Why You Should Kill Your Agile Transformation
Agile transformations are all over the place. Results are disparate and some organizations seem to have forgotten why they started it all in the first place. How can its actual value be protected and real impact delivered?
Context: The hype around agile organizations needs some debunking
As leading organizational behavior scholars put across in crystal-clear terms, every few years or so, the management consulting community latches onto a new cure for everything that ails large organisations (a.k.a. potential clients).
These hype cycles unfold in predictable phases: the new practice seems to work in a number of organizations and gets highly publicised (see Spotify, the poster-child of agile organizations), companies of all sizes and kinds are encouraged to adopt it, a few prominent failures occur, and infatuation gives way to disillusionment as the magic medicine does not seem so magic anymore. The cycle unfolds again (and again) as the fallen wonder gets replaced by the “next big thing”.
A similar fate may be awaiting to “Agile”, a relatively abstract concept that is widely used as a “unified brand” that encompasses a broad set of organizational practices emerging from places like agile software development, design sprint methodology or the lean startup paradigm.
Why agile: The need for speed and customer focus
Before being too hard on “agilists”, it is important to remember why it all started and why it makes sense, so that its actual value can be preserved. At its core, agile is about re-imagining human interactions in a business context. But, why is that relevant?
It is relevant because organizations face a new reality. A reality in which technology has reduced the cost of creating a new product or service dramatically. A reality that allows for short development cycles and rapid testing.
Design, development and delivery cycles have shortened. Tech-powered companies are capable of launching new product releases monthly, weekly and even daily. Additionally, as the cost of putting a product (or alternative versions of it) in the hands of customers has been cut down, the objective is no longer to reach more customers than your competitors, but to learn from your customers faster than your competitors.
In that context, traditional command-and-control structures prove ineffective and the situation calls for new ways of interacting with co-workers that foster cross-disciplinary collaboration, autonomous decision-making and a culture of entrepreneurship, open-mindedness, thirst for discovery and experimentation that delivers true innovation and business value.
An inconvenient truth: A magic recipe for innovation does not exist
As Peter Thiel points out, the paradox of entrepreneurship is that a formula for success necessarily cannot exist, because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative. People find value in unexpected places and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.
What then? Does it mean that any structured effort is hopeless? Not at all. It means that it is critical to be humble, tone down the hype, understand and face reality. The reality that says that learning and discovering what product or service will work is an art. A really tough one to master.
The path forward: Direction you look is the direction you go
There are no shortcuts, magic recipes or proven ‘operating models’ you can ‘implement’. Organizations aiming to drive innovation need to (i) assemble talented and diverse teams, (ii) ensure that they have the freedom to operate with a discovery mindset and (iii) allow them to pursue meaningful and challenging goals.
Obviously, achieving that poses significant challenges and requires an enormous amount of drive, courage and commitment to face the harsh reality.
Harsh reality #1: Working in multi-disciplinary teams is painful
People in truly diverse teams struggle to understand each other. Working with someone that sees the world in a different way is not natural, is a skill that takes time to learn and does not come easy. But the pain pays off in terms of ability to actually transform reality.
Different skills and backgrounds contribute to innovative solutions. True innovation can be inspired by customers, market dynamics and new technologies. Customer, business and technology-savvy colleagues must be welcomed, respected and valued.
How to know if your team is diverse enough? Hard one. But if you personally could do everything that is being done, or if you fully understand everything that is being said in the room you probably are not being diverse enough.
Harsh reality #2: Mindset eats strategy for breakfast
Innovative organizations are open-minded. Being open to learning is far more important than having a good initial hypothesis or strategy. Innovative teams know that good ideas can come from anywhere and good ideas are not always obvious at the outset. They also feel empowered to run tests. They know that a few will succeed and many will fail, and this is acceptable and understood.
In that context, teams feel pushed to stop ideas sitting on shelves and test them in the market instead. They look forward to continuously interacting with and learning from customers. They set rigorous KPIs for ideas and quickly determine whether they are worth it. And if not, they kill them or pivot.
Harsh reality #3: Goals are more relevant than processes
Teams in entrepreneurial organizations do not hide behind a process. They strive to answer questions and achieve goals, not tick checkboxes. They focus on relevant outcomes in the form of learnings, customer engagement, revenue and profit. Not on following a methodology “by the book”.
Processes are mostly irrelevant. Conformity with a process should not be praised. Speed, delivery, discovery and results should be. And buzzwords should be avoided at all costs. This one is critical, avoid buzzwords and focus on getting stuff done, not on naming that stuff.
A final harsh reality: Fear of freedom does exist
For some people, genuine autonomy and free thinking is likely to provoke unbearable levels of anxiety. Therefore, rather than using autonomy effectively, some people will inevitably attempt to minimize its “negative” effects by developing thoughts and behaviors that provide some form of fictional security.
Conformity with normative beliefs; authoritarianism, understood as the pursuit of control over others to impose some kind of order, or as the wish to submit to the control of some superior force which may come in the guise of a person (e.g. the CEO) or an abstract idea (e.g. the methodology); and even destructiveness or the bias towards destroying anything that cannot be brought under control (e.g. that interesting new idea) are all shamefully (and understandably) common traits in the corporate world.
Business transformation inevitably involves a high-degree of freedom and uncertainty. Assembling teams with the right balance of personality traits, and in particular, openness to experience, internal locus of control and need for achievement is a key success factor to avoid having frustrated teams rushing to escape from freedom while frustrated leaders expect them to perform autonomously.
