The first time I saw this expression was at a tech conference, a talk from Alexandre Freire.
If you don't know it, take a look at this video:
There are more details on Wikipedia, but TL/DR: indigenous saw planes dropping food / etc and thought it was God's gifts. When the war stopped and the army left, they repeated the same actions to keep receiving the gifts.
What message do you think we could take from this?
If we don't know WHY we are doing something, we are not going to receive the benefits
In the agile context:
- If you don't know why we do retros, the team will not get better
- If you don't know why we do stand up / daily meetings, you may not have address communication and collaboration issues
In the tools context:
- If you don't know how "the tool" works and which problems it solves, you may introduce new issues
- Some samples: kafka/kubernetes/microservices/graphql/etc
In the finance context:
- If you don't know how the market works, you may buy on high and sell on low
- If you don't know about Bitcoin, you may lose money
We can go on and on, about weight loss, metrics, entrepreneurship...
Using Steve Jobs shirts will not make you rich...
Neither wake up at 4 am...
Neither cold showers...