Joep Schuurkes (Posts about values)

The difference between a dead and an alive Agile Manifesto

Joep Schuurkes — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 22:00:00 GMT

One of my favorite books on leadership is "Extreme Ownership" by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. I can imagine some people bouncing off of the book because of the Navy SEAL angle, but to be honest I'm a bit of a sucker for the whole military leadership genre.

The second part of "Extreme Ownership" covers four critical leadership concepts, the "Laws of Combat". Curiously enough, you can map these to the four values in the Agile Manifesto. These four concepts do come in a specific order, so you have to shuffle the Agile values around a little bit:

Cover and Move maps to customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
Simple maps to working software over comprehensive documentation.
Prioritize and Execute maps to responding to change over following a plan.
Decentralized Command maps to individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

To me this mapping is interesting in two ways. It sheds a different light on the four Agile values. And it's an example of how I think we should be engaging with the Agile Manifesto, in a way that keeps it alive.

Uncovering Agile micro-skills at FroGS conf

Joep Schuurkes — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 15:56:09 GMT

At the second FroGS conf Open Space on 12 March 2022 I facilitated a session based on my blog post "Four skills to embody the four Agile values". My goal with the session was to uncover more Agile (micro-)skills. In this post I'll share what we did during the session and I'll close off with some thoughts on the biggest challenge of this exercise: too many skills. Before I start however, a big thank you to everyone who participated in the session!

What we value

I opened the session with asking people to add stickies to the board of things they valued in Agile software development. When was I preparing the Miro board before the session, I labeled this part of the board "values". Then I remembered I had decided earlier to label it "what we value", so as to avoid the discussion about what values are and aren't. The topic did come up (i.e. the relation between values, ethics and morals), so I was glad I could respond by saying it's a great topic, but not for this session.

Four skills to embody the four Agile values

Joep Schuurkes — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 16:04:06 GMT

If you're familiar with the Agile Manifesto, you're familiar with its four values:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Recently this made me wonder: how do you apply these values? How do you live them? What skills do you need to embody them? In this post I won't be sharing any definitive or complete answers, but as a starting point I have identified four skills needed to embody the four Agile values.