It’s easy to forget that failure is good – if you can fail fast enough. That’s one reason agile works so well – short iterations and work transparency let us fail fast, and everyone knows when we fail. But failure shouldn’t only be seen as negative. We learn a lot more when we fail.

I recently read a great post titled “Are you building a learning suppression system by Daryl Kulak from his upcoming book. Here’s an excerpt.

What happens in organizations is that people get punished for committing sins of commission but they do not get punished for sins of omission. This shapes the mind of a person into saying “No, we better not try that,” attempting to avoid the nasty results of commission errors while ignoring the problems of omission errors, which don’t seem to cause as much havoc.

We don’t want to suppress innovation. Mistakes should be tolerated, not punished. We want a learning organization so our teams can always adapt to change, and thrive.

More on Learning from Linda Rising

Linda gave an enlightening talk Wednesday at ADP about retrospectives, and she talked a lot about having time for thinking and learning. These are my notes on her talk, so I hope I haven’t misinterpreted anything she said. You can find more material direct from her on her site.

When confronted with practices such as pair programming or retrospectives, some managers have this reaction: “We don’t have time for thinking”.

But we aren’t trying to stop, analyze the root cause of all of our problems, and fix them all. We need to do little experiments to see if they solve some problem we’re having. If the solution works, we don’t even have to know why, we can just use it. Linda compared this to tuning a musical instrument – we can make tiny changes, and these give us lots of value.

Linda quoted Tom DeMarco’s book, Slack. You can’t learn or change if you have no slack. Linda cited research showing that not being able to express feelings and thoughts in the normal course of business weighs us down, slows us down. It sounded a lot like technical debt to me! We fret about things that aren’t going well, and if we don’t get a chance to experiment with ways to improve them, we become less and less productive, more and more unhappy.

Going back to that idea that we must tolerate failure, it’s important that we don’t criticize or blame our teammates. Every team member should feel safe to raise issues and propose ideas. Linda cited Norm Kerth’s prime directive for retrospectives: We must believe that everyone did the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time. Everyone used their skills and abilities, the available resources, to their best advantage, given the situation at hand. When we start from there, we can avoid pointing fingers, and simply try to learn: what’s going well? What’s not going so well? How can we improve? What still puzzles us?

Linda advises us to watch for stereotypes: “These people are just no good at…” She was talking in the context of retrospectives, but this is good advice for everyday work. We even stereotype ourselves. We have to believe, instead, that we can get better. Then we will.

Focus on experiments. Identify the next experiment, and ask the three questions about it at the next retrospective. Share knowledge. Look for patterns.

Time to Learn

As Linda noted, everyone says they want to learn, but few take the time to do so. Take some time to learn something new today. See what you can do to promote a learning culture within your organization. Show your manager the Google 20% rule, and the value that Google has derived from that! Lots of companies, big and small, have something similar: Wiki Wednesdays, Engineering Sprints, one hour per day devoted to professional growth. People on agile teams love learning, and it makes us happy. When we’re happy, and when we are always learning and experimenting, we can do our best work. To me, that’s what agile is all about.

My own dressage trainer tells me all the time, “It takes a million repetitions to change a bad habit.” That’s only a slight exaggeration in my case. I remind myself (and she reminds me) about 50 times a ride to correct each bad habit, for example, to put my hands closer together and keep them centered over the horse’s withers. Some of my bad habits are 50 years old, so they’re hard to fix, but I’m slowly getting better.

Discipline is a critical component of delivering high-quality software, too. We need to thoughtfully plan to use the right practices for us. We need to remind ourselves every day, via big visible charts, information radiators, retrospectives, any means that works to learn new good habits and reinforce the things we do well.

During a recent estimating meeting, our product owner (who normally knows better) asked, “About 6 weeks ago you estimated this XYZ story at 5 points. Is there any cheap, hacky way to do it for one point?” One of the developers responded, “Possibly, but we are not going to do a cheap, hacky solution”. It’s tempting to cut corners to meet a business need, but hacking in a quick fix that increases our technical debt down the road isn’t the way to do it.

Another example where discipline and good habits came into play occurred in this morning’s Scrum. A couple of the customers brought up a significant piece functionality that they had accidentally omitted from a story we’re already working on. It was tempting to say “OK, we’ll add that in too.” But it was too big a change to put into the story at this late date. We discussed possible workarounds, and one of the customers came up with one that would do the job. They will write a new story, and if we can, we’ll pull it in this sprint. If not, they’ll get it two weeks later.

Sometimes we do make compromises about quality, and implement a solution that is less than ideal. There are always business trade-offs to consider. But we don’t make these lightly. And even after more than five years of agile development, we spend time on a serious retrospective every iteration, and work hard to keep improving the way we work and the quality of our code. Some of our bad habits have been hard to fix, but we keep working at it. Our business continues to grow, which to me is the best feedback about our disciplined approach to keeping up good habits and eliminating bad habits.