Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi, My name is Elizabeth Woodward and I want to welcome you to our Halloween edition of
Lessons in Enterprise Agility. We are having a Halloween edition because today is October
31st. So for those of you outside of the United States who are not familiar with this holiday,
it is a holiday where we have people dressing up and children get candy and there are many
creepy crawly things. There are spiders. We have skeletons everywhere. And we carve pumpkins
into scary jack-o-lantern faces and we roast pumpkin seeds. It's a very fun holiday here
in the United States. Well, there's also a movie called "The Nightmare Before Christmas."
And you're probably wondering what does this have to do with agile or agility or DevOps,
for that matter. I'll show you. So, this is Jack Skelington. He is the Pumpkin King in
the movie, "The Nightmare Before Christmas." And he is beautiful at Halloween. He knows
everything about scariness and creepiness and crawliness. And he is king of Halloween
town. And all of the people in Halloween Town work to make Halloween. Well, he gets bored
and he comes across Christmas Town and he decides that he's going to take over Christmas.
He sees the lights. He sees the logs in the fireplaces and the Christmas trees and the
snow falling. And he sees Santa Claus and he sees Reindeer and he wants to be a part
of that. So he has his checklist. You know, he has Christmas lights, wrapping paper, gifts,
Christmas trees and on and on. And he takes that back to Halloween Town and he shares
this checklist with everyone in the town and says they're taking over Christmas. Okay,
so they begin to follow the checklist. They create wrapping paper. They create gift boxes,
but with a twist. Because they still have the Halloween spirit, their wrapping paper
is a little on the creepy side and their bows are creepy. And when you open the packages,
instead of cute little gifts, warm presents, creepy things spring out of the boxes. And
the music that is supposed to be so beautiful ends up being creepy, scary music. And so,
as you can imagine, to make a long story short, it ends up being an abysmal failure even though
they have the checklist of what it takes to create Christmas because they are--they are
making Christmas. They don't quite get the spirit of it. And I think that sometimes we
might see enterprise agile transformations and organizations that are trying to "make
agile" rather than to "be agile." Or, we're "doing agile" rather than "being agile." And
so on this Halloween season, I wanted for you to take that and think a bit about that.
I had a meeting with an executive a few days ago and he had a slide deck 72 slides of details
from his organization about who was doing what and to every last detail what was going
on. And he said, I don't really need that. I need to know where the blockers are, where
are the issues, and where do you need my help to deal with that. That's the spirit, right?
That's agile. That's what we're trying to get to. So think about it, um, and I wish
you the best this happy holiday and I look forward to our next session together.