As you may or may not know, I’m an active agile coach. While I have a wonderful day job, I often get asked to enter new teams and jump-start them or assess their overall level of agility. One of the ‘smells’ that I look for in a strong and healthy agile team is what I’ll call controlled chaos or perhaps a better phrase would be guided chaos.

You see, the atmosphere in these teams isn’t safe nor predicted too far in advance. The teams don’t have a false sense of security. They’re working on a short list of features in close collaboration with their product owner. They know that challenges will rise up to meet them. Risks will fire. Team members will get sick or get married or tend to ill parents. And the design approaches and code won’t always work as advertised.

They may or may not have the technical skills to interface with the new third party vendor they’ve just signed a partnership agreement with. They also struggle mightily to deliver software of sufficient quality – scratch that – they struggle to deliver solid software – even though they focus on it daily.

What I’m trying to say is that in these dynamic teams, “stuff” happens. The plans shift daily and the team must respond to this landscape. They must be undeterred in their commitments to sprint and release goals and to be creative and relentless in attacking impediments. Agile project managers need to understand this chaotic reality. In fact, they need to create and foster it! Here are a few ideas on how to do that.

Don’t Ask for Specific Commitments

Imagine yourself in a canoe on a river you haven’t navigated before. You have a map, so you know generally where you’re going. You have a GPS, so you know specifically where you are. Now you get an emergency call from your boss and they want to know exactly when you’ll arrive at the take-out location. What do you say?

From my point-of-view, not very much. You simply don’t know how long it will take. You can guess and give your boss a sense of comfort or you can tell her the truth. I’m here and my hourly rate appears to be this. My map implies the following obstacles and journey length. I think I may get there between 4-5 pm.

A key here is that in highly variable and complex situations, we often don’t have a very clear idea of how long something will take. Instead, we need to triangulate to get to our destination. We’ll take daily samples of progress, looking ahead on our journey and then reducing the uncertainty as we gain knowledge, make progress, and get closer to our goal.

That’s the reality of complex systems. So the question for an effective Agile PM becomes, do you want the truth, with incremental triangulation, or a facade of absolute certainty? I think we need to emphasize the integrity of the former and support it with active team focus, high communication and collaboration, and full transparency. And leave the facade for those who can’t handle the truth.