We work in an uncertain world, and our main goal in pursuing agility is to confront the unknown. 🕶️ Pursuing predictability causes us to lay a veneer of fiction over the real world 🌍, making it conform to a plan of what we would like to believe is true rather than what really is.

Predictability is an illusion 🪄. Those things we call “plans/Forecasts”? They’re just guesses with a nice-sounding wrapper 🎁 around them.

𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐚 𝐬𝐞𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐝𝐲𝐬𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬

Being forced 😤 to produce predictability warps reality and lets the following scenarios happen:

1️⃣ Predictable plans

Many organizations that somehow think that the future 🔮 can be predicted with accuracy and question a plan is viewed as “being negative”. And punishing 👩‍🏫 people because they didn’t guess correctly is a waste of time.

2️⃣ Predictable productivity

Delivering value is important ‼️, not how many “units of work” (like story points) were delivered. What is better: driving 100 miles 🏎️ per hour in the wrong direction, or one mile per hour in the right🎯?

To go faster, place smaller bets, run shorter experiments, and evaluate where you are more frequently.

3️⃣ Predictable careers

It may seem scary that we don’t know where we are headed 🧑‍🦯. So how do we prepare ourselves for what lies ahead? By cultivating flexibility 🤸, adaptability, and the ability to learn quickly 🏫. Just as with Scrum, we succeed personally by trying new approaches 🆕 and evaluating the results, in measured experiments.

4️⃣ Predictable agile transformation

Organizations seem to believe 🧠 that they can predictively plan how they are going to “become agile”. "Agile" is not a tool 🔧, that can be “installed” or “rolled out”. It is a way of thinking and acting that involves continually 🔄️ seeking better results and better outcomes. We cannot plan how this is going to proceed!

#scrum #predictability #agileTransformation