The Agile Manifesto

Many of the great programmers and great startup founders work differently than the rest of us. When they started their companies, or went to work in someone else's company, they did not spin their wheels in the same ruts as everyone else. They did not look at the way their fathers and mothers worked and say, “We should organize ourselves exactly like that.” They examined process instead, refusing to inherit one. They looked at the kind of work they hoped to do, took seriously the ways in which external changes can affect project management and project fulfillment, and devised guidelines within which they could function best. Luckily, they took such retooling of process so seriously that they generated manifestoes to articulate their core beliefs and craft. And they fought—and still fight—over these manifestoes.

One of the most famous artifacts from these endless scuffles is the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development,” published in 2001 by self-proclaimed “organizational anarchists” Martin Fowler and Jim Highsmith, and cosigned by many others. The work of Boudett and City, referenced earlier, might help you maximize the existing work environment in your school. That is, it might help you to proceed in a practical and sane manner and work with the clay you have. But it is also worth considering the work of organizational anarchists from time to time, trading in your ordinary clay for another substance, just to see what you can build with it.

The Agile Manifesto evolves from a shared appreciation for values that any school would share: “mutual trust and respect,” collaboration, a focus on people and the kinds of professional communities that are attractive to the professionals who inhabit them or could, one day, inhabit them (Fowler & Highsmith, 2001). And yet it serves as an excellent foil to the working methods, and even the mindsets, of many schools.

Where many schools cling to jargon or try to force-fit technology onto their existing programs and populations, agile practitioners admit up front that they “don't have all the answers and don't subscribe to the silver-bullet theory” (Fowler & Highsmith, 2001). That kind of clear-thinking humility—especially from such brilliant people—is important for any organization that hopes to allow its frontline workers (that is, teachers) to make decisions based on what is truly best for the clients (that is, students). It leads to an important prioritization of individuals and their interactions over processes or tools, which is also a stance that we think schools should promote, especially as related to technology integration. Too many schools start by talking about bulk purchases or the hot new gadget instead of what is best for teaching and learning.

Partially, they do this because they worship the god of planning. Syllabi and lesson plans are seemingly as old as schools, and strategic plans, though newer, abound. Agile's answer to planning is characteristically humble and aspirationally in line with reality:

No one can argue that following a plan is a good idea—right? Well, yes and no. In the turbulent world of business and technology, scrupulously following a plan can have dire consequences, even if it's executed faithfully. However carefully a plan is crafted, it becomes dangerous if it blinds you to change. (Fowler & Highsmith, 2001)

Change, for Agile practitioners, is something to be courted rather than feared, managed rather than resisted. They know—from little more than the long experience of being human—that change is a law of the universe. It happens.

Another thing that schools might learn from Agile methodology is how to take seriously one of the things they dole out most frequently: feedback. One of the keenest ironies of schools is that the adults who populate them, who supposedly love learning so much that they dedicate their working lives to it, often have trouble applying their own learning to their own daily practice. Agile methodology foregrounds this, again very human, maladaptation with a direct and penetrating statement: “Although most people agree that feedback is important, they often ignore the fact that the result of accepted feedback is change.” Agile teams, though self-organizing, work with change; they change as a result of change; they trust their “ability to respond to unpredictable events more than [their] ability to plan ahead for them” (Fowler & Highsmith, 2001).

As has happened since its inception, however, the Agile methodology espoused in the Agile Manifesto is often critiqued, and we can learn, too, from such assays. Giles Bowkett, who works with Panda Strike, published a paper online on March 4, 2015. Called “Flaws in Scrum and Agile,” Bowkett's memo points out the way times have changed. In it, he talks about the fact that tools like GitHub, Skype, and Hangouts had not been popularized when Agile was first codified. As a result, Agile's insistence on face-to-face communication is somewhat anachronistic. As Bowkett writes:

Remote work requires a ton of writing, and that's one of the best things about it.

How many times have you sat down to email somebody a question, and found that in the process of writing the email, the answer became obvious to you? This step is built in to the workflow of every remote team. Likewise, have you ever had to tell a co-worker the same thing twice? Technical work involves lots of tradeoffs, and people don't always remember the intricacies of every debate. But you can refer to a conversation on GitHub three years later and review every detail with perfect clarity. In a distributed company, the written word becomes much more influential than the spoken word. (Bowkett, 2015)

This takedown of Agile, truth be told, feels like what we are promoting in this book: logical and rational moves forward, in a variety of areas of organizational life (mainly in schools) based on existing tools and cultural norms that are bubbling just below the “old-school” sheen and surface.

