Professionalisation of Agility, or Striating Agile Practice…
A friend recently suggested that it was time to regulate agile coaches; they cited (legitimate, in my view) concerns about some of the views, opinions and approaches espoused by some people in the domain. Like academia, my friend suggested, we should regulate or self-regulate: one should not be able to call oneself a professor without having peers recognise and validate one’s levels of experience, knowledge and skill. I confess, I too have had this view, originally about IT consultants in the early-noughties: so often one sees consultants go in, give advice and implement systems, but from the outside, it is patent that this consulting does not benefit the client nearly as much as the consultant and their firm. And of course, latterly, agility has become quite the cash cow being milked to desiccation by the big consulting firms.
It’s first useful to distinguish between professionalism as a personal approach to probity and integrity in one’s occupation, and professionalism or professionalisation as “a route taken collectively by members of an occupational group who refine and guard their knowledge base, [and] set boundaries around who can enter and what the limits of practice will be” (Davies, 2001, p. 345). To be clear, regulating a profession has the latter meaning: “Agile Coach” as a protected title which can only be bestowed by authorised regulatory bodies which define who can call be called an Agile Coach, and what practices are acceptable by people who have been granted that title.
It’s worth also thinking about what we mean by agile coaching. Do we mean the classic “scrum master” model who supports a team in adopting a particular, normative approach to knowledge work? Do we mean people who are specialists in products who are able to mentor and develop effective product management capabilities in an organisation? Do we mean those of us who coach executives to empower employees to be able to make reactive and proactive adaptations to actual and anticipated environmental changes? Do we mean the consultants who come in and sell a particular way of working into an organisation, and who then manage its rollout, departing without any accountability for impact? Do we mean the people who, recognising a problem, suggest an improvement to a product or process and who are able to effect that change? Do we meant the people providing education on agile (and lean) approaches to process and product management and development? Do we mean the thinkers who outline ideas and theories which others then implement? All of these? Some of these? This is just part of the range of conceptual domain of “agile coaching”.
Effects of Professionalisation
Professor Celia Davies, who I cited above, was (when she wrote the book from which I quoted) Professor of Health Care at the Open University, considered the issues of professionalisation in the light of nursing. She made the following observations:
First, professionalisation is incredibly difficult, she refers to it as a “sheer unreality”. In the context of nursing, placing the regulation of behaviour entirely on the shoulders of a regulating body (supported by education systems and employers) doesn’t have the expected effect: the staffing needs of hospital wards, community care and social care overwhelm any system which attempts so to do.
Second, she cites Salvage (1985) in identifying six challenges which professionalisation raises (Davies, 2001, p. 346, note that each of the enumerated emphasised headlines below are quotes, except 6); I attempt to apply these challenges to agile coaching below. I should note that the context of professionalisation in nursing is somewhat different to that of agile practitioners: the argument for the professionalisation of nursing was as much around giving them more professional autonomy and broadening their practice domain (for example, the rise of specialist nurses and independent nurse practitioners) as it was restricting acceptable behaviours.
- Professionalism is divisive. Most agile coaching, and, dare I say, actual operational improvements, is effected by “untrained” and “unprofessional” people. By denying the legitimacy and knowledge of these people — who are essential to our goals of continuous improvement — we undermine our ability to work effectively and to effect change. We also create barriers to entering the profession, to accessing knowledge, and to being effective.
- Professionalism seeks to impose a uniform view. There is no one way to do or be or become agile. This reminds me of the idea that we should teach people “the agile mindset”: it devalues the diversity of experience and lived knowledge that is brought by the range of people who come to agility. It also means that acknowledging the power dynamics and interests in play becomes more difficult: for example, what role would the big consultancies and their employees play in setting the boundaries of knowledge and practices?
- Professionalism denies the needs of its workers. In nursing, this is a contemporary topic, as nurses seek to assert the need to meet their own needs (eg. access to incomes sufficient to support families, access to food, access to rest) against managers and politicians demanding “professionalism” (which rhetorically means suppressing individual needs for the greater good). In agile coaching, would the expectations prevent us as practitioners from meeting our own needs, and achieving our own self-actualisation and transcendence?
