Agilish

In the middle of the 19th century, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis made a discovery that should have saved thousands of lives. Instead, it cost him his career, his reputation, and ultimately his life. His story is one of the most important cautionary tales in the history of science — and one of the most relevant to anyone who has ever tried to challenge the status quo inside a large organization. The Discovery Semmelweis was working in a Vienna maternity ward in the 1840s when he noticed something deeply troubling. Women giving birth in the ward staffed by doctors and medical students were dying at a dramatically higher rate than women in the ward staffed by midwives. The difference was stark. The data was undeniable. He set out to understand why. What he found was that the doctors were moving directly from performing autopsies to delivering babies — without washing their hands. He hypothesized that something was being transferred from the cadavers to the patien...

Bringing Agile into a corporate IT environment that has not asked for it is one of the hardest things you can do in this industry. Large, well-established IT organizations have often spent years — sometimes decades — building their processes, standards, and ways of working. That history does not disappear because someone in leadership decided it was time to go Agile. And if you treat it as though it should, you are going to have a fight on your hands. Here is the thing though. In my experience, once teams actually make the switch, most of them like it. They see the benefits quickly. They get more visibility into their own work. They feel less like cogs in a machine and more like people with real ownership over what they are building. Most will never go back. The resistance is rarely about Agile itself — it is about change. About uncertainty. About being asked to operate differently in an environment that has not changed around them. That distinction matters, because it changes how...

A friend recently shared a fascinating article about a mistake made by some of the greatest scientific minds of the 19th century. For decades, the best mathematicians and astronomers in the world were convinced there was an undiscovered planet — named Vulcan — orbiting between Mercury and the Sun, hidden from view. The math seemed to demand it. The calculations were elegant. The theory was accepted as fact. There was no planet. A Star-Crossed 'Scientific Fact': The Story of Vulcan, Planet That Never Was Two lines from the article stuck with me. The first: "It's easy to forget that there are people behind the data and equations. And when people are involved, there is always room for human error." The second hit even harder: "In science, you don't dwell on the blind alleys... but the blind alleys are most of what science actually does. You have to go down the blind alley, you bang your head against that blank wall at the end of it, come b...

There is a Russian proverb that translates to: "The first pancake is always spoiled." At first glance it sounds pessimistic. But I find it far more hopeful — and far more Agile-minded — than the phrase you hear so often in IT: "It is what it is." The first pancake proverb carries an honest and important message: the first attempt at anything is rarely perfect. That is expected. It is not a failure — it is the price of admission. Learning happens through doing, and the first version of something exists precisely to teach us what the second version should be. Think about what actually happens when you make pancakes. The first one almost always goes wrong. The pan is not quite at the right temperature. There is too much butter, or not enough. The batter spreads differently than you expected. You cannot know any of these things until you put the butter in the pan and pour the batter down. Only then do you start to understand. The first pancake might be uneve...