Instead of thinking of the three perspectives as different tribes, we see them as essential ingredients that every team and organization needs in different proportions.
Is there one true Agile? In this episode of the Humanizing Work Show we break down the three Agile tribes—People, Performance, and Process—and discuss why the conflict between them is surface-level and how they can be integrated for greater success.
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Episode Transcription
Peter Green
In the land of Agile, three tribes have emerged. Each has its own strongly held beliefs and has compiled its collection of favored techniques, articles, books, and case studies. Tribe number one, the People Tribe, describes agile as an advanced, human-centric approach to work. Tribe number two, the Performance Tribe, describes agile as a faster, more innovative approach to achieving customer and business outcomes. Tribe number three, the Process Tribe, describes agile as the modern way to create predictability, efficiency, and visibility at scale. These three tribes are engaged in a years long war for the title of “The One True Agile,” debating on the battlefields of social media, conference sessions, and user group discussions. Which tribe is right? Is there one true agile? How long can Peter keep speaking in this voice? Stay tuned to this episode of the Humanizing Work Show to find out.
But first…
Richard Lawrence
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Peter
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Richard
Ok, we are clearly having a little fun with how entrenched these three perspectives often seem. But I’m sure our listeners who have been around the agile block a few times have come across these arguments. So today we’ll look at the origins, benefits, and blind spots of each of the three tribes–the People, Performance, and Process points of view. We’ll share why we believe the conflict is actually mostly surface level, and what you can do to get the benefit of each of the three perspectives, while mitigating the blind spots.
Peter
Let’s start with the People perspective. The first value pair of the agile manifesto places individuals and interactions over processes and tools, so it’s easy to see how this tribe emerged. This tribe promotes team well-being, collaboration, and personal growth. They emphasize techniques from popular psychology, like increasing psychological safety, rethinking motivation through the lens of Self Determination Theory, and helping leaders improve through Adult Stage Development Theory. They advocate for a work environment where empathy, trust, and respect are paramount.
Richard
The people tribe often shares case studies of companies like Zappos, FAVI, and the USS Santa Fe under Turn The Ship Around author David Marquet. These organizations emphasize flat org structures, empowered people, and high levels of collaboration. These particular case studies also had significant organizational success, showcasing the potential benefits of putting people first.
Peter
The People tribe has a few blind spots. The first, stated only a bit too strongly, is a belief that if leaders would just get better at leading, their organizations would suddenly be full of “shining happy people holding hands.” The second blind spot is that the tribe often asks organizations to make a leap of faith that treating people well will lead to better business results, while struggling to provide clear and convincing evidence that it will work in this business, with these people, in this specific context. Critics argue that in our efforts to treat people well, there’s a slippery slope leading to a lack of accountability and an inability to make hard decisions to address the challenging business climate many leaders are facing.
Richard
For the origin of the Performance Tribe, look no further than the subtitle of Agile Manifesto author Jeff Sutherland’s book about Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. This tribe is all about business performance. They value speed, flow, and innovation, and strive for continuous improvement across every team and system. The Performance Tribe believes that Agile’s true potential is realized by maximizing throughput, delivering high-quality products at a rapid pace, and using fast test and learn cycles to discover new solutions to customer problems.
Peter
The performance tribe often cites case studies like Amazon, Tesla, and Google, with two pizza teams, rapid continuous integration and deployment systems, an emphasis on KPIs at Amazon and OKRs at Google, and being all in on rapid continuous improvement cycles in service of a world-changing mission like at Tesla. They embrace ideas from the Lean Startup and Human-Centered Design movements as extensions of Agile thinking. Clear strategy, cascading goals, and accountability for results are the tools of the trade. Employees are expected to devote their time, creativity, and energy to these outcomes, and many companies in this space hire for, promote, and incentivize those without strong commitments outside of work.
Richard
The blind spots for this tribe include the costs of relentlessly sprinting towards goals: burnout, high stress levels, and a view that any expression of vulnerability is a weakness to overcome. There’s often a certain bravado and ego celebrated in this tribe that can be challenging for anyone with different opinions or perspectives from the leaders.
Peter
Finally, we have the Process Tribe. This tribe emerged a bit later than the other two, as agile ideas spread from tech and IT into industries like finance, insurance, and healthcare. In the context of those industries, agile techniques like iterative delivery, small-sliced increments of work, and team relative estimation techniques provided frequent, more reliable techniques for managing big, complex initiatives.
Richard
The Process Tribe cites case studies like Standard Bank, Intel, and pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, with a focus on large scale process adoption, increasing the ratio of completed to committed work, and improving efficiency and delivery times.
Peter
However, this focus on predictability can lead to rigidity and resistance to change. Assuming most work is in the Cynefin Complicated domain, this tribe can sometimes over-focus on analysis and planning, then working hard to deliver against that plan. As new information emerges through doing the work, there is little room for and plenty of resistance against changing the plan to accommodate it.
Richard
While there are some deep-seated beliefs in each of these tribes that can come into conflict with the others, if we take a step back, it’s easy to see why an organization wants the benefits promised by each tribe. Every leader we’ve worked with sincerely wants to treat their people well, and they recognize that happy people are more productive. Every organization wants better performance, faster delivery, and less waste. And every organization needs to make forecasts about the future so they can decide how to allocate time, money, and people. In other words, every organization needs all three ingredients, People, Performance, and Predictability if they’re going to succeed.
Peter
One of the biggest errors we see agilists make is going into a team or organization full of advocacy for the benefits of their favorite tribe. Instead, we’ve found that taking a position of inquiry first allows us to hear what the team or organization in question is currently missing, what they value. We go pretty far in this direction when we’re speaking with our potential clients, and existing clients, and we recommend others do the same. Check out ep. 77, They’re All Customers, for the process we use.
Most of us will have come to agile through the lens of one of these tribes. My early experience with Scrum in the 2000s was that it helped us deliver a brand new product to market faster than any of the other teams at our company had done before.
Richard
And mine was similar. Our team used XP practices to get fast enough at delivering that we needed better techniques to discover what the right thing to build even was.
Peter
So Richard and I got our start in the Performance tribe, and still do quite a bit of work in that area with our Product, Team Collaboration, and Leadership offerings.
Later in my career, I went pretty deep into the People tribe when I learned more about professional coaching and leadership development.
And these days, both of us balance all three perspectives in our work. Some clients need us to help them do better planning and estimation, and we gladly help them do that. Some need to turn around their ability to innovate, and we do that. Others want to take a more human-centric approach to leadership and management, and we help with that. In our favorite clients, we get to do a mix of all three.
Richard
So instead of thinking of the three perspectives as different tribes, and you have to belong to one of them, we like to think of them as three important ingredients that different organizations need in different proportions. Strong agilists should be much more like chefs who can improvise the right ingredients for tonight’s dish, rather than cooks that follow the same recipe over and over again.
Peter
Which tribe did you get your start in? Has your perspective evolved over the years? Let us know in the comments and on our socials. And if you found this episode useful, please like, subscribe, hit the bell to get notified of new episodes on YouTube, and rate and review the show in your podcast app. That helps others learn about the show.
Thanks for tuning in!
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