I’ve been thinking about commitment vs goals for a while. And the concepts confused me. What is the difference really? They are more or less the same thing – right?
Yesterday I applied some learning from my life and now I finally get it. Here is my story.
I have a love hate relationship with smoking and exercise.
Commitment #1
I commit to stop smoking. This lasts about a month and then I start up again. Like any good agilist, I did a little retrospective and realised that its when a lot of wine is involved. So simple solution – stop drinking and smoking? That also lasts about a month 🙁
Commitment #2
Lets skip to exercise. I started at a new gym. Its about a 20 minute drive away and costs 5x more than the gym around the corner from my house. I commit to attend for 6 months with 2 friends, 3 times a week. This is working brilliantly. Perhaps too much so. I attend all the sessions and am getting fitter. However when I’m sick I still want to go (and did) and that was not good for my health.
Goal #1
About a month ago, the same 2 friends and I decided to monitor our goal of getting healthier. We invested in a Fitbit Flex each. The first goal is to get 10000 steps a day. This is rather difficult when you spend most of the day behind a computer! I have managed that goal about 5 times. Another measurement it has is Active Minutes. You need to aim for 30 active minutes a day. I am finding this more rewarding than the 10000 steps. The measurement that is driving most of my behaviour though is the 7 rolling day step count.
This is a list with you and your friends showing the total number of steps you have each taken over the last 7 days. The beauty of this is that you can have a bad day and it affects your rolling count very little. Likewise for a very good day. So the behaviour it drives is for you to be a bit more active everyday instead of only a few times a week. My weekly count started at 30000, then went to 40000 and is now around 38000 (I have bronchitis!).
So what have I learned?
When I stop smoking and have one slip up I feel like a bad person. Like I am useless and pathetic for not having any will power. It’s then way more difficult to stop again. When I have a bad day with my step count, I brush it off because I know I can make it up the next day. I don’t feel unworthy, I just feel more inspired to go for a walk the next morning.
The word commit implies you do it or fail. You need to be perfect everyday (not smoke at all) or else you have failed your commitment. And no-one likes failure. It is way more difficult to get back on track when you FAIL.
Having a goal with a rolling count over a time period, allows me to have good and bad days and realise that they are ok. More importantly it makes me strive to do a little bit better everyday.
Having friends to measure myself against encourages me to try more. And with a 7 day rolling count – they can never get that far ahead of you that it seems impossible to catch up. Everyone has bad days 🙂 What a freeing feeling!
How does this relate to Scrum and agile?
The team commits to stories and either fails or not. In my experience even though this is just a gauge, managers tend to hold teams to commitments. They should take them seriously etc. A goal instead of commitments would probably not make these managers very happy. But reading about my experience above – which do you think would drive the better behaviour in the team?
As a team – there is already a pack of friends working towards something. Perhaps a rolling count of the last 10 days points would drive behaviour of finishing stories. Or breaking down stories to smaller chunks? More of a continuous flow of delivery of value to business.
These are my thoughts and theories. Let me know yours.
Hey, Sam, I’m on the Women in Agile Publishing team and have scheduled this post for 10/27. I just had to comment. I truly don’t understand this “commitment” thing since estimates are so bad. When I was originally trained in Agile, it was around gathering enough sprints to gather an average of actual historical velocity and base projections on history. Commitments feel too much like the old school version of forcing teams to do more than they can really do (which is the version I have observed). Where did this pressure to commit come from? Even Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland have modified their Scrum document to move away from “commitment” and reframed it as a “projection.”
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