Routines and Systems

Routines are a good way to operate.

But let’s face it: routines are a recipe for rut.

Ergo, systems.

With the help of 10 personalities—Vincent van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, and Admiral McRaven, just to name a few—allow me to elaborate.

Wondering what this has to do with Agile? Agile is a system and, like any system, it will fail you if you reduce it to mere routines.

Routines

First of all, routines are a good thing, and here are 10 reasons why.

#10 Routines force execution.

Once you’ve established a routine, you can use it to fend off conflicts of all kinds, not the least of them moods, and stay on track with whatever it is you want to do. When you commit to a routine, you stop putting things off and stop making excuses: you commit to action and take control of execution.

If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
—Vincent van Gogh

#9 Routines save willpower.

It’s hard to get into a routine but thankfully, through repetition and practice, the routine becomes an automatic habit. And once your routine is set, it runs on autopilot and preserves your limited supply of willpower so you can use it for something substantial.

#8 Routines create rhythm and flow.

Routines get you in the groove and create momentum to keep you on a roll.

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. […] You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.
—Ernest Hemingway, 1958 interview with The Paris Review

#7 Routines instill a culture of discipline and sense of pride.

High performers appreciate strict routines because they show a drive to perfect and a commitment to execution excellence. The same is true of high-performance teams.

If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed. […] Throughout my life in the Navy, making my bed was the one constant that I could count on every day. […] It was my first task of the day, and doing it right was important. It demonstrated my discipline. It showed my attention to detail, and at the end of the day it would be a reminder that I had done something well, something to be proud of, no matter how small the task. […] If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter. […] If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right. And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made—and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.
—Admiral William H. McRaven, Make Your Bed

Admiral McRaven gives this message in his University of Texas at Austin 2014 Commencement Address [04:43].

#6 Routines help optimize.

The power of routines goes beyond structure and organization: routines can serve as a method to decrease waste of time and increase productivity.

Casey Neistat shows with this domino animation [03:32] how he manages his time to maximize every waking second of every day.

#5 Routines help simplify.

Don’t despair if, like me, Casey Neistat’s vlog makes you feel like a complete slacker. Nah, it’s just that we’re not optimizers . . . we’re simplifiers. For simplifiers, the focus is just as much on what not to do (and what to stop doing) as it is on what to do. When you choose what to leave out and boil things down to a simple routine, you focus on the essential and find yourself having more free time and energy to concentrate on what’s important to you.

The following thoughts on optimizers versus simplifiers from Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, apply not only to systems but also routines:

My wife, Shelly, is a world-class optimizer. I, on the other hand, cling to simplicity like a monkey on a coconut. […] For example, when I draw Dilbert I include little or no background art in most panels. That’s a gigantic time-saver. […] Optimizing is often the strategy of people who have specific goals and feel the need to do everything in their power to achieve them. Simplifying is generally the strategy of people who view the world in terms of systems. The best systems are simple, and for good reason. Complicated systems have more opportunities for failure. Human nature is such that we’re good at following simple systems and not so good at following complicated systems. Simple systems are probably the best way to achieve success. Once you have success, optimizing begins to have more value. […] Simplicity is a worthy long-term goal. That’s how you will free your personal energy so you can concentrate it where you need it.
—Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

#4 Routines reduce decision making and increase happiness.

Barry Schwartz says in his TED Talk, “The Paradox of Choice,” that, contrary to what you might think, having too many choices increases paralysis and decreases satisfaction, and that the secret to happiness is (ta-da!) low expectations.

When you use a routine, you don’t have to go to the trouble of figuring out what to do, when, and how: you reduce choice and decision making, you eliminate paralysis, and you become a happier person.

#3 Routines provide comfort and peace of mind.

Settling into a routine isn’t a bad thing. A routine is something that’s predictable. A deliberate, well-thought-out routine makes you feel as if you researched and considered all your options. And when you start seeing the results you want to see, you know your routine is something you can trust.

#2 Routines make everything possible, one day at a time.

Routines are simple things done consistently that lead to the result you’re looking for. You pick a routine, stick with it, and chip away until you get the result you want. Routines turn big, overwhelming goals into small, manageable tasks. Routines turn distant ambitions into concrete results that add up over time, every time you apply your routine.

