Something I wrote the other day to a team I was coaching:
As you may remember at the end of the second day I made the observation that if I were to describe you with one word I would choose “everything”. This is so because many times you collectively tried to cover everything in your designs, plans and other considerations in an attempt to get it perfect on the first try. That’s why you were unable to complete your sprint planning within the timebox.
It is easy to get drawn into discussing all the possibilities, options and potential risks in the end producing nothing. Our minds get overwhelmed with complexity and paralyzed with the desire to get the right solution on first attempt. Agile approach is to break big, complex problems into small chunks and then fully solve them within small iterations producing working software. So, the agile way is to do something rather than everything – but to do it well and keep on doing something each and every sprint all the time improving both the product and ourselves. By keeping doing something well each day, week, month you can build anything in the long run.
That is how agile breaks complexity with consistency.