Agile IT Transformation and Emotions

Agile IT Transformations are often prescribed by higher leadership at a company.? The leadership believes in the benefits of the Agile Ways of Working.? Those are often portrayed in management magazines as a faster, stronger and better Information Technology Department that is more innovative, has a shorter time to the customer and provides them with Minimal Lovable Products that increase the market share and therefore the income of the company.??

Most of the Organizational Changes I have been part of focused on process change implementing Scrum and one of the scaling frameworks.? Scrum Teams often get created by management, new roles are announced that employees will fall into.? Managers are asked to be an Agile Team Manager and Servant Leader.? The business side of the organization gets a short memo that IT is going through an Agile Transformation asking for patience and that all will be for the better afterwards.

The leadership that prescribes the change often does not realize that change is hard for people and that it will trigger emotional responses by each single of their employees in IT and of course elsewhere in the company especially when working closely with the IT department.

This is why I like to talk about Agile Transformation and Emotions today.

The experience of being alive and being a human being is the experience of feeling emotion.? We cannot turn it off.? It is always present, always with us and is important because everything we do or don't do is because of a feeling we want or don't want.? Our feelings run all of our motivation and our lack of motivation.??

I am bold enough to say that our employees' emotions will either fail or succeed the Agile Transformation.? However, we hardly ever speak about emotions when getting ready for a Change.??

There are many types of emotions.? One way I like to categorize them is into energy producing or energy depleting.? This is useful, when we as an organization are deciding what emotions we want to generate in order to create the results we want to achieve with the Agile Transformation.

So the question should be: “What emotions do we as an organization want to call on in our employees when we are trying to create the result we want?”

Example: If we are trying to change how our business will work and the feelings that we are generating are, let's say, Easy, peaceful, and gratified, then we are going to run into some trouble.? Those feelings do not create a lot of energy.? In fact, they can dissipate a lot of negative energy and have you hold less energy, but they're not going to provide us with the fuel that we as an organization want to drive an Agile Transformation.??

Agile Transformation will slow down or fail because employees quit because they feel discouraged.? Why do we get discouraged? Because our results aren't providing us with the emotion we want.? We think the result is discouraging, but really, it's our thoughts about the result that's discouraging.

If we as a Team are waiting for certain metrics to improve, already felt confident, already felt motivated, already felt inspired regardless of what that numbers did, we would never quit, we would keep moving forward, we would keep following the Agile practices: like write unit tests, do refactoring, invite stakeholders to our backlog refinement, exercise Sprint Reviews (Demos) and would be taking care of our Team and ourselves, voice what we need in the Retrospective and would take the improvement item into the next Sprint and would work on it.??

We as an organization don't just put something on our vision board or create OKRs (Objective and Key Results) and then expect to get it.? We must have felt pretty confident that we would be able to achieve it.? We must have really believed that we would get it.? Then, we created that reality in our organization.? If Organizations put something on their vision board and don't believe it and don't get it, it's because they didn't believe it would work.??

Remember our thoughts create our results by generating or depleting the energy that we need to create those results.??

Energy producing emotions

What emotions do we want to create driving our Agile Transformation? Here are some of the emotions that I think are energy producing:?Motivated, Disciplined, Excited, Inspired, Fascinated, Intrigued, Curious, Engrossed, Amazed, Attentive, Focused, Courageous, Energetic, Optimistic, Thrilled, Exhilarated, Communicative, Active, Vigorous, Earnest, Cooperative, Productive, in the zone, Honored, Privileged, Adaptable, Reliable, Dynamic, Alignment, Confidence, Stable

The reason why that produces energy for me is because I hold steady through negativity.

Agile on its own already has the following emotions: to focus, to be adaptable, to be transparent and to be cooperative.? What other emotions do we want to have and work towards in order to be successful in our change in our organization?

We have a list of emotions that are important to us leading the transformation.? Now, it becomes important to think about how we can generate those emotions in our organization and design the transformation around it in order to create the result we want.

Example: The organization wanted to generate following feelings: alignment, cooperation, focus, transparency, communication and motivation.?

They had a Sprint kick-off meeting every two weeks where everyone in IT was invited.? The meeting was between 8 and 9 am and it was in the largest room they had.? It had a breakfast banquet with free food.? They had coffee, tea, bagels, donuts, fresh fruit and other yummy food items.? The first 30 minutes either a team was introduced or talked about what they did and the largest failure was celebrated.? The next 30 minutes people were asked to mingle and to find someone they have not met or talked to and to introduce themselves and just have a chat.? This meeting generated lots of positive energy and motivation for the new Sprint as well as all the feelings mentioned above.??

Energy Depleting Emotions

Then, there's all these energy depleting emotions that so many of us indulge in and many Agile Transformation generate unwillingly.

Confused is a great example of that.? I have run into many confused employees during a change to the Agile Ways of Working and what I heard most often is, "I don't know."?

Confusion is a completely energy depleting emotion and it is not useful and it totally blocks any wisdom that we have.? Here are a few energy depleting emotion: Confused, Unsure, "I don't know" energy, that self pity, that feeling sorry for yourself, Disheartened, Despondent, Cheerless, Stumped

These types of emotions are going to deplete our energy.? They are not going to generate the result we want.? Therefore, it is very important to avoid the generation of those energy depleting emotions.

What can we do before starting our Agile Transformation?

1. Sit down and look at the energy depleting emotions and ask yourself.? “What can we do to avoid those emotions among our employees? What opposite emotion do we want to generate instead? Example: We do not want to have confused employees, we want to have employees who are clear on what is going to happen and how it is impacting them and their organization.? We like to provide understanding towards employees that have questions and concerns why we are doing the Transformation. ? Let’s generate some OKRs towards that goal that we just spoke about
2. Sit down and look at the energy generating emotion and ask yourself.? “What can we do to generate those feelings within our employees in the first place? How can we maintain these feelings over many months? How are we designing our Agile Transformation so we produce those energy generating emotions we agreed on??