Date: 26th October 2023
Subject: Key themes and insights from an interview with Kevin Rutherford, focusing on his career, personal experiences, and perspectives on Agile methodologies.
Source: Excerpts from "Who is agile: making the invisible visible with Kevin Rutherford" (Podcast Interview)
Executive Summary
Kevin Rutherford, a mentor for Agile leaders, offers a unique perspective on his career and the Agile landscape, heavily influenced by his late diagnosis of autism and ADHD. He emphasizes "making the invisible visible" in both personal and professional contexts, advocating for systems thinking, and a focus on productivity and responsiveness over simply "being Agile." His personal journey highlights the challenges and strengths of neurodivergence, while his professional insights underscore the importance of understanding underlying systems, utilizing pull systems, and developing strong public speaking skills.
Key Themes and Important Ideas/Facts:
1. The Profound Impact of Late Autism Diagnosis:
- Diagnosis and Identity Shift: Kevin received his autism diagnosis at 56 (in 2017), followed by his son (2021) and wife (2022). This late diagnosis led to a significant "identity is wiped out" experience, requiring him to rebuild his understanding of himself and his past. He states, "You can look back over the previous 50 odd years and suddenly explain all of the wacky stuff that happened...and now maybe you have an explanation for it and you can see patterns."
- Building a Career on Autistic Traits: His wife's observation that he "built [his] entire career on [his] autistic traits" resonated deeply. Kevin explains that his autism allows him to "see things that you can't see and...say things you wouldn't dream of saying," which is crucial for diagnosing system problems and "cut[ting] through the politics" in organizations.
- Challenges of Neurotypical World: He describes the "complete exhaustion that comes from trying to survive in the neurotypical world" and "social hangovers" leading to "complete shutdowns and meltdowns." He also mentions experiencing burnouts and dropping off the grid for a year or more due to the toll of social interactions and the pressure to "mask" or pretend to be neurotypical.
- Reclaiming Authenticity: Post-diagnosis, he has learned to "mask an awful lot less" and be "much more just me," which further enhances his ability to see through systems and cut through politics without social filters.
- Autism as an "Enablement": While acknowledging the societal disabling aspects, he strongly believes autism brings value, particularly in "system thinking." He notes that "smart autistic people are very capable able in this kind of sense...they make links where neurotypicals have a lot more time needed to digest these kind of things."
- Advocacy and Support in Retirement: His biggest challenge and future focus is to provide "autism support for people" like himself – late-diagnosed individuals – to navigate their new identities and a neurotypical world. He emphasizes "making the invisible visible" for neurodivergent individuals.
- Trigger for Diagnosis: The trigger for his diagnosis was reading the blog of Graeme Mat, who took his own life in 2015, and finding parallels in Graeme's experiences with autism. This tragedy "changed the direction of my life and my whole family."
2. The Power of Public Speaking Skills:
- Early Performance Background: Despite identifying as a mathematician and being labeled introverted, Kevin began performing on stage (poetry, plays) from a young age (around seven). He believes this early experience of "going on stage and performing...is closer to the real me."
- Crucial for Career Success: He views public speaking skills as "really really important" for an Agile coach and for anyone's career. He encourages junior team members to "cast off the shyness and get out there and speak in front of people."
- Beyond Technical Prowess: He argues that the ability to "hold an audience and be confident and comfortable doing it," along with constructing engaging content and a narrative, is "almost as important a skill as anything technical we have." Without these skills, individuals with important things to say "often get pushed into a backwater."
- Learned Skill: He highlights that public speaking is a skill that "can be learned" and encourages early experimentation.
3. Deep-Seated Drive for Symmetry and Simplicity:
- A Fundamental Autistic Need: Kevin identifies symmetry, or "simplicity" and "self-similarity" as a "fundamental deep autistic need to organize the world." This drive has been present since he could reason and is a core element of his identity, influencing his mathematics, chess, and Agile coaching.
- "Perfection is Achieved...When Nothing More to Take Away": He aligns with this quote, seeing it as a "symmetry thing" about finding the "underlying essence of a thing, the fundamental shape of a thing."
- Goldrat's Influence: He references Eli Goldrat's idea of "inherent simplicity in any system," aiming for designs and architectures composed of "six plus or minus one pieces" to reach the "core of the essence of things."
- The Power of Pull Systems: His pursuit of symmetry leads to the insight that "everything's a pull system." He states, "if you can stop pushing value and instead only only produce in response to demand at all at all levels...it's a really strong starting point." He cites the Unix 'make' utility as a "classic pull system" and questions the necessity of push-based CI pipelines.
