Agile Product people: is your inner Lisa Simpson making life harder for you?

Complexity, perfectionism, and the shame of not knowing all the answers

In case you’re worried, I love Lisa Simpson. She’s smart, funny, and cares about doing the right thing. She’s awesome. (You’re probably waiting for the “but…”. There isn’t one.) And some of the brilliant people I get to work with remind me a bit of her.

In school, I imagine these people (not always girls, in my analogy) had the neatest handwriting, the tidiest exercise book, and always, always had everything they needed for the day packed in their efficiently-organised schoolbag. Their homework was always on time and thoroughly completed with no mistakes. If there was a spelling test, they’d get 10/10. If there was a gold star to be awarded, it was theirs. They were probably captain of at least one school sports team. They’d be easy to dislike just out of jealousy, if they weren’t also kind, and friendly, and nice.

Maybe you don’t recognise yourself here – you remember being mortified the one time you brought in your Wednesday schoolbooks on a Tuesday. Maybe there was one person in the class whose handwriting you were a bit jealous of. And, despite your best efforts, by the end of term, maybe your exercise book covers were starting to fray around the edges. Another thing about Lisa Simpsons is they strive so hard to be perfect, they can be horribly self-critical, will agonise for ages over the slightest imperfection, and will remember it years later.

I’ve noticed that quite a few Lisa Simpsons go on to be product managers. And if you’re one of them, leading a product team to perform at its best can mean working in ways that are really, really uncomfortable.

In product teams we very often deal with complex problems. Problems which, by their nature, can’t be solved by thinking really hard about them, no matter how smart you are. (That approach is more likely to work for complicated problems. For a really great introduction to Cynefin framework and the difference between complicated and complex, read this post by Liz Keogh.) Complex problems are best solved through trying some things and watching what happens, then deciding what to do next. Probe, sense, respond.

And if you’ve always been rewarded for getting things right first time, and learned that working hard to figure things out, thorough planning and preparation are the keys to success, it’s not surprising if you feel some resistance.

If you grew up with Lisa Simpson’s values and hold those behaviours as things good, hardworking people do, the Probe-Sense-Respond approach can look a lot like winging it. Not having done your homework. Laziness. Things to be ashamed of.

Making good use of the agile practices, and the deep, contextual knowledge that work so well for complex problems is hard work and does require preparation, just not the Plan-Everything-Up-Front kind. It’s more the kind that needs you to be ready for whatever happens next. To know what signals you’re looking for, wanted and unwanted, how you’re going to spot them and make sense of them (and having the practices and tools set up to do that), and being ready to respond. This is where a collaborative team, with a range of skills and experience and understanding of the environment the operate in, is a huge advantage. Neil Mullarkey recently wrote brilliantly about the difference between Improv and improvisation, here. There’s discipline to being able to react in the moment. It is most definitely not the same as winging it.

This, I think, is one of the biggest barriers for some people to feel at home with truly agile methods. It’s the voice in our heads that says “you need to do all the planning and preparation before you start work” and “you should be able to figure it out if you’re smart enough”.

Letting go of those ideas is hard, but if they can, Lisa Simpsons will be a lot happier and more successful in dealing with complex problems.