When I drive through a tunnel with my kid, there are two points of excitement – entry point and exit point. When entering a new tunnel, it’s always a “Yay!!” The exit feeling depends on how long we were inside. It’s either the expression – “Finally some light” or “Oh, no, we are out.”
You get my point. We love tunnels. We like to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
We not only love tunnels, but we love to tunnel. Tunneling helps us focus, and there is a focus threshold after which we need to see some light.
Sprinting in agile is Tunneling. After a two-week sprint, we might have the expression, “Oh, no, we are out too soon.”, and after a four-week sprint, we might have the expression, “Finally, some light.”
A two weeks sprint seems to be a global average of adequate time in a sprint. While that is an indicator, the team must choose their sprint duration.
Not all people are alike. Some people like to be first finishers – Tunneling helps them to get from A to Z fastest. However, we remember our journeys for unplanned explorations. Can we visit that lake nearby? Can we bathe in that waterfall? Can we take a different road?
In software projects, the expectation from engineers/architects is that they build a path from point A to Z as fast as possible (tunnel), but the way should be open to exploration by the user. E.g., Build a mobile user interface to update my health parameters, but let me explore new services in the user interface to improve my health.
If you are agile, you can introduce innovation experiments to explore users unwritten needs, making your own journey not feel like a long tunnel.
Takeaway: We need black-box tunnels, exciting tunnels, and open roadways, and in agile software parlance, that loosely equates to sprints, spikes, and MVPs.
Digital Journey 