared at nothing; tar pits of silence grew to entangle the saber-tooth tigers of talk.

She broke first, I recall.

“You have no emotion. You’re not expressing yourself. Who cares about a bird? You worry so much about structure that you forgot to cry”.

And so, the start of my great hatred for poetry began; luckily, I was, in my twenties, to read it again and even write some published sonnets and the like in books. But from age ten to twenty-two, the memory that I had associated with poetry was of the rest of my classmates who (being smarter than myself) had got the message loud and clear. The next, a girl, started crying and talking how her father didn’t love her.

This is what lack of structure brings. Emotion? Sure. Have you ever sat through a recital of excited pre-teens who have been told to express yourself fully without caring for rhyme or reason?

It is enough to yearn for Mencken

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

The same happens when one tries to be Agile without any caring for the structure of the methodology. Let’s take a simple example: the Daily. Say, someone says: let’s have the daily when we need it and in the time that we have free. That entails:

• That one person, at least, must have a clear criterium of what we need is.
• That this person can communicate that this criterium has been met
• One person that tries to negotiate the calendar time of every member in the team
• That the meeting time agreed is communicated
• That everyone attends the meeting

Just how much more complex is that compared to just show up for fifteen minutes every day in the cafeteria? There can be a lot of things that can go wrong with the complex example; very little chance that, day in and day out, people don’t get in the rhythm of Agile. And if someone’s sick that particular day? There’s always tomorrow.

This example boils down to something: Agile Is something you Are, not something you Do. You can’t be Agile without the mindset. But the mindset is not gained in a single, one moment thing. It grows from rhythms and seasons, like any good organic thing. And in order to grow strong, we need to reduce the possibilities of going wrong. And for that, again, Constancy Reduces Complexity.

After all, as Wordsworth said:
In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is

Category Archives: Agile

Why and How: Storytelling part 1

Agile nuns

Constancy reduces Complexity