Agile - What about me?

Welcome to part 3 of my 7-part series on why you’re an Agile Failure. In part 1, we discussed the five biggest Agile Failure reasons:

1. Agile is geared for millennials. Half of the workforce is not millennial.
2. People need to be parented.
3. Agile is a mindset not a toolset.
4. Fail Fast - Are you serious? Stop Failing. Start innovating.
5. Politeness is weakness. We are at war. Start acting like it.

In part 2, we discussed in-depth the Golden Circle by Simon Sinek focusing our discussion on the Why, How, and What, and challenging that Agile should be a mindset versus an implementation; not all activities require Agile. Today, we are going to focus on my first Agile Failure Hypothesis, which is that Agile is geared for Millennials. According to the Center for Generational Kinetics, most industries in the world still have four to five generations working within them. I would be remiss without listing them.

·       Gen Z, IGen or Centennials: Born 1996 – TBD

·       Millennials or Gen Y: Born 1977 – 1995

·       Generation X: Born 1965 – 1976

·       Baby Boomers: Born 1946 – 1964

·       Traditionalists or Silent Generation: Born 1945 and before

The Pew Research Center also ran a study that stated that Millennials became the largest generation in the US workforce in 2016 with over 56 million Millennials working or looking for work. Globally, millennials are predicted to make up 35% of the workforce by 2020. With Gen Z showing similar cultural behaviors to their Millennial parents, almost 60% of the global workforce is comprised of Millennials and Gen Z. As an entranced Generation X (albeit close to the beginning year of the Millennial generation), I am awe struck by the audacity that corporations have focused so much energy on the Millennial generation. I challenge anybody to state a time in their companies’ history when they were invited or voluntold to participate in a class on how to manage/motivate Generation X, Baby Boomers, or even Traditionalists? Yet about 10 years ago, the bombardment of Millennial awareness started.

During the same period, we saw a massive SURGE in Agile adoptions. What is so fascinating about this surge is that is not going away. It has shown remarkable staying power with no signs of waning. Agile is about flexibility. It is about fast response times. It pushes for a distribution of responsibility with overlapping and shared responsibilities. It limits formalities to the extent that ceremonies and artifacts exist, but the team carves out their own way. Think about the typical Millennial. They tend to live in an accelerated world of communications with modern thinking. They define rules based on their interpretation of them – aka their personal truth. Their concept of performance management has been relegated to team group thinking with limited real-time feedback and certainly limited ability to address performance in a black-and-white definition of the concept.

I am not necessarily opposed to, and quite frankly agree with many Agile (or should I say millennial) dynamics. What I am challenging here is that 40-45% of all Agile teams are comprised of Generation X, Baby Boomers, and even some Traditionalists. Agile to a large extent has ignored these generations. The argument could always be made that workforce dynamics change and morph over time, and that nimble employees rise to embrace change and become leaders in it. But I would counter that a hybrid approach that looks cross-generation would be more impactful because it would increase the critical mass of your teams. When teams reach true critical mass, they get noticed and become high performing.

I recently had the opportunity to manage an Ops Quality Team. My team was easily compromised of four and probably five generations. I absolutely went the Agile route. But in doing so, I gave the team options on how they could adopt it. For starters, I let them pick their Agile training journeys. Each team member had a menu of robust training options based on what was important for them. I also (very intentionally) kept my Agile team very non-Agile. While we worked in two-week sprints, conducted traditional planning increments, and retrospectives, the team felt that dot voting and group consensus was time consuming, led to ambiguity, and wanted a stronger/clearer leadership direction. I also took the approach of providing real-time group and individual feedback to the team. What was interesting with this approach is that the team members that fell into the Baby Boomers and Gen X asked me point blank to stop doing group feedback and to focus on individual private feedback. The Millennials and Gen Z loved the group direct feedback. They were quick to absorb it and quick to adapt. I also established a very non-Agile leadership hierarchy. I introduced a strong project management component into my Agile organization. In my opinion, high-performing teams are led; they aren’t simply coached. Teams will always be limited in their level of performance when they try to become self-organized on their own because they will always be limited by their weakest link or their weakest team player.

In the 18 months that I led this team, we delivered or out-delivered every predecessor team and quickly established ourselves as the team for quality delivery within an Ops organization of over 2,000 people. A small team of 20 people drove the direction of an entire organization of 2,000 people. Right before I left the team, we ran a GALLUP engagement survey and I ranked in the top ten percent of all GALLUP survey participants for having the most engaged teamed. So, what is my hypothesis here? I love Agile. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t write about it. There is a but coming here, though. I think Agile has missed the mark completely by focusing too much on Millennials, and now Gen Z, and forgetting about half of their Agile teams (which fall into other generational segments). Agile has this amazing impact when it’s utilized as a mindset versus an implementation. The next generation of Agile should be cross-generational and, quite frankly, a little less Agile. I’m worried that Agile is going to be used as the critical crutch to success when the reality is that people are the critical crutch to success. My challenge is that Agile as it is currently implemented doesn’t do enough to bring cross-generational cultural difference together in a way that promotes high team performance.

 David Filer

'The Divergent Agile Leader'

[email protected]

https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/davidfiler1/