Exhibit A: “Groundhog Day.” Bill Murray is forced to relive the same day again and again and shows us that, when you apply yourself to daily tasks, you can change your perspective on life and accomplish anything you want.

#1 Routines turn losers into winners.

Sure, it’s a great feeling to set a goal, chase it, and achieve it. But you can spend your life chasing goals and you’ll be unfulfilled most of the time and that feeling will wear on you. And if you achieve your goal—so what, now what? In contrast, every time you complete a routine, you know you took action and feel good about yourself. Every time you complete a routine, you win.

More thoughts from Scott Adams that apply to both systems and routines:

The system-versus-goals model can be applied to most human endeavors. In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. […] Goals are for losers. […] Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.
—Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

Rut

By now, if you’re still reading, you should be gung-ho about routines.

But here’s the catch: routine rut.

“Rut: a habit or pattern of behavior that has become dull and unproductive but is hard to change.”

Stuck in a rut. Trapped in routine. Yup, sounds familiar.

Making your bed every day is one thing, but every now and then you need to change the sheets.

Routines are proxies and, as Jeff Bezos tells us, we should resist (or own) proxies.

Resist proxies: A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us?
—Jeff Bezos, 2016 Letter to Shareholders

Which raises the question: Do you own your routine or does your routine own you?

Systems

Routines give you autopilot capability, but you need some sort of “navigation system” to get you where you want to be.

Routines get you to do things, but systems go further: systems get you to do the right things.

Systems use different parts—ideas, values, practices—to form a unified whole and provide a complete solution.

Systems don’t have to include routines but, when they do, systems provide context and validation to keep improving routines.

Systems are the remedy for routine rut.

And if “system” sounds complicated, the most powerful and elegant systems are utterly simple. Systems only have to satisfy one condition:

The minimum requirement of a system is that a reasonable person expects it to work more often than not. […] Consider Olympic athletes. I don’t consider daily practices and professional coaching a system because everyone knows in advance that the odds of any specific individual winning a medal through those activities are miniscule. […] Buying lottery tickets is not a system no matter how regularly you do it.
—Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

For example, Dr. Sanjiv Chopra has a system for health and well-being that has 5 ingredients: coffee (you should drink coffee every day), vitamin D, exercise, nuts, and meditation. Dr. Chopra talks about his system on the James Altucher podcast (#174). One of his friends gets vitamin D on the golf course by playing the front 9 without sunblock. That’s a routine. Dr. Chopra suggests another routine to get all 5 ingredients: on a good sunny day, don’t put sunblock, go for a brisk walk to your favorite coffee shop, eat nuts on the way, and before you go: meditate. It’s that simple.

Agile

So how does this all apply to Agile software development?

Agile is a system: a far-reaching, all-encompassing system of values and principles. And like any system, Agile fails, or at least disappoints, when you reduce it to a subset of its parts.

I’ve seen this happen in large organizations that have come to realize that these days you have to “be agile” but have fallen short of embracing, not to say grasping, Agile as a system that goes beyond the rules and routines of frameworks like Scrum.

Agile is big on routines (me too) but routines only scratch the surface of Agile.

A bit of history from Jim Highsmith, one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto:

We all felt privileged to work with a group of people who held a set of compatible values, a set of values based on trust and respect for each other and promoting organizational models based on people, collaboration, and building the types of organizational communities in which we would want to work. At the core, I believe Agile Methodologists are really about “mushy” stuff—about delivering good products to customers by operating in an environment that does more than talk about “people as our most important asset” but actually “acts” as if people were the most important, and lose the word “asset”. […] For example, I think that ultimately, Extreme Programming has mushroomed in use and interest, not because of pair-programming or refactoring, but because, taken as a whole, the practices define a developer community freed from the baggage of Dilbertesque corporations.
—Jim Highsmith, The History of the Agile Manifesto

To leaders involved in agile transformations, it’s always worth asking: “So, what is your system?”

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Featured Links:
Admiral McRaven Commencement Address, Make Your Bed at [04:43]
Casey Neistat Vlog, Daily Routine at [03:32]
Barry Schwartz TED Talk, The Paradox of Choice
Jeff Bezos, 2016 Letter to Shareholders
James Altucher Podcast with Dr. Sanjiv Chopra, The Art of Well-Being