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Planet as Stakeholder @Agile2024 - The Agile Playground

Planet as Stakeholder @Agile2024

by · August 19, 2024

This past July, I traveled to Dallas to give a talk about “The Planet as a Stakeholder” at the Agile2024 conference, hosted by Agile Alliance. What an experience it was to be at such a large conference and to be able to contribute!

Earlier this year, I submitted a proposal for a talk at the Agile2024 conference. As I often submit proposals to conferences, I honestly didn’t expect it to be accepted and had almost forgotten about it until I received an email in March: “Your proposal has been… accepted!”

Suddenly, I had to think: “Do I actually want this? Flying all the way to Dallas for a talk about climate awareness in Agile teams… isn’t that a bit strange?”

After giving it some thought (making an impact vs. personal footprint??) and talking with people around me, I decided to go.

And what an experience it was.

Reimagining Agile

At a conference with all these Agile veterans—people who co-authored the Agile Manifesto, wrote books about Agile leadership, Agile team coaching, leading without blame, etc. The panel discussion on “Reimagining Agile” with Heidi Musser, John Highsmith, Jon Kern, and Sanjiv Augustine was especially interesting. In America, our colleagues are facing large-scale layoffs, raising the question of how Agile values and principles remain relevant in these times. There were statements like, “Is Agile dead? No, Agile has won!”

I noticed that this sharpened my own perspective on my work. How am I doing with my teams? As a Scrum Master, am I too focused on the ‘rules’ of Scrum instead of the principles behind them? Are my teams truly embracing Agile values?

(When today I asked one of my teams, “What do you believe is the core of Agile, and why do you find it important?” I was relieved to hear: “That we can adapt easily, that we don’t get stuck too long in one direction if it isn’t working because we work iteratively, that we have a PO and SM who can quickly respond to our clients, and that we stay focused on the value we deliver to our customers.” Thank goodness :)).

Back to the panel. The future of Agile was discussed in the light of big disruptive innovations such as AI. But Agile in service of sustainability and climate change (hugely disruptive for which we will need big innovations!) were however not really taken into account, much to my regret.

But the sadness was not for long, because after the panel discussion there was the chance to propose ones own discussion, and so I did.

Extreme Open Space

After the panel discussion, there was Extreme Open Space. Why ‘Extreme’? Because it was an Open Space with hundreds of participants. Incredibly well organized, a minimal structure without descending into chaos :). I proposed a session on Agile for the Planet: how can we use Agile as a leverage for the planet? With the awesome Steve Moubray co-facilitating, we discussed: “How to use Agile to start helping the planet?” With about 20 people, we had an interesting discussion where the consensus was that the first step is making our impact on the planet more transparent.

Networking @ Agile2024

And yes, networking is, of course, an important part of such a conference. Traditionally, AgileXX hosts a big party on Thursday evening for that purpose. Wow, can those Americans party. What a fantastic time! There’s also an interesting app for networking in the Agile community: Simply Agile. It’s like LinkedIn but exclusively for Agile professionals. It’s available in the usual app stores. Give it a try—I’m really impressed with it myself!

The Planet as Our Stakeholder

And then my own talk. During my session, I shared how you can help Agile teams reduce their IT carbon footprint and how to integrate this mindset into the Agile way of working, with examples from (among others) my teams at Alliander.

In the interactive part of my talk, the participants brainstormed on the following questions:

👉 What is needed to halve your company’s IT carbon footprint by 2030?

👉 How can you contribute to that from your role?

Many ideas were discussed!

At the end, participants shared the small steps they plan to take for the planet at their workplaces. Some examples of personal actions included:

  • Discussing the IT carbon footprint with their team.
  • Learning more about the energy consumption of the IT environment.
  • Using hardware for longer.
  • Automatically shutting down unused environments.
  • Making climate impact transparent through metrics (energy consumption).

But…

Is that enough to justify the 3.5 tons of CO2 emissions from my flight to Dallas?

Unfortunately, I don’t have specific information about how many CPUs would be needed to save 3.5 tons of CO2, considering factors like renewable energy sources, server types, and configurations.

But according to a rough estimate using ChatGPT, about 3 servers would need to run for a year less to compensate from an IT perspective.

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