- Professionalism emphasises an individual approach. Organisations are open, complex systems and processes which exist within open, complex systems and processes: the actions of individual practitioners are heavily constrained by the practice context which is outside their control. Holding them accountable for those open, complex systems and processes is unjust. For example, if a coach promotes a particular approach in a team, but a manager actively undermines it by withholding resources or limiting the number of people available, should the coach be held accountable for the failure of their professional advice?
- Professionalism does not challenge the status quo. By the time a radical thinker gets to a position within a professional system of regulation to change anything, they have demonstrated beyond doubt they will do everything they can to not change anything. Does professionalisation lead to more radical thinking?
- Professionalism focuses on professional group, and not the needs of clients. By directing attention to the professional group, we run the risk of ossifying practice norms, such that we are unable to adapt to changing needs of our customers and employers.
Thus, professionalisation creates elites, it normalises and systematises professional power dynamics and accountability, and these are issues of which we should be critical. After all, as Davies notes, “Doctors acting collectively have put ‘profession before public’ in their emphasis on the exclusive character of their knowledge, their insistence on unity and their preservation and enhancement of their own status” (2001, p. 347): it would be foolhardy to see to create a system which undermines the very motive for action.
By creating elites, professionalisation reduces diversity in multiple ways. First, since professionalisation mandates a standardised curriculum for membership (whatever combination of formal education, on the job training, reflection and otherwise informal practices, which must, of course, be formalised to be operationalisable), the ideas held by practitioners will be reduced. Whereas the current process means people come to the profession from a range of backgrounds (developers, testers, product specialists, accountants, HR professionals etc…) that diversity will be reduced as a result of a set training curriculum because going through such training has costs. Even if those costs are just the opportunity costs of time (on top of other work, or spending time with family), it raises the bar of who will be able to enter the profession. With the impoverishment of the pool of applicants comes a reduction in the diversity of ideas, along with the standardisation of the ideas approved and taught in the curriculum. Innovation becomes the reserve of the researcher elites within the profession, rather than the myriad of exploratory research undertaken everyday by a diverse agility coach population.
When we talk about professionalising agile coaching and agile practitioners, we need to consider the systemic and processual contexts in which we are working, the goals we are trying to achieve, and the technologies (including methods) available to us.
Forms of Knowledge, and the Striation of Smooth Space
Deleuze and Guattari in their 1980 book A Thousand Plateaus describe the distinctions between nomadic science and Royal science, which sit in the contexts of smooth space and striated space respectively. They use the example of the skilled stone masons of the early Middle Ages, who would arrive at building sites — cathedrals and bridges and the like — and take the rough stones delivered to the site, shaping them perfectly to fit where needed. These nomadic professionals would move fluidly from site to site as needed, carrying their knowledge, experience and tools with them, making their skills valuable and relatively expensive.
Later in the Middle Ages, the rise of the architect led to a different model. They would design templates with specific dimensions, and with specific characteristics, and in specific volumes, and send them to the quarry, having them cut by cheap local labourers before they were sent to site and assembled. This was more predictable: it also enabled division of labour (between the people shaping the stones and the people laying the stones), and drove down the cost of building; it was an early form of production line management.
Before the architects, the space being built was smooth: it wasn’t marked with measures and fixed ideas, and the building was collectively created by the masons on site. The masons would move around the country where needed, and thus impressive churches would built in places where they were paid to build them.
The coming of the architect profession striated the space: it added lines and measures and controls, it removed independence and it created a lower-power workforce who could easily be replaced, disempowering the independent practitioners. (Deleuze and Guattari say that the smooth space is like a desert, which reshapes itself, and in which people wander to where they need to be, whether that’s to an oasis for water, to a market to trade, or to resources for materials. In contrast, the striated space is typified by the city, where everything is measured, time is coordinated and people go where they told.)
