Why Agile is NOT the goal
IAgile isn’t changing as much as we think it is. In many situations it was implemented as a process over the values, principles and mindset that it was intended. I say implemented, because (again, in many cases), it was installed over adopted as a push (vs a pull) with little training ,coaching or change management. ‘Hey today we will be Agile’ is not possible.
First of all, it’s important to remember that agile is a set of values and principles and not a methodology. It was first published in 2001 with the goal of making the lives of software engineers better so that they could deliver value without all the waste. Underneath that umbrella are many different Frameworks. You may have heard of scrum, or Kanban, Safe, XP, Crystal or the like. They can work, but only to a certain point. They all aim to reduce waste and shorten the lead time to value.
Initially they started at the team level to promote collaboration and better ways or working but quickly morphed to a scaled system.
Without an agile mindset, it looks like what many would call ‘cargo cult scrum, or checkbox scrum’. For them to be truly effective, it’s imperative that we adopt organization agility and an organizational agile mindset.
Adopting scrum will get you a result. It will yield some benefit. A team doing a thing and focusing on the activities, events and ceremonies over the entire purpose of a sprint which is a potentially shippable increment for the purpose of a feedback loop. Don’t have that? You just have mini waterfall. ‘Agile is only faster because we don’t build things that no one wants and we will never know that without a feedback loop from the customer’.
The bigger challenge in today’s world is that we have created ‘ticket takers’. Big up front projects are still created and passed down to teams to code. Leadership push the work to the team and show up to rally and organize the teams in the false sense of ‘Servant Leadership”. It creates an environment where people wait to be told what to do over teams self organizing to determine the best approach to their work. Environments that create fear of consequences or silences voices for speaking out will cause people to just sit back and wait to be told what to do.
You see, ‘Agile’ is not the goal. The goal is creating better ways to work in order to deliver customer value. That could take any form, but those that know what is in their way, are the ones that do the work.
What if it looked like teams self-organizing around a problem they needed to solve for the customer and did whatever they needed to do to get that capability or feature into the hands of the customer?
We don’t get to tell a self-organizing team what to do. Only hold them accountable for outcomes they need to achieve with the capacity, tools, resources and environments they have.
This can only happen with a broader organizational agility. How are goals communicated? Do we ask teams to achieve objectives or do we give them a list (backlog) of things to do? Are there clear priorities? Can teams decide how to achieve that objective? Do we trust them to? That requires leadership development to unlearn old habits and learn new ones. Without it, success will be limited.
I do think agility will be around to stay. It todays fast moving environment we have such a need to continue to think people and teams first, focus on the customer, remove waste and learn as fast as we are able to improve. How we lead in these times continues to be more and more critical as we think about enabling, empowering and equipping our teams to solve problems for the customer in the work they are closest to. I do believe frameworks will and should morph to the context of the organization you are in holding organizational agility accountable for success.
At the end of the day, it’s about adaptability to delivering customer value and that looks slightly different in every context.