Best feet forward?

Please don't anyone take this as advice of road safety. It's just an exercise.

Push your chair back from the computer. Just relax. Imagine that you're driving along in your car down a very familiar stretch of road. A journey that you've done lots and lots of times. Yes, that's it, mime holding the steering wheel. You can't close your eyes, because then you won't be able to read this, but in your mind's eye, imagine what you can see. Familiar roads, familiar corners, and junctions. Then suddenly, something jumps out in front of you. It's a toddler, chasing a ball. Stop! Stop! You have to STOP!

If you're used to driving a manual transmission car you probably wanted to stamp both feet straight out in front of you. One on the brake. One on the clutch. When we want to stop a car in a hurry that's our instinctive reaction. We tend not to think about it, there isn't time. But is it the best?

If the road conditions are good, it's probably the best, most effective strategy, but what if the road conditions aren't good? What if it's raining? What if it's snowing what if there's an inch of ice on the road? If the road's slippery, it's best to pump the brakes. But what do you do if you thump both feet to the floor and you start to skid? Apparently, you're supposed to turn into the skid to regain control even though this feels like exactly the wrong thing to do. People can learn to drive in wet and icy conditions, they can learn to resist their first instincts, pump the brakes and turn into the skids but it takes time and practice, rarely do people spontaneously do the right thing.

Someone was asking me yesterday why so many projects use a waterfall approach rather than an agile one. I think it's for similar reasons. In industrial societies waterfall methods are deep down in our brains. We just assume that the way that anything complicated gets done is by putting together a long, complicate plan and then trying to deliver on it. No matter how many times the result of this is the project management equivalent of skidding into a ditch, because this is our hard-wired, instinctive approach, we carry on doing it.

Agile is the project management equivalent of pumping the brakes and steering into the skids.