For our purposes, though, the details of Agile methodology—and its critics—is not as important as the spirit that drives its practitioners. And the system preference is not as important as the fact that such systems were invented, fought over, spawned spinoff systems, and continue to power today's software and startup workforces. It is healthy to analyze not only the products produced by teams, but also the teaming practices and workflows that generated those products. (The next time you want to discuss homework practices, perhaps you could organize the conversation in grade levels rather than departments, or vice versa, depending on your school's typical pattern.) It is healthy to connect meetings as directly as possible to work being done on behalf of the customer or end user. (The next time you are deciding on an important school policy, consider inviting some students into the process.) It is healthy to relentlessly try to omit needless work. (Pick a process that bugs you in your school and then organize a group to reduce it by at least two steps.) It is healthy to reflect and adjust—continuously. (All good teachers do this; all good leaders of teachers should, too.) It is healthy to allow teams to self-organize, to find their own way to work, based on what they discern from their local environments and the specific problems they face. (Some schools choose the unconference method when they are addressing issues in their community; rooms are assigned based on topics; participants then join the conversation that interests them and stay only as long as they feel they can contribute.) You don't need to follow the Agile Manifesto to promote growth and change in your school, but it might not be a bad idea to have your own manifesto—to be clear about how you work together and why you work together, and to be appropriately critical of the organizational habits and default settings you haven't questioned in a while.

Rethinking the Ideal

If totally free from the typical meeting conventions, blended leaders only arrange a meeting if they have thought first about the intended outcome of the meeting and determined that they cannot arrive at that intended outcome on their own. This idea doesn't seem revolutionary—until you think about the number of meetings you attend that don't fit one or both of its criteria.

Having arrived at the conclusion that a meeting is necessary, blended leaders then define the tasks needed to reach the intended outcome. They answer the questions, what will we need to do to reach the desired outcome, and how will we do what we need to do?

Next, they think about the available talents of the people in their community and in their extended network. As has been discussed elsewhere in this book, a blended leader might use his or her extended network to solve a problem rather than turning to a more established team within his or her school. So blended leaders planning a meeting would ask themselves, who can help me solve this problem? Who needs to be part of this problem-solving (or problem-framing) process? What team should I build around this issue? These questions embody the idea put forward in Johansen's Leaders Make the Future: “The best leaders will get extremely skilled in choosing which medium—including in-person meetings—is good for what” (Johansen, 2012, p. 12).

We have found that it helps to think of your meeting time as a circle. Working within the circle, with familiar associates, can be beneficial in that it gives you continuous access to the institutional memory of the group. Also, the group shares tacit knowledge, which allows for shorthand when time is tight. But what happens if you remove part of that circle? Suddenly, the rest of the world can enter your meeting space. The meeting continues, with the agenda steering it, but ambient participants can influence the outcome.

If you like this idea, remember one simple fact: Every time a computer is open during a meeting and connected to the Internet, the close-knit meeting circle is broken. This can lead to distraction—as it often does, especially if the meeting is not compelling—or to the inclusion of specialists from anywhere in the world. You can bring in a relevant article or video; you can bring in a participant who can offer a fresh set of eyes and ears to help you gain a new perspective on your problem; you can record parts of your meeting, transcribe them through a transcription service like Rev, and share them with other groups working on a similar problem. Once you get used to breaking the circle, your meetings can begin to move from calm, dry, carefully conducted symphony performances to the focused serendipity of a rendition of John Cage's 4’33”. If you ask the right questions while planning your meeting, and then lift the constraints associated with most meetings, you might surprise yourself and others—you might allow noise to reveal its music, passive audience members to become musicians, and the music of your organization to go where it wants to go.

Disrupting the Real

But not every meeting can be set only after someone determines one is necessary, especially in schools. Because we often work backward from a schedule of meetings, we therefore walk backward into those meetings, wondering what, if anything, there is to do.

Because of the nature of school calendars, meetings often need to be scheduled months in advance. In fact, if you do not schedule your meetings months in advance, you may not be able to schedule a meeting when you need one. So, we schedule meetings just in case we need them, and then we end up using them, even if we don't. Also, many of these prescheduled meetings are based on the assumption that teams in schools need to meet on a repetitive basis. Typical teams include grade levels, departments, student support services, administration, committees, and faculties.

A blended leader inherits such meetings, just like everybody else. But a blended leader enters his or her long march of meetings with the intent of disrupting at least a few of them in the name of time and talent.

You can begin disrupting a long march of meetings by asking questions of yourself and others. In fact, you should create a discipline around asking such questions each and every time you see a meeting approaching in your calendar.

