The prevalent kind of Agile team training is:
- here’s what to do
- follow it until you understand it
- you can fill in the blanks, but don’t change the foundation
- if you do, we can take no responsibility for results because then you’re not doing what we said
To me this smells of “we know more than you.” but it also smells of “we don’t know so much more than you to be able to explain why this works – you just have to try it yourself.”
And it ignores the fact that maybe what they’re telling you to do is not the best thing.
The second kind of training:
- Here are some principles that if you look at your past experience you can see they have always applied
- Here’s what you can do with them
- Now, since you’re starting with new practices, here’s a set to try to start out
- See if they work
- These probably will, so don’t just abandon them
- but if they don’t work well, consider if there’s another way to get a better result
- make sure you’re attending to the result, not just an easier way
- you’ll know if you did if you can get more done in less time with higher quality
- if you get worse quality or things don’t improve, reflect on why – don’t just abandon things because it’s easier
Which way would you prefer to be trained