What do 3-2-1 cookies have to do with Agile?
This morning, I googled “3-2-1 cookie recipe” to verify I remembered correctly that 3-2-1 was Flour-Butter-Sugar. I was aghast. The top results weren’t even 3-2-1 cookies. What the heck is wrong with this world?
More importantly, what on Earth does this have to do with Agile? Okay, dear reader, stick with me here and traverse the craziness of my former-chef-turned-programmer-turned-product-manager-turned-agile-coach mind to get there. I hope it’ll be an interesting one. Maybe less interesting if you don’t care about cooking…or food…or cookies.
Back to Cookies
What are 3-2-1 Cookies?
3-2-1 cookies are a ratio by weight to achieve a shortbread cookie. Why weight? Because weight works every time; whereas, volume would, first, be a totally different ratio and, second, depend on, well, how you weigh your flour.
The correct ratio is 3 parts flour - 2 parts butter - 1 part sugar. This produces a “short” dough, meaning that the fat blended with the flour is what inhibits the flour from developing its gluten and forming a solid puck and instead leaves it tender such that it’s crumbly and pleasant to bite through. There’s no leavener, e.g. baking powder. There’s no egg. There’s no flavoring.
A 3-2-1 cookie is the single simplest cookie you can make, at least as far as technical cooking skills because a great 3-2-1 cookie depends entirely on having amazing ingredients. (Here in the US, it’s hard to get great butter because we don’t have literal aisles devoted to butter like they do in France, but I digress.)
So, if I wanted to make a small batch of shortbread cookies, I’d weigh 25g sugar, 50g butter, and 75g flour. Unlike most recipes containing wheat flour that you want to remain tender, you can mix this pretty much to your heart’s content. The high ratio of butter to flour and lack of water will inhibit gluten development. The end result of the dough is a smooth, uniform, firm ball of flour-butter-sugar mush.
From there, you form the dough into cookies by any number of methods:
Roll and cut
Form into a log using parchment (imagine the tubes of cookie dough you can buy at the grocery store), refrigerate, then cut into little coins
Use a portion scooper to place uniformly-sized semi-spheres onto a sheet tray then flatten them
Flatten into a 9x13 pan, bake, and cut into rectangles inside the pan immediately out of the oven.
Other methods I’m sure I’m missing
Bake at 325 degrees Fahrenheit until cooked through. The time depends on how big you made the cookies and if you made separate cookies or did the 9x13 method above, which would take the longest and for which I’d suggest lowering the oven temperature.
Wow, that’s a lot of variation for the simplest form of cookie, dontcha think? I even skipped over variation in how you might start making the dough. But, all of these methods will produce a proper 3-2-1 cookie.
What did Google tell me was a 3-2-1 cookie?
Ron Howard narrator voice: It was not a 3-2-1 cookie.
The top result confidently proclaims that this ratio only works for volume measurements!
The second result confidently proclaims the ratio is for volume, but provides a recipe that’s 4-2-1 by volume or 4-3.83-1 by weight.
The third result, written by a woman named Janice with a PhD in chemistry, not surprisingly, nails it. I’m also going to provide this link to the result because it’s really well written and explained.
Why did this search make me lose faith in humanity this morning?
What if it weren’t me searching for this ratio this morning? What if it had been a friend of mine, a family member, or some other random person who, unlike me, hadn’t been to (the best) culinary school (in the world) and worked in 5-star restaurants?
They do their Google search and come up with these top 3 results. What the heck do they do? Do they choose at random? Do further searching? Call a friend like me? Give up?
Because I do field enough calls from people in this situation, I know: it leaves them incredibly frustrated, many on the verge of giving up.
The Internet can be a great tool, and it can also be full of bad information confidently declared as good information. Perhaps the Internet is just Dunning-Kruger run amok.
Onto Agile…
The hellscape that was LinkedIn this morning
I caught a thread on LinkedIn including the usual suspects those of the Agile community would expect be involved in the rant-du-jour about the ills of the Agile world.
Don’t get me wrong, these people all know what they’re talking about. I’m sure they’ve all been a part of successful orgs that build great products. They’re experts. For sure.
But, it hit me: they’re all out in public methaporically arguing about what a 3-2-1 cookie is and how evil it is there are people giving bad recipes.
Imagine if I was someone considering how I might improve my organization and I was considering this “Agile” thing. If I saw the constant barrage of arguments among the Agile faithful, I’d likely be confused. I’d be frustrated. I’d be afraid to enter for fear that I’d get it wrong and suffer the wrath of these experts excoriating the masses for doing it wrong.
Back to cookies and pulling it together…
OMG, I’m the asshole
When I saw those incorrect 3-2-1 recipes, I tweeted a screenshot with the intent to mock the recipe showing ratios that were not 3-2-1 by volume or weight. Not to mock the person who did it, but because I find it humorous that there’s a recipe proclaimed to be 3-2-1 that isn’t 3-2-1 in any way, shape, or form. I find that humorous, but I’m sure if the author saw my tweet she’d think I was mocking her…and I suppose in a way I was. My bad.
As I thought about the constant debates in the Agile community decrying “that’s not Agile!” or whatever the refrain of the day is, I considered how I don’t think these debates help people trying to start, and how they feel like the experts in the Agile community disagree. (Narrator: they do, vehemently, but usually about some fairly fine points.)
I then reflected back on the cookie thing. I was being the “that’s not ‘Agile’” asshole.
So what’s the point? Why did that inspire me to write about it?
I had an ah-ha moment.
There’s a lot of discussion in the Agile community about how this framework, or that framework, or that method isn’t agile. “It’s not right and we should call it out,” people say.
But, maybe it’s working or stepwise working in their context?
I read/hear a lot of discussion these days about recognizing that people need to adapt frameworks, practices, and methods to their environment. Agile should look different everywhere because the combination of business challenges each company is trying to solve is unique, the argument goes.
I agree, and I think we need to have this conversation more frequently with companies trying to be more agile.
Perhaps we need to step back and realize that this means people will experiment with things we don’t like. Someone might even do some “Dark Agile” or “Dark Scrum” things because they found the wrong recipe. Maybe they even took an expensive cooking class and the instructor told them this was the best or only way.
How do we help them without decrying them as terrible cooks, mocking them for following the wrong recipe, or scolding them for taking classes from the wrong chef?
Ultimately, we’re not after the scientifically perfect 3-2-1 cookie because maybe everyone doesn’t like it. Maybe they’re after a shortbread cookie, which has any number of permutations. Maybe they don’t even want a shortbread cookie: perhaps they prefer macadamia nut cookies. Everyone’s tastes are different.
What if we step back and recognize that people are in search of a cookie (delivering business outcomes - to steal Jon Smart’s phrasing - better value sooner safer happier) versus a 3-2-1 cookie (whatever our definition of “perfect” agility or Agile or Scrum or SAFe or LeSS or etc. is)? What if we recognized that what we all may think as experts isn’t a good cookie is actually someone’s favorite? That’s what they like and it’s better than the cookies they used to make.
As for my cookies
I ended up making a small batch of 3-2-1 cookies.
I added in some powdered whole milk, because adding a little dry milk will change your life. I also subbed in some cocoa powder for part of the flour. And I under baked them slightly because I like them a smidge doughy.
These were the perfect 3-2-1 cookie for me this morning. Even though they’re not 3-2-1 cookies… or perhaps not even a cookie you’d like. And I’m okay with that.