“Am I hunting antelope or field mice?” is one of Tim Ferriss’ 17 Questions That Changed My Life.
The point being that… “a lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope.”
He goes on to ask… “Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice? In the short term, it might give you a nice, rewarding feeling. But in the long run, you’re going to die.”
It occurs to me that team-level agile practices on their own run the risk of creating an environment where you’re hunting field mice, it feels nice to be getting things done, but you’re slowly dying. Something else is required to provide focus, intention and then measure progress.
OKRs are my go-to for this. Consider, absent the constraints of a project and running team-level agile practices – how do you avoid hunting field mice?