4. Practical Agile and Lean Principles:
- "Disrupt Software Teams": In his earlier career, his elevator pitch was "I disrupt software teams," which was memorable and reflected his approach to challenging the status quo.
- Mentoring Agile Leaders: He currently mentors Agile leaders, improving their "bottom line usually by helping them with systems thinking."
- XP as Risk Management: He sees Extreme Programming (XP) as "an exercise in risk management," explaining that its practices create "safety nets" rather than being inherently risky. He believes focusing on risk is a great way to discuss XP with non-technical people.
- Beyond Ceremonies and Practices: He emphasizes that "scrum and XP almost don't matter...it's the deeper symmetries that really matter and only seeing the ceremonies only seeing the practices misses the point."
- Personal Agile Tip: "Ride on a Line of Code": His ultimate Agile tip is to "take a ride on any single line of code" from customer need to customer use, to understand the "journey" and identify delays (discovery, waiting, testing, deployment). He recounts an experience where a team estimated 3 days for this journey, but it was actually 29 days on average, with outliers over a year. This exercise is "really really valuable for showing people what the system is."
5. Remote Work and Ensemble Working:
- Visibility Challenge: The negative aspect of remote work, especially post-COVID, is that it "made the fundamental problem of knowledge work far worse because it's made the work even less visible."
- Ensemble Working Advantages: Remote work, however, makes "ensemble working work more naturally." The physical constraints of face-to-face ensembling (keyboards, screens) disappear in a remote setting.
- Reduced Social Exhaustion: With proper "social contracts and group agreements," Kevin found remote ensembling "less emotionally tiring." These agreements include 5-minute breaks every hour, cameras always on, and opportunities for solo work (e.g., "gold card time" for individual research).
- Continuous Engagement: To prevent distraction, drivers change every few minutes during ensembling, ensuring constant engagement.
- Daily Retrospectives: He advocates for "retrospectives every day," even twice a day initially, to foster self-awareness and conscious design of working methods.
6. The "Does Agile Matter?" Question:
- Historical Significance vs. Practicality: Kevin believes the Agile Manifesto was a "watershed moment" historically, but it's "not actionable" and "too vague...too abstract" for day-to-day practical application.
- Focus on Productivity and Responsiveness: He walks away from clients who "want to be agile" if they don't also want to be "more productive and more responsive...with happier people." He states, "agility is not important what we're trying to do here is be productive and be responsive and build a happy workplace."
- Team Ownership and Evolution: He emphasizes that "teams, organizations, value streams should own their own practices and evolve them." The Agile principles serve as a "good guideline," but the specific implementation should be locally developed.
- Agility as a Description, Not a Goal: The Agile Manifesto "describes systems that are likely to work well" and that are productive, responsive, and foster a happy workplace. It's not an end goal in itself, but rather a description of a desired outcome achieved through conscious effort and problem-solving.
7. Recommended Book: "It's Not Luck" by Eli Goldrat
- Sequel to "The Goal": "It's Not Luck" is the sequel to Goldrat's famous book on flow and bottlenecks.
- Theory of Constraints Thinking Processes: This book focuses on the "theory of constraints thinking processes" and "how to do root cause analysis in a very very organized way."
- Informs Question-Asking: Kevin credits this book for informing the types of questions he asks clients, helping him "find the symmetries and find and find and find the underlying simplicity in things." He considers it "a better book" than "The Goal" in many ways, despite being less known.
8. Biggest Achievements:
- Raising Three Children: His primary achievement is raising "three amazing kids," which he notes as a "surprise that someone like me could" do.
- Paying the Bills by Asking Questions: He finds it baffling and a major achievement that he has been "able to pay the bills and support a family just by asking questions."
- Encryption Algorithms: At 24, he designed encryption algorithms used for "all large bank transfers in the UK."
- Agile Coaching Successes: He mentions "a few major wins as an agile coach" where his questions, particularly in risk analysis, saved or made projects possible.
9. Future Focus:
- Autism Support Group: In retirement, he plans to focus on providing "autism support for people" by setting up local support groups for late-diagnosed individuals.
Recommended Next Guest:
- Clark Ching: Described as "the bottleneck guy," Clark Ching has applied the Theory of Constraints in software development for 20 years, written readable books, and is known for being funny, thoughtful, and entertaining.
