Mike Lyons maps the Japanese training concept shu-ha-re to Agile practices: learn the rules, bend them, then transcend them. He uses the Dunning-Kruger effect to explain why you'll feel confident at first, then lost, then gradually competent again.
You know, when I was in elementary school, I for some strange reason picked up the saxophone. And I remember my parents not being too thrilled about that, but I picked up the saxophone because I was really interested in learning how to play the saxophone. But when I, when I started on it, I picked it up and it's got a reed, you know, like a wind instrument reed. And, and I blew it. It just made this like terrible noise, terrible noise. Like it was not good, right. And I remember my parents, you know, like covering their ears. I was not great at it to start with. To start with, well, guess what? Learning to play the saxophone was a journey and learning how to be agile is a journey. And there's a, there's a common thinking in approaching how we learn things called SHU ha re and sort of SHU is, it's from, it's a martial arts type training mechanism that says in the SHU state we're learning the fundamentals, we're learning the rules. I was learning how to play the saxophone and I had to take some basic lessons. And then in the HA state we're actually sort of bending the rules a bit. It's like, okay, well I could, I could probably tune this a bit and play a little better. I'm learning I'd taken more lessons and began to get better at it. And then in the RE state, so shu ha re, we're sort of transcending the rules and, and we become these excellent saxophone players. Now I never got past the shoe state of saxophone playing, but in the RE state you sort of why we do these things. You've experimented with the rules and now your own, you sort of own that and you begin to even maybe create new rules. In the software development world it's a lot like that with agile sort of we introduce you to this idea of, you know, have a daily standup, do your product backlog refinement. Your product owner, she owns the backlog. The what? And she has to keep it in order. And your developers, here's how we're going to keep them in sync and delivering fast, you know, in short increments. And we're were fairly prescriptive the shoe state. Like here's how, like this is how you do it, here's why you do. And then very quickly teams move to the ha state where they go, well, do we, you know the example I gave earlier, do we really need to meet daily? Well, we understand shoe, we understand why we have the daily stand up. So ha, let's try to change that a bit. Maybe we experiment and Then the restate that you sort of transcend the rule extreme programming teams for example, don't necessarily even meet daily there. They don't have a need for that. They make their commitments, they meet their commitments and high performing teams, they're in the re state. Now there is this. Speaking of, you know, we're talking about a journey. There is this interesting idea called the Dunning Kruger effect. And I introduce you to that where you sort of start out going, I don't really know how to do this. Me with a saxophone and I'm telling you, when I picked it up and I played it at first like everybody knew I didn't know how to play. My parents knew for sure. But you know, a few lessons in and I kind of thought I was like, I thought it was pretty good, you know, and begin to play that thing and it sounds different to me. It sounds like all right, I kind of get the hang of this thing, you know, and I begin to play and then pretty soon my mom's like, yeah, you're not very good at this. I'm not sure, you know, we need to keep, you need to go to more lessons or whatever. But my point is, my point is, you know, to me it sounded good but. But to everybody else in the world they're like, okay, hold on, you don't know what you're doing. The Dunning Kruger effect is similar to that. It was sort of like immediately, you know, everything, I got this. Well, that might be the case for you. You know, we're coming up to the conclusion of chapter one and you might be like, I got this, I know what I'm doing. And then, but then what happens is there's this sort of idea that okay, it's more than I thought, this is a little more complex than I thought. My saxophone, this is okay, a little truth comes in and then you keep going and you sort of maybe even enter into some, a little bit of self doubt. Like I'm never going to get this, I'm never going to understand this. But eventually, and this will happen for you on your agile journey, you sort of realize, yeah, I can understand this. In fact, we say throughout this class this will be fairly easy to understand. Where this sort of dip in the Dunning Kruger effect will come in is when you begin to internalize it and master it and then you begin to come out of that sort of area and say, yeah, I can do this and then commit to it. Now I didn't keep playing the saxophone, but I did stay on my agile journey all through the Dunning Kruger effect to where I am now, where I'm really excited about it. I really enjoy the time of learning and growing and getting better and mastering the craft. And so that's a little bit about understanding that agile is a journey. And again, we're excited that you're partnering with us on this journey.
