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You lost me at "sprint." I'm a marathon runner worried about a goal way down the road, not running 100m after 100m after 100m until I essenrially sprint a mara
by Frost1x 6y ago
You lost me at "sprint."
I'm a marathon runner worried about a goal way down the road, not running 100m after 100m after 100m until I essenrially sprint a marathon (~42km) and die somewhere in the process.
To bring this silly neverending business analogy full circle, there's a reason people run quite differently in actual sprints and marathons. If you treat a marathon like a sprint, you're going to tire out early and fall behind. It's all about steady paces, small breaks, and occasionally picking up the pace to push yourself when needed.
You can set some runners up in a marathon, then lie and setup posts every 100m and tell them they just need to sprint to the first 100m and then "we'll treat this like a real marathon." After they get to 100m you can shout, oh shoot we need to catchup, and sprint to the 200m mark. Continue this perpetually until your runner basically exhausts and dies out and just says "I quit this race."
Thats basically what most businesses do, create perpetual sprints that are completely unsustainable. Businesses have the flexibility that in their race, if the runner grows tired of their terrible coach angsting them on, they can just sub out a new fresh naive runner mid-marathon and start the full cycle all over again.
Let's stop encouraging businesses that sprinting marathons is an acceptable practice... let's run marathons like--marathons.
- thom 6y agoYou’ve gone far too deep on what was once a very loose metaphor, and is now just a piece of jargon with its own meaning (one which is pretty close to your exact suggested marathon strategy anyway).
- luisehk 6y agoI understand your point and I agree, but have you read the book? It's useful for managing stakeholder expectations and to fight scope creeping by keeping things simple.
- commandlinefan 6y ago> you're going to tire out early and fall behind No, no, you don't understand. You sprint for a week, and then you immediately sprint again for another week, over and over again, so you're never sprinting for more than a week at a time.
- thisisbrians 6y agoI'm a literal marathon runner, and couldn't have said it better myself. Oh, also — you have to take frequent breaks from training and racing to recover between these damaging efforts to let your body and mind rest and rebuild. Overtraining (burnout) can and does happen and is incompatible with optimal performance, anyway.
- privatemonkey 6y agoCouldn't agree more. It is so tiresome to do sprint after sprint. The always running analogy rings very true in my ears. I've been doing sprints and other variations on agile methods both as a developer and the past 8 years as a designer and is getting really tired of it. The methods are so easily sold to management and mostly poorly understood and implemented.. My current project manager has no deeper understanding of agile concepts and keeps strictly to his highly detailed plan while complaining about the deliveries of his design and development team using agile methods and mindsets.