Afonso Franco wrote a great post with a lot of empathy for the community, struggling when facing an environment in which some models just seem to be right and “used by the ones who understand things”.
Combined with a bunch of thoughts I talked about last year, it led me to record this video. Kudos to Afonso for the clarity of his post.
Here the transcript of my video:
Repeat after me: “Models are fiction.”
That’s a thing I repeatedly said last year: Models you read are just that: fiction, like a novel, a nice fairytale. Created in hindsight, trying to condense abstract ideas so they can be taught, communicated.
They are not reality, they are not what happened. They can’t be. What happened is too detailed, cannot be understood, is highly contextual.
That’s where Afonso Franco’s post comes in — one of the best I’ve read in a long time.
He breaks it down with a simple but powerful metaphor: three pills.
Read it. The link is in the comments.
I quote:
(the stories) … have made it far too easy to feel inadequate … They dream of better, but they’re stuck comparing their messy reality to oversimplified advice and polished case studies that only show the winning side of a story.
Each time, they read: “You just need to do X, and everything will be fine.”
Each time they hear: “What separates the best from the rest is just Y, not X.”
And then he continues with the idea of three pills.
Red Pill: Oversimplification. You “just” need to do X. For most people that ends in paralysis. There is no match between the simplicity of the story and the messiness of their environment. It makes them stop dead in their tracks.
The opposite is the Blue Pill: It’s overthinking. It’s characterized by “but”. “But I could also … “
But the third pill is the one that matters: the pill of perspective — leaning into action. Treat it like this: read the model like a novel. Immerse yourself in it, enjoy! Maybe an aspect sticks with you. Maybe none. Imagine it in your context. If it fits, good. If not, forget about it. It was a nice fantasy. You don’t owe anything to that story, that model, that idealized fantasy.
And again: it does not exist in reality. Anywhere.
When someone says: all good companies work like this. It is not true. It can’t be. A) All good companies are run quite differently and B) each company is running wild and looks messy from the inside.
My experience: When a company brags about being great at something, they’re actually not. It’s where they are struggling. It’s recency bias. It’s what they’re currently fixing. They talk about their pain, not their mastery.
No model is ever necessary or sufficient. There are always complementary models that work just as well in another successful environment. Always other reasons why something succeeds. Not Scrum. Not 3 Horizons. Not Flight Levels. None of them explain everything. Ever.
Anyone saying “this is the model” is wrong. There are other successful models. It’s just a sales pitch.
Which leads us to: Narrowing options — the number of possible models — down, to standardize is bad! Keeping things open, diverse is what we need, because it gives choice and an opportunity to fit things to our complexity.
As my good friend Jabe Bloom once said: “Let’s keep Kanban weird.” And now let’s replace Kanban with anything.
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