The Agile Truth: Episode II

This article was originally published at WWW.ACTIOGLOBAL.COM 
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As my friend, partner, teacher and mentor David Hanna put it in 1988, while he was pioneering at Procter&Gamble the development of high-performance organizations based on self-sufficient teams:

'High-Performance Organizations are characterized by structures that reinforce the qualities of living systems.'- David Hanna

Although, this seems natural, is not. Centuries of organizing work based on machine theory have influenced our thinking about how to divide work.

'The principles of organizing living systems have been helpful to many high-performers by allowing them to harness the natural energy of their people against the tasks to be completed.'- David Hanna 

Their focus of high-performers is on getting work done right in the first place rather than detecting or controlling errors after they have been made.

'The high-performers have learned to design for results and self-sufficiency rather than for supervisory control.'- David Hanna 

As David Hanna demonstrated to all of us already in the 80s, two decades before the agile manifesto was explicitly written:

The Agile truth is about creating a 1to1 flow of value, and about letting the value creators work to form and develop the system and team needed to make the value flow in the simplest, most complete way possible. 

Self-Sufficient Teams in Agile Organizations include all skills and experience needed to get the product or service into the customers' hands. 

And this means, for instance, Product, QA, UX, Data, Brand, Legal, Sales, etc.

Allegiance to process orientation, working through a preconceived system to build the value sequentially step by step is an antiquated way that forces delays and reinforces the need for bureaucracy and ‘documentation.’ 

The examples of the power of teamwork, leveraging individual contributors fueled by a shared desire to output a fully ready finished product, versus a component or comprehensive documentation, is one way to unleash the power of this concept, beyond the technical application and understanding of today.

This approach,

To prioritize “products and services that make the customer instantly smile” over comprehensive documentation is valid for everything in an agile organization. 

Because that’s pure Agile. That's the Agile Truth.