Do we need to meet F2F? Is there a way we could accomplish the same tasks without being in the same room at the same time? Is there a way, in fact, that not meeting in the traditional way could actually enhance the outcome of the “meeting”?

The blended leader is committed to figuring out the best way to access people's best work at a time in their days when they are most capable of producing that work. We all have ideal work rhythms; we all have ideal work times. The interconnectedness of our computing devices means that meetings can happen asynchronously, matching up with those rhythms and times, aligning talents with tasks.

If Joe is a morning person, he can contribute to a shared document at 5 a.m. If Kim has parenting duties that occupy her mornings and her early evenings, she can contribute in the late evening.

If Benedict wants to share information with a group, he might simply email that information to the group.

If Sonya wants to both share information and seek input on it, she could create a Google Doc, share it with her team, and ask people to add comments in the margins.

If a discussion is not progressing as it should in a F2F meeting, why not cut off the meeting and ask people to contribute to the discussion over the next week in a wiki-style space? Or why not start the conversation there, a week before the F2F meeting?

Building a presentation with a group? Meet F2F quickly to launch the parameters of the project, then launch a Google Presentation or a Prezi presentation and ask people to contribute slides.

Facing a time-sensitive situation and having trouble getting all the key players in a room? Consider using Google Hangouts or asking someone to phone in or Skype in. You could bring in a special guest or consultant the same way.

Different modes of communication or meeting have different affordances and limitations depending on the context and purpose of that communication or meeting. A F2F meeting in the same physical space could be an organized group or committee, or it could be an informal conversation between colleagues in the hallway. A F2F meeting can also occur with individuals in different physical spaces using video-conferencing tools such as Google Hangouts. Voice meetings can happen with telephone conference calls or VoIP (Voice over IP) conversations using Skype. Synchronous text meetings can take place in a live Google Doc, through a Twitter exchange, or in iChat. Asynchronous text meetings can take place in a Google Doc or simply over email.

None of these modes is intrinsically good or bad. Instead it is important to understand what is gained and what is missing from each mode when making a decision about what type of communication structure to engage or what kind of meeting to organize. For example, a meeting can take place with a smaller subgroup of a larger committee or department, or a meeting can be run without requiring all members to be in the same space (some can participate virtually, while others can be sitting in the room).

It is also important to return to the fundamental rationale for working in teams to begin with: to achieve goals that cannot be achieved by a single person working in isolation.

When Steve and Reshan first started using technology to enhance teaching and learning in schools (more than a decade ago), one of the first truisms to pick up steam was that using an electronic message board could help quieter students to participate in your classroom discussions. Steve and Reshan saw the efficacy of this insight early and often—and, these days, it is one of the main reasons they introduce a tool like Edmodo into their classes. A well-run classroom discussion is a great way to challenge students, air and stretch ideas, and even collect formative assessment data. But some students are simply more comfortable—and productive—when they are invited to show their knowledge and skills in a different mode.

If you are responsible for surfacing talent on a team, for ensuring that the team gives all it can, changing up the communication channel can do more than simply free up people to work in ways that they want to; it can help them reveal aspects of themselves, and their abilities, that they might not be able to show in a more traditional, F2F meeting–driven venue. What happens when the person who talks too much in F2F meetings is forced to type his or her thoughts into a comment box instead? What happens to the person who talks too little? What happens to interruption patterns?

A relevant platform that has been making a lot of positive noise in business, and that is just starting to inch into schools, is called Slack. Many people are cheering for it because it is proving to reduce dependency on email and on the need to hold meetings. Who wouldn't love such a product? Slack recently closed a $160 million round of funding, valuing the company at $2.6 billion.

Photo courtesy of Slack

Slack describes itself as “a platform for team communication: everything in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go.” In its HTML header, it includes the phrase “Be less busy.” It is a combination of instant messaging, Twitter-style chat, and Evernote (because of the archival and searchable nature of the content).

Reshan was first introduced to Slack by his Explain Everything colleagues in the Poland office. They were using it to communicate across departments but also to communicate among the whole staff. Significant decisions at Explain Everything about the design of the app, the direction of the business, and more have all been mediated by Slack, with participants working in different time zones and countries. Though it is another platform—and thus another app, another login, another thing to check, and another habit to build—it somehow balances simplicity on the surface with incredible depth and reliability beneath. It also has a terrific search function.

A few months later, Reshan joined another organization that also was using Slack as its communication platform. The coworking space AlleyNYC uses Slack to make announcements to the three hundred–plus companies using their space, but individuals also use it as an opportunity to share ideas and ask questions. At AlleyNYC, Slack serves as a virtual network within a physical network. For example, Reshan posted the CV of someone interested in a summer internship to the #development channel and within hours five companies were interested in talking to the student who had asked him for this favor.

