Please Don't Make Artists Do Agile

I’m in my final year of college and, in order to complete my Drama degree, am enrolled in a theater class which requires us to put on 5 small performances over the course of the semester. We spend our valuable class time filling out sprint logs, estimating story points, and self-assessing for “optimal” project efficiency. The course fulfills a history-like requirement for my degree, but the professor has shifted the focus to creating as many small “productions” as possible. That on it’s own is not the problem. The problem is that the professor has decided to enforce Agile as the methodology for making theatre.

I have a software background and I undertand and have worked in Agile environments. I appreciate how the various implementations of Agile can be a force for good in software development. But it should not be applied to everything.

Even if you “do Agile right,” applying what is fundamentally a tool for optimal efficiency in software development to the arts is a mistake. The arts are about creativity, experimentation, and spontaneity. You can’t time-box every step of the creative process. Sure, you can estimate how long it might take to rehearse a scene or to build a set, but it’s much harder to estimate how long it will take to generate an idea that resonates with you, that you’re proud of, that you’re excited to share with others. I do beleive that constraints breed creativity (that’s one of the reasons I love theatre so much), but when the primary constraint is time, everything becomes stiff and unproductively rigid. One of the things I love about Theatre is that it’s all collaborative. I love having an idea, trying it out for a bit, coming together as a company or group of designers (or whatever) and working through our ideas and coming up with new ones. I love the spontaneus ideas that change the direction of the boat. I love that it’s a communal, living, breathing thing.

The type of Agile that my professor is enforcing is essentially the bastardized corporate Agile pushed by top-down management, just in a slightly different font. Like this corporate “Agile”, the story points matter more than the work. There is a value judgement baked into whether or not you hit your estimated time allocation. In a recent class, groups who “estimated correctly” how many tasks would be accomplished during the period were praised publicly. This corporatized version of Agile is about the act of estimating rather than doing or making. It’s been maniupulated to optimize employee time and company profits. That’s not what theater should be about.

Applying corporate Agile to theatre-making also encourages the production of artistic boilerplate. The point of estimating story points (or t-shirt sizes or whatever) is to be able to come back and reassess so that next time, your estimations are more accurate. But that assumes a relatively stable environment with few unpredictable variables. That’s not what theatre is. Sure, most shows have similar deadlines for Lighting, Scenic, Sound, Props, etc. and a set deadline of opening night, but the process of getting there is different each time and each show asks for different things.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for project management in theatre. There absolutely is; a good PM (production manager) can make or break a show. But the PM is there to facilitate the creative process, not to dictate it. The PM is there to make sure that the show gets up on time and on budget, not to enforce arbitrary productivity metrics and procceses.

Agile/Scrum/etc. is a tool, but when it’s enforced top-down on artists, it becomes beaureacratic overhead that limits creativity and makes the work less enjoyable. I’m not saying that artists can’t benefit from some of the principles of Agile, but it should be up to the artists to decide how or if to implement them.

One more thought: putting aside the procedural issues of Agile, it is (at least in popular conception) a tool for corporate productivity and profitability. When you apply it to artists, you project the ideas, values, and goals of the corporate world onto the artists. Though theatre exists in the real world of budgets and deadlines, the goal of good theatre should not be to make money or to have the most efficient proccess.

The goal of good theatre should be to make good theatre. Agile gets in the way of that.