The nature of the knowledge of the mason and the architect is different. The mason’s science, derived from practice in different contexts, and from learning the characteristics of different types of stone in different parts of buildings, is not only nomadic in that it arises from the practitioner wandering from place to place, but also arises from nomos, laws which govern behaviour which have extrapolated and identified over time. For example, astronomy (astra nomos) originally arose from observing and identifying laws of the movement of planets and stars. The Royal science, practiced by the architect, and commissioned by the King or Tyrant, is systematised, measured, controlled and centrally taught, arising from logos: word, discourse and reason. Psychology (psych-logos) is a more systematised approach to understanding human behaviour.
There is, of course, always interplay and exchange between the nomadic and Royal sciences: psychology certainly has it’s nomic tendencies, and clearly modern astronomy has risen to the standard of Royal science. But we can also look at practitioners like doulas, whose role it is to help people feel comfortable during significant life and medical events (most commonly known in the context of childbirth and related events, but who also attend situations like deaths, supporting both the individual experiencing the event and their friends and family. Doulas are not healthcare professionals, but provide a range of services and support skills which help to advocate for the individual. Some of what they do is supported by Royal sciences; for example, they may well learn ideas and techniques from midwifes. Some of what they do is learned in context and thus nomadic in nature, although we also see that knowledge get striated and adopted by midwifes, promoting it to Royal science over time. (There are, it should be noted, professional midwives and nurses who object to doulas on the basis they believe the nomads are stepping into their striated territory.)
We agile practitioners and coaches have our feet in both camps. We rely both on what-works-in-context nomadic knowledge, and what-works-universally Royal knowledge: how one persuades a team to change their practices vs how one measures flow of work. We draw on psychology, sociology, geography and mathematics as much as we draw on charisma, stories, metaphor and gut feeling. If we are to be effective, we combine both in an alchemical approach, combining logos and nomos, studies and magic, to achieve goals in complex environments.
To Professionalise or Not to Professionalise?
I am sympathetic to the idea of professionalisation of agile coaches: I have seen the damage that can be wrought by over-confident practitioners, or the limits on those operating in heavily constrained contexts over which they have no control. I am also aware that, if we are to promote ourselves as a regulated profession, it will reduce diversity of people and ideas and practices; it will increase the cost of entry to the profession for talented, nomads; it will make individuals personally accountable for the effects of systems outside their control; and it will, ultimately, create an elite who have the potential to be the basis of their own destruction.
The question ultimately becomes whether the costs of professionalisation are worth the anticipated benefits, and whether or not, ultimately, it would have the desired effect. I wonder if there aren’t alternative approaches which might be more effective in the long term. For example, if a particular educational and validation approach to agile coaching was either demonstrably more effective (ie. statistically better outcomes for given criteria) or less harmful (ie. statistically fewer cases of harms arising to businesses and individuals from interventions, or fewer cases of legal liability), then it would not take much to partner with insurance companies. They would be keen to reflect that reduced risk in their professional indemnity insurance, or to decline to insure people who have been through programmes which have demonstrably higher rates or harm or lower effectiveness. Companies would also be more keen to hire people who have been through the statistically proven accreditation systems, and thus such people would command greater fees (assuming, of course, that it doesn’t result in devaluation of the skills market when everybody shifts to identical training standards). This would, of course, be de facto regulation, but it’s done on the basis of evidence of effectiveness, not by legal force.
It is not merely the systems in which we work that we should consider, it is also the systems which validate our education and experience. There are alternatives to statutory regulation which would likely be more effective, garner less resentment, and which would increase confidence in the quality of the work that we do.
Davies, Celia (2001) ‘Professionalism and the Conundrum of Care’ in Davey, B, Gray, A, and Seale, C (2001) Health and Disease: A Reader, 3rd Edn (Open University Press, Maidenhead)
Deleuze, G, and Guattari, F (2013, original 1980) A Thousand Plateaus (Bloomsbury Press, London & New York)
