Agile Nottingham: Why Your Fix Made It Worse and What To Do Instead

Reflections from Agile Nottingham: the diagnostic gap nobody talks about.

It was great to be back in person at Agile Nottingham last week, hosted at Kerv Digital's offices.

Agile Nottingham is a platform of community events to bring agilists together for mutual benefit and personal growth, to share experiences and help each other improve in the agile delivery space whether newbie or super-experienced. 

Last week was a standout session by Neil Walker, whose talk carried one of those deceptively simple premises that actually cuts deep:

"You spotted the problem. You chose an intervention. Things got worse."

Not because your intervention was wrong in theory, but because your diagnosis was wrong. Neil's argument: our industry has spent years building increasingly sophisticated treatments on top of remarkably amateur diagnostics. And when change doesn't land, that's usually why.

 At the heart of the talk sat one question, deceptively basic, and almost always skipped:

"What did you conclude was wrong before you decided what to do next?"

Neil pushed us to ask: what were the starting conditions for this change? Were you walking into something that was already...

 Starting conditions to diagnose first

• Complex
• Insecure
• Rapid
• Contradictory
• Anxious

 And only then, to consider the right levers to pull such as clarity, learning, empathy, agility and resilience, rather than jumping straight to frameworks, ceremonies or process fixes.

A great reminder that meaningful change starts with better questions, not just better answers.