I am a great fan of pattern libraries, I am a great fan of Ways of Working, I am not such a fan of methodologies, but now I am on the fence about “methods”

#AgileDataWoW

We just recorded our 101st episode of the No Nonsense Agile Podcast (“just” as in just at the time I was writing this, not the time I am publishing it).

The guest we had blew my mind, he took us through his company’s “method”, which they had developed and applied over 3 decades. It was a whirlwind of patterns that could be dynamically applied to any organisation, industry or use case to help improve that organisation.

While I could grasp some of the underlying patterns they used, and those patterns are not unique, we have had guests that have explained those patterns before, it was the way he weaved those patterns together into a unique Way of Working that had me in awe.

The company called it their “method” not because it was a methodology, but because they had effectively productised their Way of Working into an “as a service” solution. He explained the entire customer journey from start to finish which they took every customer through using this method.

It reminded me of pattern libraries such as Disciplined Agile, and Mike 2.0 to name two that pop to the top of my mind.

It was the complete opposite of methodologies such as Scaled Agile.

For me to apply their method to an organisation would take me a lot more than attending a few days of training and following a set of documented processes step by step, that methodologies like Scaled Agile promise.

But there was method in their brilliance.

One of the challenges I have with patterns is they are often unconsciously applied. A person with deep expertise and years of experience can look at a situation, understand its context and then unconsciously pull a pattern from their subconscious and apply it.

When you ask them how they knew that was the right pattern to apply and how they knew how to apply it, they will often struggle to answer it.

When you ask them to explain the pattern to you so you can apply it yourself, they will often struggle to explain it. Or if they do, it will be bound to a very specific context.

The thing that blew me away about this method, was our guest could explain it in a way that I could see the nodes and they were defining and the patterns they were using to link those nodes.

And I could see how they were applying those patterns systematically to define nodes and links for every organisation they worked with, but each time they were defining unique nodes and unique links that were driven by the context of the organisation.

That was the beauty of their “method”, it is what I would call their Way of Working.

So now when I hear the word methodology I am going to have to explore do they mean methodology or do they mean method.

Again it comes back to semanitics, which seems to be a core theme of my 2024 for some reason.