This is my summary of Brian Marick’s “Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism”, a session I attended at ScanDevConf 2010. Please understand that, except for the notes at the top and bottom, this post reflects the opinions of the speaker, not me.

There is a core in agile that is going missing now that Agile is going mainstream and crossing the chasm.

A problem with Agile is its name. Of course everybody wants to be agile. Look up the opposites in a dictionary: sluggish, torpid, immobile. Who wants to be sluggish and torpid?

So I came up with a description of Agile that is weird enough that nobody is going to immediately, before they’ve had time to really understand it, react with “oh yes, that’s me”: Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism.

1. Anarcho-syndicalism:
   • Worker self-management – no managers
   • Direct action. To take an example from the original anarcho-syndicalism, say you have a strike, and those opposing the strike are attacking you with clubs and guns. The standard approach would be to vote to elect a congressman who passes laws that prohibit violence against strikers. The AS approach is to get your own clubs and guns and protect your strikers. Don’t try to get into management to fix your problems, fix them now.
   • Worker solidarity: the team fails together and succeeds together, we’re all in this together
2. Team-scale: we’re not revolutionizing society, just helping your team
3. Artisanal: people on the team care deeply about the product and its users, sometimes more than the business. Counteracts the risk of becoming so infatuated with our process that we lose sight of our aim.
4. Retro-futurism: 1930s futurism pictured all sorts of nice things for the future, i.e. for now. Orbital cities, clean cheap urban transport, underwater cities, personal jetpacks. We didn’t really get much of any of that. The same happened with Agile. In the early days agile projects were few and far between, but everybody hoped that the idea would spread and make all developers happy. Instead we now have lots of teams doing Agile in name only. People on “agile” projects are saying “at least my job doesn’t suck as much as it used to” instead of “this is the best project I’ve ever worked on,” which is how it should be. Retro-futurism reminds people of the possibilities. Don’t accept things as unchangeable, change your circumstances to get where you want, keep that gosh-wow spirit.

To summarize the spirit of Agile:

• scrappy – we are trying to do something here, get out of my way
• care – for the product, the users, the process
• naive optimism

My opinion: Inspiring! Brian was an enthusiastic, passionate speaker who delivered a thought-provoking speech. New ways to think about old things. Conference sessions tend to fall into two categories: those where I learn new facts, and those that simply energize me and make me want to get back to work and improve everything. This is a prime example of the latter kind.

If you find this interesting, there is a bit more information at ARxTA.net, including a video of Brian delivering a similar talk some years ago at some other conference.