This was my second year as a facilitator at the Business Agility Conference in New York City, and it was even more impactful than last year (read about 2017 here). The real-world stories were enlightening and inspiring. Speakers represented a wide range of disciplines and industries (e.g. nursing, human resources, hardware and physical engineering businesses, energy operations).
The evolution of this event has aligned well with my personal journey. The last few years I have worked closely with Scrum.org and the Professional Scrum Trainer community to understand agility challenges and how we can affect more positive change. I have worked with a wider range of organizations, including startups and small companies trying to keep up with their growth and get out of the chaos, as well as traditional businesses trying to be innovative and reduce their complexity.
My beliefs have been shifting as I’ve questioned the way things have been done and the assumptions many of us in the agile community hold. I am focusing more on how I can best serve and create meaningful impact. Many of my new ideas and beliefs were confirmed and expanded upon at this year’s event.
Photo by Philipp Henzler on Unsplash
Amen! I avoid using the phrase “agile transformation.” And this sentiment was echoed by a number of speakers, including Barclay’s Jonathan Smart. It’s about moving towards business agility. And you’re always going to be growing and transforming. There is no endpoint.
Words I often use to describe agility are “nimble” and “resilient.” Jonathan made a profound point when he asked the audience, “What if you have to break your value chains and build new ones if there is a market stressful event?”
Don’t make the goal about agile. Be the best at getting better.
If that phrase doesn’t work for you, how about this definition of business agility Jonathan offered:
Agility is the speed and effectiveness with which an organization can generate new insights, adapt, and respond to them.”
When I work with clients on business agility (or even when I’m chatting on a podcast or coaching clients one-on-one), I always talk about knowing your why and knowing what you want.
Purpose is the why. Outcomes are what you want.
Then you create alignment. When you have your purpose and desired outcomes, you can create a strategy that aligns them. You also empower people and teams to make decisions because you have created organizational clarity.
You need to have the right measures (outcomes!) in place to guide your progress and inform adaptations. This also creates alignment and feedback loops for continuous improvement.
This was a big a-ha for me. It’s something I have felt but had not heard articulated. It has always seemed a bit awkward to talk about the “culture part” of an “agile transformation.” And here’s the thing… culture is not a “piece of the puzzle” or one of the “tools.”
Jutta Eckstein shared her model for company wide agility using three focus areas of process, strategy, and structure. She explained that you don’t need to call out culture separately because culture change is only happening if behaviors change.
Culture is embedded in everything.
Culture is the whole puzzle. It’s who we are and who we are becoming.
This also means that culture is non-negotiable.
We must make hard decisions and remove the obstacles that are holding us back. If those obstacles involve not having the right people in management positions, corrective action needs to happen fast or else the cultural climate suffers. And you can still approach these conversations with compassion and integrity.
I hear a lot (and have even said myself) that the best way to approach large change is to start with a pilot. Prove it, then slowly roll it out, one team at a time. While I think there may be specific things that make sense to pilot, I don’t believe agility is something you pilot first. And this was echoed strongly by some of the speakers.
Jimmy Allen, author of Founder’s Mentality made a great point about the problem with pilots. Anything with huge executive support always succeeds, but it doesn’t always mean it will “just work” when you roll it out. So yes, we can learn from pilots. They can help us mitigate risk. But we have to be careful about knowing the context within which we learned and consider the wider implications when we take it to the masses.
I will be stealing this quote from Ard Leferink,
I don’t do pilots. We are either going to change or we’re not going to change.”
Organizations don’t “try on” agility. You commit to the agile mindset because you believe in the values and principles. At the very least, you commit because you know you need to think and work differently in order to survive and to thrive.
And this point about pilots also brings up a common problem we create for ourselves in large organizations with integrated systems and processes.
Laurence Jourdain shared the story of a major bank in the Netherlands that did a “big bang” approach to organizational change. They transitioned their teams to Scrum by rolling it out in waves of about 500 people at a time. In her words, they defined a set of common structural changes and “pushed everyone in the water.”
When we try to change bits and pieces of highly interconnected systems, we create lots of dependencies, confusion, and unproductive conflict. In my experience, these so-called “hybrid approaches” feel very heavy. Instead of spending all that energy fighting through the challenges created by the hybrid approach, imagine if everyone put all of their energy into figuring out a better way together.
Because everyone was in the water, they were able to work together to find solutions to the most pressing problems quicker.
If you set enough structure, provide training and ongoing coaching to support people, and create the focus described in point #2 above, you can trust that people will figure it out.
This feels in alignment with the latest work from thought leaders at Scrum.org (Scrum Studio as a model for innovation) and John Kotter (creating a dual operating system) that enable this ability to push the right people in the water rather than struggling against slow organizational change.
Everyone wants to “scale agile,” but much of what I see in terms of approach seems to miss the point of scaling. Jimmy Allen offered a great description of what scaling agility actually means.
Scaling is about having a strategic effect on the organization, not the number of agile teams.”
Jimmy went on to talk about the Growth Paradox. Growth creates complexity, and complexity kills your growth.
We need to constantly seek to reduce complexity. Jimmy reminded us that the purpose of good organizational design is to create conflict. The problem is we forget to resolve the conflicts, and this often leads to the creation of silos which allow the complexity to grow. The problems actually get bigger as we seek “advanced” solutions.
In order to be more nimble and more resilient, descale the work. Then build up the descaled work.
Descaling work is not easy. It requires technical excellence, multi-disciplinary teams, extreme transparency, short feedback cycles, and empowering people to raise issues immediately. Jonathan Smart summed up his message about descaling with this metaphor:
The better your brakes, the faster you can go.”
How quickly can you see a problem, stop the line, fix the problem, and move forward again?
This comes up all the time in my work. Yet it is still a fundamental problem in many organizations. I heard stories with tangible examples of significant change created by listening to people.
Amanda Bellwood shared her story as an HR representative assigned to a 100-person technology tribe. She knew performance management was a challenge, so she decided to have conversations (speed dating style) with the people she supported. She didn’t ask for permission. She just did it. She listened to them and started implementing changes that were so successful that other tribes were clamoring for the same changes.
Jason Tice shared his story of using games and being more transparent to overcome our biases in how we interview people. When we create the space for candidates to be seen and heard through different styles of communication, thinking, and collaboration, we learn more meaningful information about them.
Lisa Smith, a fast track executive transforming the Duke Energy operations centers, reminded us that we have to listen to employees and to customers. She saw an environment where employees didn’t know how to think anymore and embarked on a mission to create management that enables and empowers employees.
If you’re a leader and you are prescribing rather than listening to employees, you are adding risk to your business. Listen to people and remove their obstacles.”
