Agile That's Made to Schtick

In Made to Stick, brothers Chip and Dan Heath ask

Why Some Ideas Survice and Others Die?

They use the attributes

Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Story

to evaulate how and why ideas endure. The acronym SUCCES wafts uplike fried cheese curds, but this is a useful, albeit ionic, mnemonic.

While reading Made to Stick, I stumbled upon Scott Duncan's collection of Twitterverse truisms at Agile Software Qualities. Scott cherry-picked the worthy knowledge nuggets from the past months of Twitter chatter.

We can get at the essence of agility by distilling some of these knowledge nuggets.

Here are the quotes from Scott's blog that stick with me:

People who think they're on a hero's journey tend to disregard the ordinary schmucks around them. ~Brian Marick

Primary work of managers: establish conditions for teams to work in. develop people. work on the work system. ~Esther Derby

Instead of thinking, 'irrational', think 'rational from the perspective of a different set of values. ~Jerry Weinberg

The more authority I have over my own habits, the more I care about outcomes over dogma. ~ J. B. Rainsberger

The problem is thinking based on authority rather than responsibility. ~Jason Yip

Don't ship features. Ship improvements. ~Joshua Kerievsky

Succinct aphorisms stick because they're easy to remember. They're easy to remember because they have one or more of the attributes of SUCCES.

Aphorisms are literature's hand luggage. Light and compact, they fit easily into the overhead compartment of your brain

~James Geary, The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism