Stop Trying to Get it Right. Do This Instead.
I read recently about an interesting experiment conducted by a ceramics teacher.
He told half his students they would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced. Fifty pounds of pots would earn an A. Forty pounds would earn a B and so on.
The other half of the class would be graded on quality. Each student needed to produce only one pot to earn an A but the pot needed to be perfect.
At the end of the course, all of the best pots had been produced by those who had focused on quantity.
Why? Because the more we do something, the better we get at it.
Practice really does make perfect.
I'm telling you this because right now there is something you are holding off on starting. And I want to encourage you to do it.
It may be something related to agile. Perhaps you want to run better retrospectives but you want to read a couple of books and every blog post you can find first.
Or perhaps you want to change how your team estimates. Or a new approach to automating tests.
Or you may be putting off something personal--learning Python or how to play the piano.
In too many of these cases, we delay starting. We're trying to craft the perfect ceramic pot. Instead we need to make as many pots as we can, trusting that we'll improve with time.
This is, of course, the agile way.
We’ve learned to take an iterative and incremental approach to developing products. We need to apply that same lesson to how we adopt and improve at being agile.
That is the only way to succeed with agile,
Mike
Mike Cohn：别磨叽，做就是了
