Good Agile, Bad Agile and How to Win Big ¹

In organisations that implement some form of scaled agile, it is common to hear teams report that it feels like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. What makes it difficult for large organisations to be agile?

The story of building products that clients love

If you bear with me, we will start by rewinding to remember what made us agile at a small scale, the individual team or small startup…

The waterfall straw-man that justifies Agile

In waterfall models, a knowledgeable and experienced person creates a “specification” for a product that they believe clients will use. It is short of what the real opportunity is. Understandably so, because, no-one can see the future.

A team is tasked with building the product, and gets driven hard by a project manager towards the goal. The team falls short because of time and quality constraints and because the product “specification” is poorly understood.

The myth of small increments

The team then starts to execute in small increments, but small increments land us with the same results, because the team still moves in the direction to which they have been directed.

The values that lead to failure

The team failed to show improvement because they could not change the underlying value system. This value system includes such beliefs as:

• What is to be built is decided by the most important people, who work outside of the team that builds the product.
• Driving the team is a highly valued role and focuses on defining and executing plans for the team (managing resources, defining the order of tasks, managing dependencies, communicating progress).
• The team that does the work is fungible
• Tightly controlled communication can hide uncomfortable truths

Learning and empowerment

The organisation then discovers that real agility is achieved when the team is empowered to make decisions based on cycles created to maximise learning. If applied tepidly, then this has modest results. If applied courageously, it can have spectacular results. Being courageous means profound changes in roles. If we are lucky, the project manager is gone and the product owner moves into the team. If we are less lucky, the project manager becomes a scrum master and the product owner changes her title, but not her behaviour.

The most important signals on the path to real agility are the changes in behaviour.

The team behaviours that lead to success

• Listening over directing
• A truly collective passion for the client proposition (commercial acumen)
• A truly collective passion for being technically good at building products
• A continuous multi-lateral conversation about the vision
• The courage to act, with mutual accountability of each member of the team (and those they rely on) to get things done
• Strong opinions that are weakly held [2]
• Generous acknowledgement of the contribution of others
• Active and honest recounting of the story of the team’s progress (by the team themselves)

Scaling

“Scaled agile” is not agile

The most common conversations around “scaled agile” are often an anti-patterm to this story. We hear discussions on managing dependencies, managing resources, prioritising work, architectural governance, controlled communication…. Roles are created (or renamed) to sustain these. It feels very much like the previous example of a failed start to team agile. In other words, all the appearance of change lands us in essentially the same place, with perhaps some modest efficiency gains.

What will it take to profoundly change behaviours at higher organisational levels in the way that the pioneers have done in small teams? It is common cause that this demands a different type of leader.

But, while the agile values and practices are fractal, the willingness and incentives for leaders to change behaviours are not. Willingness and incentive to change are easier for those below me than for me. It is easier to restructure my team than to recognise that substantial parts of my role are now irrelevant. Things that have made me proud and successful actually hold back the potential of my organisation.

If you go back and read the behaviours of the agile team, do these (or could these) truly describe all levels of your organisation? Don’t give an easy answer.

Am I courageous enough to follow through?

In this context, there are no solutions that allow us to tinker with existing structures. Being agile means reinventing the modern corporation.

How do we do this? Let the small agile team be our leader. There isn’t a “how”, there is only a “why”.

[1] With apologies to Richard Gabriel, http://dreamsongs.com/WIB.html

[2] Ameet Ranadive, https://medium.com/@ameet/strong-opinions-weakly-held-a-framework-for-thinking-6530d417e364

Photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash