Four Simple Words

Chris,

You asked me how you hold on to something long enough for it to shape you—how you don’t let it get sanded down into a costume or a phase or a line on a résumé.

I've thought about that question a lot.

I remember the moment I became a punk. The moment I fell in love with the music and found a sense of belonging I didn’t know I was looking for. The moment I found the thing I wanted to hang on to for the rest of my life.

We were sitting in the most 1990s scene imaginable: your Saturn SC2 parked outside a Borders bookstore, listening to Stranger Than Fiction through a Sony Walkman hooked into the car with a tape adapter. Every song sounded vaguely the same, and we were laughing about how easy it was to pick out the singles. Now every one of those songs feels like a chapter of my life.

Here was a band using SAT words I had to look up, writing blatantly clever lyrics about philosophical dilemmas and unapologetic answers to them. Curiosity wasn’t something to be ashamed of. It was ammo. It was armor. At the edge of my teenage years, that realization hardened me in a way I didn’t understand yet—but needed.

Years later, I remember the moment I became an agilist. Not because I changed, but because I recognized something familiar.

I was on the back patio, re-reading Elements of Scrum while waiting for an interview call for my first real job. I was trying to convince myself—and whoever was on the other end of the phone—that I wasn’t just a failed art school dropout bartending his way through uncertainty. I remember thinking: if teams worked this way, with cross-training and shared responsibility, you’d learn so much they couldn’t keep you. That focus on people—on making them better at what they do—felt radical. It felt right.

Scrum isn’t Agile, and Agile isn’t new. What got branded as a movement was mostly a rediscovery: inspect and adapt, a sharper way of saying Plan, Do, Check, Act, which had been around since the 1940s. Talking to mom about her programming days made it clear the problems weren’t new either. Nothing really is. The pendulum just keeps swinging, waiting for a rebrand.

Somebody told me that music with guitars

Was going out of fashion, and I had to laugh.

This shit wasn't fashionable back when I fell in love,

So if the hipsters move on why should I give a fuck?

-Frank Turner (Four Simple Words)

There is plenty to be hopeful about. Companies are re-learning that developers are human. Sustainable pace matters. Shareholder supremacy won’t keep a business alive forever. Collaboration actually helps workflow.

Are these ideas mainstream?
No.
Are they going away?
Also no.
Are we making meaningful progress?
Not much.

But Agile did something important: it put language around these problems. And some people—usually one newly minted engineering manager at a time—are trying to act on it.

Chris, when you asked how you hold on, the answer surprised me: you don’t hold on because it’s a practice. You hold on because it’s who you are. You absorb what works into your identity, and then you don’t choose it anymore. You do it because not doing it would mean losing yourself.

Early in my Scrum Master career, I got into a fight with a Product Owner over the team picking up a story without his explicit approval. He called it insubordination. The team argued they didn’t have what they needed to take it on, and since he was on vacation during planning, they skipped it and moved down the backlog.

I ended up arbitrating between the team and the Product Owner—over the rules of Scrum and what Agile was supposed to mean. Eventually, I confronted the Product Owner in the VP of Technology’s office about how his absence had put the team in an impossible position.

No one came out of that well. The team was eventually disbanded. The Product Owner went back to being an individual contributor. I earned a reputation for being difficult, which almost certainly cost me advancement.

I wouldn’t change how I handled it.

I’ve learned how to explain those situations better. How to resolve them without burning everything down. But the essence of what happened had to happen. The team responded to change over following a plan. It wasn’t very Scrum. It was very Agile.

That’s the cost of holding on. It’s not clean. It’s not rewarded. And it can be lonely.

But once you understand something deeply enough—once it’s past adoption and into your bones—you can’t put it down without losing a piece of yourself. I'll leave you with the four simple words that drive me in everything I do.

I hope that helps.