Overheard: “Tasking out the sprint in hours should have been more accurate than doing it in something as imprecise as story points”.

Every time I hear the word “should” my ears perk up. Ding, ding, ding…  alarm bells, warning flags…!  Using an agile mindset we need to look at what did happen, not what should have happened. For years I heard colleagues talk about how we should have planned better, that design should have worked, employees should be happy with what we gave them…  And yet history teaches us something else – it teaches us that we learn by doing, by experimenting, by testing our hypothesis against what actually did happen, not by clinging desperately to what we thought should have happened.

When was then last time you said,”It should have worked. We just didn’t try hard enough”. Can it be replaced by “We did x…. and here’s what actually happened. What did we learn from that?  What do we want to try next?”?

History is an available teacher. It’s up to us to do the learning.