After a short time, and seeing two organizations that are vital to him using the tool, Reshan decided to give it a try for a small venture he ran with nine high school seniors (Startup 101, first mentioned in Belief 2). Knowing that the members would be working on different projects, and possibly working in different places, this platform would provide a real-time connection to bridge distance. It would, in fact, allow Startup 101 to function in a much—much!—different way than any other high school academic experience that these nine students had ever had. They could work on the project, and work with one another, whether they chose to come to the physical “classroom” space or not. Some days, Reshan would insist on F2F meetings, though most days the students would decide where to work. Slack made this flexibility possible. In addition, Slack allowed Reshan to open up the Startup 101 experience to others; he invited outside mentors and advisors to join in the conversation.

Students were invited to join Slack on the first day of the program. Other than a quick overview of channels versus messages, Reshan offered very little guidance. Once the students got comfortable with the medium, which took about one day, they started using it often and always. At first they thought they had to use the @channel syntax in order to send a message, so on day one there were a lot of notifications about every comment, but they soon realized that such a command was needed only to force a notification to their peers' devices. By the second day they realized it was not necessary except for important alerts, which they self-categorized. They contributed twelve communications in the first day, and this daily volume increased by a factor of 3 by the end of the week. A quick glance at the archives shows that they contributed an average of 150 communications per week. They introduced shared Dropbox and Google Drive folders, asked for feedback on visual designs and business plans, and decided where and what time to eat lunch. As the overseer of the project, Reshan could check in on the Slack channels from anywhere to have a sense of what the students were working on, what questions they had, and where they might be at any time. On Slack the team handled small, logistical things like field excursion travel plans, but they also worked on, and worked out, big, mission-critical problems. An example of the latter is how they decided what tool to use to build their constituent survey, how to analyze and share the results, and how to make use of their resulting insights during their final pitch to a group of potential investors.

Slack allows us to make a point that, for those who are willing to participate in a new way and take responsibility for their learning and communication in a new environment, meeting structures need not remain static. Inside Slack you can keep track of all communications, which is really what a meeting is. You can link to Google Docs when you want to build larger thinking spaces. You can generate new topics, new content areas. And the truly beautiful thing is that anyone within the space can launch these tasks, so the agenda is not controlled by one person; it is really controlled by the flow of work itself and by the needs of the team. Thus, the group sets the norms and lets the norms evolve. There is no fixed system for moving tasks or communicating. The group dictates what works for them through their use. The leader helps them see what is working for them and what is not working. And it all becomes searchable.

Trello is another tool that is challenging our meeting, collaboration, and productivity habits. It describes itself as “the easy, free, flexible, and visual way to manage your projects and organize anything.” And it is another tool that came into Reshan's (and thereafter Steve's) life because of his work with Explain Everything, where the team uses it to set goals and monitor progress of tasks. It has guided them through development challenges, artwork design, and the creation of marketing materials.

When learning about the second edition of their initial book prototype, Reshan and Steve decided to use Trello to keep track of all the moving parts within Google Docs. Email remained sufficient for originating tasks. But given other systems that both Reshan and Steve maintain for their personal organization (for example, inbox zero and iCal), and the amount of condensed work and external deadlines, we needed something less linear and, more important, less intrusive to other, existing systems.

Desktop computer operating systems have files and folders. Evernote uses notes and notebooks. Trello uses boards and cards. Similar to using a sticky note board or cork board, you have boards that you can imagine are on a wall, and then cards that have specific categories or tasks within a category. Text and attachments can be added to a card, and a labeling system allows you to color code the progress or status of an item.

Photo courtesy of Trello: Adam Simms

Trello integrates with Slack, so that if a task is completed or updated in Trello, an announcement can be sent in Slack to the relevant individuals or to a specific channel.

Let us compare this functionality to the ideal scenario after a F2F meeting. After a long meeting, the leader generally consolidates and distributes follow-up actions in a timely fashion. But, in schools, where leaders are surrounded by hundreds of fellow humans who need their attention, they can't always process their notes immediately after meetings. Things come up. Sometimes it is easier to head home and think, “I'll get to those notes later.” Sometimes days pass; sometimes the notes remain mere scrawls on a pad or in a program. So, the possibility of automating part of this responsibility by connecting Trello, or some similar application, to Slack, or some similar application, is incredibly enticing. Doing so would take work off the leader's plate; more important, it would all but guarantee that the leader's team would receive continual, reliable updates on their shared work-in-progress.

