Is Agile a culture or a process?

That's the question Jeff Patton is asking on AgileProductDesign.com. It's a question I've also been thinking about, ever since Chris and I shared a deep dish pizza at Patxi’s in Palo Alto last week with Pat Reed, supreme mistress of the IT universe at the Gap.

What Pat has accomplished in terms of furthering agile adoption, and the thinking she's put into the hows and whys, is fairly stunning. She has a psych degree, too, which inclines her to always circle back to the human side of why we do the things we do–and she said, in effect, that the biggest stumbling block of all wasn't the teaching (or even the accounting) but enculturation–the transition to an agile culture.

In his post, Patton goes on to say that on one level "culture is process," and uses the example of what it means culturally to be an American–work hard, go to college, get a good job, have 2.5 kids, etc. Our culture, he says, is comprised of these processes,  which we then adopt or rebel against. The point, he says, isn't that we do all of these things, but that as members of the culture that holds them as values, we always return to measure ourselves against them.

Here is where it gets interesting for those of us who teach agile:

We must teach process, but if we try to teach this stuff as pure process–put tab a in slot b–we might get perfect adoption in the short term, but in the long run, once people revert to their human state, this system will break down. I hear a lot of "one true way-ism" around agile, statements like, "Well, if you're not doing XYZ, then it isn't agile, period!" But how useful is this? Is agile an object, a commodity to be refined to a state of purity in order to "burn clean," or is it a culture, in which we hope to live our professional lives with room to grow, fail and define ourselves, for ourselves?

In agile, we have a manifesto, some
best practices, a few schools of thought, and even, as Patton adds,
some myths and heroes. But if it is to be inhabitable as a culture, then it is vital that we use it as a framework to measure, test and strengthen ourselves against, rather than as a set of acceptance tests to pass.

To use an analogy: as human beings, we absorb much of our culture from our parents. And we accomplish this in any number of ways: by immitating them, honoring them, emulating them, and by rebelling, rejecting and defining ourselves against them. We draw strength from their guidance, and we strengthen ourselves by resisting them. Agile needs to be robust enough that we can treat it this way without breaking it.

In short, we aren't the parents here, but the children: we don't need to adopt agile; agile needs to adopt us. Only then will it be a true culture.