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I was working on a keynote on the 10 pillars of a successful Agile transformation for a very smart bank the other day and I had to get back to the book to find said pillars and reconsider how I felt about them all when I wrote it. Specifically back to the “Agile WoW and WoT” chapter the name of which was inspired by this article I wrote in Forbes ages ago called “You can’t have the WoW without the WoT”
Re-reading it all I stand by -almost- every word and that’s rare for me when pieces any older than a year or two normally make me either cringe a bit or disagree a lot ,because le’t face it, things move too fast around us for that not to occur.
I remember when the article came out and how it caused a stir. People were annoyed with my unflinching stance. Not as annoyed as when my infamous “Agile by Heart Not by McKinsey PowerPoint” Forbes article was published but still not all for it.
At the time I thought it was anti-Agile-resistance, nowadays, older and I like to believe wiser, I wonder if it weren’t a reaction to how sterile and pompous any theoretical stance is. These days I’m all for the practical bits. The “Fine but what do we *DO* and when will we stop just lyricizing about it?”
To be fair at that point I felt we were pre-“Fine!” and that the message of Agile being a mindset change of enormous proportions but needed and worth it hadn’t sunk in. Has it fully sunk in today? For everyone? Everywhere? Still “no” but we are a damn lot closer.
Maybe the biggest win I see is that even in the slow and reluctant shops where many people are still “doing Agile despite themselves” and not everyone is doing it “from the heart” there still is little -if any- need to express the point of doing it in the first place at least when it comes to speed. This could well be because of how it has become the norm in technology everywhere else and the commonality has simply worn off the “it’s just a fade and it will go away” excuse, but I like to believe it is because people have noticed that speed. They lived it. They had to concede that the things in the “Done” column would have taken eons or not happened at all in a waterfall world. So they stopped contesting it.
I wasn’t ever one to try and include Agile stat after Agile stat in my talks or even the book – I presumed the point was fairly clear to most of us and when I spoke about the reasons they tended to be more esoterical:
“What do we need Agile for?”
Not Only For Speed, But For True Collaboration
For Finding Family
For the Value
For the Sake of the Challenge
For the Licence to be Human
To Be and Build Our Best
And all of the above is true if a bit too lyrical to be easy to stomach to a certain audience. The same audience that sometimes flinched at my “10 Pillars of a Successful Agile Transformation” is so little about the code and so much about the humans as this updated set here:
“10 Pillars of a Successful Agile Transformation”
Affirming a deep commitment to change– aka Organisational Permission – giving your people real permission by sharing your thought process behind wanting change to give validity to how much you do: “This is what we now believe and where we want this company to go and we know we must change our work culture and behaviours to make it happen so this is not empty rhetoric but our plan on how to become part of the digital elite – come with?”. The permission slip has to be accompanied by real support. Resources and freedom alike have to be plentiful at every turn. Whether it costs money, time or understanding, neither should be spared when people take the slip and use it.
Tolerating nothing but Servant Leadership – decentralized and purpose-driven autonomy in lieu of command and control. Empowered and fearless teams instead of nit-picking and insulting micro-management. True leadership. Some say this is the hardest of them all – it comes so unnaturally to every consummate exec that they have trouble even envisioning how a climate of lack of control would even accomplish the enterprise goals they have. With the pandemic behind us this topic is more current than ever and finding ways to quickly change our collective perception of leadership and create a new breed that is comfortable not controlling and never commanding is imperative or the conversations about returning to the office will continue to muddle our understanding of what matters – people – our customers and our employees.
Taking Agile to Heart – An environment where flexibility and adaptability are aggressively praised – in actionable terms, not on paper only. Shifting from sequential thinking to a continuous loop with things done as needed, not as road-mapped a year in advance, is not easy but essential.
At the centre of this – building a culture of experimentation. Once the above is in place and rewards become connected to being adaptable and brave, all that’s left to see courage propagate in an environment where mini-results are praised is to consistently underline how making open and honest mistakes is more valuable than being spot-on.
Obsessing with the customer. Finding ways to prioritize customer feedback above all else and therefore learn to be MVP-driven to gather it. Above all others, this is intensely personal to your particular business and attempting any of the off-the-shelf strategies won’t work. Unfortunately, for most places, a good litmus test of how Agile they are is asking developers who their customers are and what they believe they need as far too many have nary a clue.
Obsessing with the team. Focusing on the idea of the family-like units that do the Agile work is fundamental. As we said before, too much of the rhetoric today revolves around ‘ the organization ’ – a nebulous concept if you stop to think about it, which brings the discourse into the realm of the theoretic and unactionable in the same way that the term ‘ transformation ’ does. Once the lens changes, the natural need will be glaringly obvious: obsess with the team’s behaviours and dynamic in particular their Psychological Safety, so they succeed.
“Continuous everything” not only “development” but “learning” and “improvement” – a thirst for innovation and growth are fundamental to each of the above elements, but it often comes as the least natural step considering the state of our knowledge organizations today. This is about ideally becoming addicted to critical thinking and cultivating passion. No stone should be left unturned and no question unasked by any of your people, your teams or your leaders. If they stop examining everything and attacking the status-quo, they stop being able to always strive for the loop and they stop being in flux. Ironically, a willingness to always exhibit critical thinking is the clearest sign of the presence or absence of passion. When it’s there in sufficient quantities, expressed and vociferous critical thinking will be too.
Redefining “results” to what matters. Instead of KPIs and performance indicators lifted off someone else’s business manual from the 1990s, sit down and understand what is important and what would be a good measure of success: the company level “why”. Ideally, the exploration finds that it’s cold hard cash in the coffers as that’s a perfectly valid reason for living business-wise and it’s translatable into objectives and key results (OKRs) which can be comprised of these pillars here, once it is crystal-clear. These new measurements must also reward failure, heart, courage and curiosity instead of compliance and impression management.
Empowering teams for better dynamics and true collaboration. Moving the topic from an empty word to meaningful and practical, intense common purpose, mutual help and its immediate and tangible benefits. Instead of talking about breaking silos, unify them by reaffirming the vision and allow them to see the connection threads while reaffirming the identity of the strong family unit the team is and giving them the permission, tools and support to better themselves. Let them define their WoW and get to it.
Lowering the HumanDebt™. We can’t keep ignoring what we owe our people. Much of this is hygiene in this new world where automation can and will eliminate anything that isn’t intensely human and therefore competitive eventually. Giving our people respect, joy, a space to be themselves and grow and making them feel truly free and valuable isn’t the norm and the implications of that alone have contributed to the Human Debt. Today, urgently, what cleaning up some of this debt means, is to mandate the human work. Making the space for the people-work and empowering teams and individuals to do it is simply the most efficient way to scale the clean-up from the trenches.
Once again while all of this may be painfully and still urgently true, I don’t like talking to “the organisation” – who is to read this and take it to heart? Quid prodes? Who will print out the pillars and then do the things? On whose epic do they land? No one’s. When we talk to the enterprise we shout in the woods. When we talk to individuals or teams and we give them true empowerment to do things is when mountains are moved and Agile success stories are built on top of said pillars.
How strong are *your* pillars? How many of those can you say are in the “Done” column?
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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve
Read more about our Team Dashboard that measures and improves Psychological Safety at www.peoplenottech.com or reach out at contact@peoplenottech.com and let’s help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.
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