Preparation

We are mentioning Slack and Trello not because we think you should rush out and use them (though they are pretty amazing and definitely worth considering, especially for some of your forward-thinking teams). We hold them up as examples of how the world of work could change if you let it. We hold them up to remind you that there are other ways to organize teams. The technology is getting better every day, and students who experience this technology (maybe because they work with someone like Reshan when they are eighteen) could be applying for jobs at your school in a few short years. Will you be ready for them? Will your school be an enticing place of employment for them?

Slack and Trello offer opportunities for anyone, in any industry, looking to shake up their collaborative practices and potentially reduce the number of F2F meetings that are necessary in any given work cycle.

But you cannot simply drop a new technology onto a faculty or a team and expect that it will replace the need to meet F2F. Arriving at a point of reduced F2F meetings (some would call this nirvana) takes consideration and skill. You can only give people control of their time when they are willing to dive into something that is structured and designed to meet their needs.

If you want to mess productively with sacred meeting structures, you have to prepare the people on your team. Though many people complain when they have to attend F2F meetings, they may not be entirely comfortable leaving them behind, or may be less comfortable moving to an unfamiliar online environment.

Think about the meetings you attend (and don't run) on a regular basis. You probably wander in near the start of the meeting. Maybe you have done some thinking in advance; maybe you have not. You grab a snack if your leader has provided one. You socialize. You have a set role to play; even the jokes in some meetings will wander down well-worn and comfortable pathways. You look around the room at the other participants and bask in the warm glow of validation—you, too, have a seat at the table. In fact, because it is a table, there are only so many seats. That scarcity is attractive; it confers status. Though you might make better use of your time elsewhere, you are certainly not uncomfortable. When the leader arrives, he or she produces an agenda. He or she gives a report or asks for a report. You drift in and out of focus. Eat another cookie. The coffee is warm. When the spirit moves you, you ask a question. Sometimes someone asks you a question. Sometimes you vote. You might leave with a task or maybe just a vague understanding of what transpired. On the way out, you roll your eyes at a friend, who rolls his eyes back at you. All part of the production.

Okay, so maybe some of that prior paragraph is an exaggeration. But if you want to move away from F2F meetings, even just a few times a year, you have to move against substantial inertia, substantial institutional memory, and substantial beliefs of “That's the way we've always done things.”

Also, you may be asking people to do more than they have usually done. It is worth noting, and remembering, that in an online meeting, responsibility shifts from the person who called the meeting to the people participating in the meeting. F2F, the meeting is dropped on people, and often, they tolerate it until they can slide out from under it. Move away from that model to something more digital and the meeting is then built, keystroke by keystroke and moment by moment, by the participants.

So you have to prepare people for the shift in responsibility, and the amped-up participation requirement, that happens when you move a meeting online. As Jillian, Reshan's student, said earlier, “Teams have to recognize and be motivated to become more efficient in their communication. Without this ability, I do not think that teams will be using the application most effectively.”

If you plan to experiment with alternative meeting formats, first call your team together (yes, F2F) and explain what you will try and why you will try it. Then, explain to them, or even show them, what they will have to do to participate. You have to invest some time up front before an online option can become a habit.

And you have to acknowledge, up front, that your first—and maybe your second and third—online meeting might go awry. Explain that possibility to people; tell them that you are committed to moving some of your meetings online out of respect for their time and talent, and that you want them to become adept at participating in such meetings so that such meetings become another tool for the team to rely on as they seek to do meaningful work together (remember your Agile methodology—individuals and interactions are more important than processes and tools. The latter can, does, and should change as needed in Agile organizations).

Explain, too, that you expect your team members to participate vigorously, to be as curious and committed and engaged as ever. If, for example, you replace a meeting with an email and a request for feedback, it's not okay for someone to fail to read the email. And it is not okay for someone to merely glance at the email. Replacing a F2F meeting with an online meeting grants people autonomy to do the work at a time that suits them, not to avoid the work altogether. There is a deep irony here: that we sometimes waste the most attentive and responsible people's time in F2F meetings because we cannot count on the least attentive and least responsible people to read emails.

Next, be sure people know what they need to know about the technology. You might have to invest some time on training. In schools, we are often so busy that we cannot even think about upfront costs to make something easier six months from now. A blended leader invests early to save—again and again—late.

Finally, do not go overboard; do not replace all your F2F meetings all at once. People can feel disconnected if they do not sit in the same room with their teams. There is a social element that is lost when you take that away. Like many transitional phases, and like blended leadership itself, a hybrid of old and new probably works best. If you can cut short some of your F2F meetings by digitally lengthening them, you will serve people's needs (for time and balance) as well as their talents (they do not have to perform on the spot always), and you will allow work to grow and iterate and mature for as long as possible.