Derek Neighbors, Jade Meskill, Clayton Lengel-Zigich, and Roy van de Water discuss:

What is more important, principles or practices?

Transcript

Jade Meskill:  Hello welcome to another episode of Agile weekly podcast. I am Jade Meskill.

Roy van de Water:  I am Roy van de Water.

Derek Neighbors:  I am Derek Neighbors.

Clayton Lengel‑Zigich:  I am Clayton Lengel‑Zigich.

Jade:  Guys, I wanted to talk today on what is more important, principles or practices?

Roy:  Explain?

Derek:  Or use it in a sentence.

[laughter]

Jade:  What is more important, principles or practices? Dealing with a lot of teams, I've seen Agile presented in many different ways.

Sometimes it is very process focused and practice focused, sometimes it's about the principles without a lot of either prescriptive ideas of how process or practices would work like how do you get the best results from a team? What's more important focusing on the principles or focusing on the practices?

Derek:  This is a faith versus works question ‑‑ and loaded.

Jade:  It sure is.

Clayton:  I view myself as a principles kind of guy. In this context, the practices are something that you could do probably quick, but for them to have long‑lasting impact or to make more sense so people understand why they might be doing these practices, you do need the principles.

To answer your question, you need both of them.

Jade:  It depends. Is that right? [laughs]

Roy:  Yes. It depends on the level of team you're applying them to. It is extremely important to have principles from the very beginning. If you rely only on principles, it's very difficult for novices to be able to do much with raw principles.

If I say, "Lying is bad. Don't lie." But you have no experience with what lying even is. Is a white lie OK? ‑‑ all of these nuanced things. You might be able to say, ''I know lying's bad, but I got put in this situation. I don't know what to do with it."

I do the wrong thing even though I have the principle, because I don't understand how the principle works. I tend to find that principles are very short, concrete things that have a lot of nuance.

The only way to develop the skill of what is in that nuance is to have a whole lot of practice. With novices, it's very important to put the guide rails on. To say like do this thing, almost cargo cult it to a certain degree like do this thing, but reinforce the principle behind why you're doing that thing.

Once you understand the classic Miyagi's son like wax the car, wax on, wax off. I don't know why I'm waxing on. I don't know why I wax off. I don't know why I'm painting the fence. It seems kind of frustrating.

You tell me that I'm going to be this really great karate fighter someday but I don't get it because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Then at that one moment that you know that I have enough practice under my boat, you can show me how it relates to the principle in a meaningful way and it kind of clicks.

From that point forward, I can let the practice be more dynamic to the situation. I think a lot of it depends of what level you're at. It's very difficult to teach principles without introducing some form of practice. It's very dangerous to only focus on practice and not have people understand the principles behind the practices.

Jade:  It sounds to me like you're describing a balance or attention between those two. How do you know when is the right...what's the right balance for the right team? How do you gauge that?

Derek:  Let me give you the answer that will work for everybody. I don't have it.

[laughter]

Derek:  That's going to be something that is worn out of experience, but that's the troubles. You don't have the experience to make that call yet.

Jade:  If you're a coach or you're a score master, you're performing some role with that team and expected to guide them in some way. How do you figure out where to push and where to pull?