TLDR

If you have been reading my postings, you have noticed that I write detailed, complex and long compositions to explain my thoughts on agile principles and transformations.  I also do this in the normal course of planning and guiding agile transformations for organizations.  I like to share the ‘conscious’ side of ‘competence’ so others can explain the ‘why’ behind the ‘how’.

Needless to say, I often get TLDR in response, as in ‘Too Long, Didn’t Read’.  I have been asked to summarize my thoughts in a summary paragraph, a short presentation, and yes, once by a boss who told me to put the important parts in the email subject line.  Somehow, there’s an expectation that if I could only shorten the concepts to bullets, the ‘aha’ would happen across the organization.  Adoption of the concepts would be self-motivated and immediate.

This leads me to ponder how a medical doctor becomes one.  Consider how the best and brightest high school students are guided to a strong ‘core’ set of biology and chemistry while getting their bachelor's degree.  In medical school, they spend their first year learning how a healthy body works, in great detail and with hands-on experience (I won’t go into detail of the hands-on experience).  Their second year is spent learning pathology, or why and how things go wrong in an unhealthy body.  They finish out their last 2 years of medical school rotating between various medical disciplines understanding the basic practices, procedures and realities while continuing to deepen their basic knowledge.  They spend years preparing for the medical exam that will determine what medical specialty that they will spend the next two to seven years being an intern after medical school.  They have board certifications to master before they are allowed to freely practice as an attending physician.

Why do they spend this much effort to learn the complexity of the human condition?  One reason is that the downside of making a mistake is so high that it can cause undue pain and suffering, even death, as well as waste time and resources on missed diagnoses.

Let’s ponder a TLDR version of medical education.  Let’s assume that we have the most excellent medical snippets from X (formerly known as Twitter), TED talks, Youtube, LinkedIn and TikTok.  Let’s assume that a really smart designer using AI figured out how to place in front of our medical students the right information in the right order, of course monitoring dwell times, actions, and answers.  Once the medical students have been exposed to the right materials long enough with sufficiently successful metrics, they are free to practice medicine.  

Would you be willing to go to such a TLDR medical doctor?  

They might be able to diagnose simple cases.  They might be able to perform simple procedures.  They might be able to, when presented with x causes y causes z, reason with the patient that x causes y causes z.  They would likely be good at a particular ‘how’.

They would likely be unable to reason the complex ‘why’.  When they are presented with unseen representations or complex, multi-causal symptoms, they will not have the context to reason possible diagnoses. 

Why?  A simple diagnosis or procedure taught without context means that that same simple procedure may not apply in all contexts.  In fact, that same simple procedure may cause harm in many other contexts.  The ‘why’ explains context and the ‘how’ explains the procedure for the right diagnosis. 

Well, what does a medical education have to do with hi-tech?  There are no life threatening development teams out there.  Right?  While this may be true, technology development does have customers, investors, stakeholders, and co-workers who are depending on leadership knowing the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of complex situations, organizations, projects and products.  Making a mistake does cause harm to these dependents.  Why would anyone simply trust a TLDR trained technology leader?  Why would anyone trust an organization that demands TLDR communications or processes?

Allow me to redefine TLDR as Tough Learning Different Reasoning.  To build the necessary context takes time and exposure.  The context explains the solutions, procedure and rituals.  This is done by humans in taking time to learn, understand and experiment with new concepts.  Watching a lot of motivational TED talks won’t suffice.  Reading a ton of summaries or email subject lines won’t help. 

Tough Learning means that one has to spend time and effort to learn and think.  Simple impressions of Learning are insufficient to master the full context.  Different Reasoning means that the underlying principles and methods are unfamiliar.  To learn them requires practice and experimentation.  Few are able to read about the new rituals and discern the new principles.  Study, effort and practice are required for mastery.  

You should ask me then, what’s a test that you can take to determine which TLDR you have been exposed to in your past.  Here is the test:  Read the Poppendiecks’ book, Lean Software Development, An Agile Toolkit.  It takes between 2 to 4 hours for a seasoned technical leader to read the whole book.  

If your response is that you don’t have the 2 to 4 hours to read the book, then you know which TLDR that you’ve been exposed to.

If you read the book AND you can explain to yourself ‘why’ and ‘how’ for ALL of the 22 Tools apply to Scrum, S@S and/or SAFe v6 (or later), you have been exposed to the second definition of TLDR and are a well trained agilist.

If you read the book AND you can not explain to yourself ‘why’ and ‘how’ for ANY of the 22 Tools apply to Scrum, S@S and/or SAFe v6 (or later), you have fallen victim to the first definition of TLDR.  You should consider vesting time to learn the foundations and principles of agile development.

If you read the book AND you can not explain to yourself ‘why’ and ‘how’ for SOME of the 22 Tools, you have been exposed to a mixture of the TLDRs.  You have more to learn.  Focus on one of the tools and immerse yourself into building your understanding of that tool’s context.  Move to the next tool until you can explain the ‘why’ and ‘how’ for all 22 Tools.

We expect our medical doctors to be conscious competent.  Shouldn’t we expect that much of ourselves when doing agile development?