Paying for agile, doesn’t make you agile
Imagine your organization is adopting / installing (rolling out) new ways of working, supported by consultants to implement what is often…
Imagine your organization is adopting / installing (rolling out) new ways of working, supported by consultants to implement what is often referred to as the Spoti-SAFe model. Sprinkle in a quarterly governance cycle (QBRs), OKRs and if you are lucky a move to funding teams (and capacity).
Martin Fowler, Daniel Mezick, Luca Minudel, Chris Matts and many others (see the Open Leadership Network post) fight against ‘the agile industrial complex’. What is the agile industrial complex? It is a cottage industry of consulting companies trying to sell pre-packaged ‘agile in a box’ type solutions to large complex organizations. This is the modern day magic pill / snake oil at scale.
Why do organizations pay for this privilege? Is it because they realize they are on borrowed time, losing revenue, getting slowed down by complexity or they simply have a new leader? These large complex organizations often fool themselves into thinking their business models are still viable after they have long stopped producing the same amount of profit as in the past. This becomes quite sad when people think things will get better simply by improving Cost Income Ratio or focusing on efficiency. That is a race to the bottom and not sustainable. e.g. The fin-tech industry is one such example.
Companies in this situation typically feel that they have few options at their disposal and are willing to pay large sums of money to expensive consulting firms to tell them how to be agile.
The fundamental error with this approach is you don’t harness the organization’s existing talent and learning that have realized what works and what doesn’t within the organization. That is far more useful than a scripted set of slides that look slick to executives but simply won't work for the organization's context. I think you can only realize organizational agility if you go through learning, experimentation, and growth yourself.
Having someone telling you how to do things and calling them best practices is a recipe for failure. The hard-won lessons are what will make you better!
These large complex organizations are at serious risk of being displaced by smaller, more nimble start-ups or tech-natives that don’t suffer from the same legacy and bureaucracy of large complex organizations.
An organization who cannot make decisions effectively will not survive in the future. It is often better to decide, experiment and have the experiment fail so that you can iterate, rather than be stuck with an ‘escalation of commitment’ (see David Marquet’s book Leadership is Language).
We know from Cynefin that in the complex domain of knowledge work, it is better to have multiple parallel safe-to-fail probes. Experiments are often meant to be repeatable and a probe quite often isn’t.
Industry examples
In the financial services industry, we’ve already seen this with the neo-banks e.g. Monzo, Revolut. They don’t have brick and mortar stores; they have a great UX and you have never had to call them for help. I once set up a shared bank account with my partner and had to make an appointment to go into the bank's office (with both of us there) to set that up.
In the automotive industry, Tesla changed the game with electric vehicles and batteries, the competition was slow to react and are only now just playing catch up.
Can organization X catch up?
For the late adopters / laggards of agile, they are usually missing the point and trying to be agile. They’ve missed the last 20 years of learning and adapting practices and business models that would have changed how they offer products and services.
What sets organizations apart these days is the time to validated learning (sometimes referred to as ‘build, measure, learn’)
If an organization can learn faster than the competition, they have a serious advantage (see John Boyd’s OODA loop). If their products are digital and can be updated over the air, they can keep getting better over time.
You cannot learn and adapt quickly if you commit to delivering work 12–18 months in advance. This is even more relevant if the committed work requires spending more time coordinating ‘front to back’ across an organization than to do the work in small increments and value being released incrementally. This sounds easy to say and is hard to do, your people are smart so if they understand the why they can figure out the how — but they need to approach planning differently.
As new products and services enter the market, the cost to change becomes cheaper and faster, the more digital and loosely coupled things can be (think of Conway's law) the more organizations will get ahead of you.
Slicing into smaller outcomes to create feedback loops
Slice work into smaller batch sizes or iterations, practice, learn and repeat.
These slices should deliver some value to someone. The goal is to deliver value along the way and learn as you go. Value can accumulate over time, even if you aren’t ready to launch a product, you can still find ways to deliver value.
If you can only deliver value by completing all the work, you are likely to fall into the waterfall trap. You need to invest in thinking about how you can learn and prove value, even if it is only partial value and it is informing the team that they are heading in the right direction.
You don’t have to deliver all value on day one, you do need to deliver some value along the way. This learning should be transparent and shared with others so they can see the outcomes.
This is how you know you are going in the right direction, how you keep people with you on the journey and avoid premature optimization of your product.
One inspiring example that comes to mind is the CEO of GitLab (Sid Sijbrandij) who published videos onto Youtube for how their organization regularly challenge each other to deliver value in iterations rather than waiting until a complete set of features are ‘complete’.
This type of servant leadership echos the values is so powerful that it sends a clear message. If you are working on something and not iterating your work, you are not aligned to the companies values (see their awesome handbook).
Search YouTube for ‘GitLab Iteration Office Hours’ for lots of great dialogue and interaction. When was the last time your CEO has such compelling discussions with your organization on breaking work down and incrementing value.