The Challenge of Agile Orthodoxy

Yet another essay in the Statler and Waldorf series

In this series of articles, we have come to a point where Statler and Waldorf, in a rare moment of introspection, abandon their prejudices and look in more than one direction for why the show lacks success. Maybe they are even part of the problem.?

Those of us who promote agile, lean organizations over traditional power-based hierarchies can always find plenty to critique in the current system of organization and management. But it has become clear that sometimes the introduction of agile itself has resulted in just a new form of rigid structure preventing engagement, innovation and great results.

We have called this “The challenge of Agile Orthodoxy”. Orthodoxy is adherence to correct or accepted creeds, especially in religion, according to Wikipedia. People who deviate from orthodoxy by professing a doctrine considered to be false are called heretics.

The incumbent system of organization and management with its hierarchies, experts and separation of thinking and doing, is an orthodoxy whose founding father is Frederick Winslow Taylor, with his 1911 monograph? “Scientific Management”. It was later molded and developed by the priesthood of business schools, and is often referred to as “Neo-Taylorism”. In management circles it can be very difficult to propose alternative ways without the heretic card being played, such is the strength of the orthodoxy.

However,? agile orthodoxies can also develop quite quickly, and be just as bad, if not worse, because they raise expectations and create enthusiasm, but turn into another set of rigid controls causing people to plummet into the anxiety or apathy zone as Amy Edmondson would call it.

Why is Orthodoxy attractive?

Orthodoxy is defining fixed rules and fixed answers to almost every question using checklists and algorithms. This matches more or less with Dave Snowden’s definition of the Clear domain (previously called Obvious, which I actually like better). Things are orderly and comprehensively understandable, at least by experts and managers who then can tell the uninitiated what to do.

This is attractive to us as human beings as it requires very little energy to follow rules. The brain is a very costly organ to wake up, consuming blood sugar like crazy, so from an energy conservation point of view, it makes sense. We can also learn about conservative bias from Daniel Kahneman; why we would rather stay with the well-known.

The problem is of course if what we consider to be well-known, is in fact not true, and what we consider obvious is in fact complex. This places us in what Dave Snowden calls “the zone of complacency” where things can fail catastrophically in times of rapid change, resulting in a sudden drop into chaos. Mark Twain knew this when he said almost 150 years ago:

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure, that just ain’t so!

Why does Agile Orthodoxy develop?

Why does it happen? The principles of Agile and Scrum are pretty easy to understand and rather simple, no rocket science here. And in the early part of this century, there were many successful case stories of applying agile frameworks such as Scrum.

Then something happened, Scrum and Agile became almost mainstream in certain areas such as IT and product development. Then the classic management hierarchy discovered this new trend and of course, wanted to incorporate it and domesticate it; now it had to be properly professional with comprehensive rule books and budgets, not the string-and-chewing gum approach of the past.

• Of course, when that happens, any self-respecting consultancy needs to have a fully-fledged Agile Transformation concept to sell, so a lot of beautifully created programs saw the light of day; even McKinsey is now Agile.
• All the classic heavyweight process institutions like PMI and PRINCE2 now have agile programs; Agile PRINCE2 in particular is an oxymoron.
• Then of course there is SAFe. Dean Leffingwell resurfaced from the depths of heavyweight processes like RUP and brilliantly answered the question: “How can we frame all this agile talk so that executives will buy it?” The result was SAFe and the executives loved it because this was just another reshuffling of cards at their level and all this agile stuff could be left to people downstairs doing the work.
• Finally, some Agile celebrities became brands, and like the consultancies, they felt a commercial need to elaborate and create special editions of agile that could be packaged, sold and enforced.
• All this led to top-down implementations of agile driven by one detailed rulebook or another, and all of them more or less failed. It is a bit like trying to introduce democracy in a country that recently came out of a totalitarian government, if you don't let people choose the new paradigm, it has no staying power, look at Iraq for example.

But there are other reasons that have contributed to the formation of Agile orthodoxies:

• Sometimes the wrong person gets to be Scrum Master; someone who deep down only wants to see people jump when he says so. The Scrum rules just become another manifestation of power. In another life, he would have made an excellent traffic warden.
• Some people are not able to deal with the complexities that stem from broader engagement; they just want fixed rules and success criteria. They are often senior experts, who are very vocal, hard to challenge and used to getting their own way.
• Taylor’s spirit seems to haunt some organizations. They feel a need to define experts for everything. The Scrum Master becomes a rule keeper or drill sergeant totally disconnected from the team and its purpose. The Product Owner becomes just a keeper of specifications in the correct form. Specialist roles are introduced into the team and then titles like Agile Coach slip in. We are really back to square one with another reshuffling of cards.
• The same spirit may lead organizations to blindly adopt “solutions” out of context. This is what happens when you believe you are in one domain but are really in another - you think the solution is obvious, but it is really complex. One solution does not fit all problems, so it is important to engage those doing the work in the process of finding the right solution for the situation.

How to combat Agile Orthodoxy

Preventing it in the first place

It is really very simple, but hard to do.?

• Create and sustain psychological safety so everybody can speak up and engage; the result is transparency.
• Keep the disciplined feedback flowing, and create really engaging retrospectives, where things are acted upon and people experience the benefits of pushing for improvement.
• Scrum Masters unite! and have forums where issues are made visible and discussed. Seek alignment and act together when challenged by the bureaucratic elements of finance, HR and others that want to domesticate you and the team.
• Have a sponsor in high places that will put their reputation on the line when the aforementioned bureaucracies strike back as The Empire does in Star Wars.

Weeding Orthodoxy out once it is rooted

It is not simple, and it is not easy, because you are now a heretic fighting against the incumbent orthodoxy.

• If the weed of orthodoxy only resides in a few places, get or take permission to uproot a few things. First,? get a fresh Scrum Master, then ask the Team to re-form and say what competencies they need; where they would like to volunteer, basically rebuilding the team.
• If the weeds are everywhere,? the new Orthodoxy is as difficult to uproot as the one it replaced. It will need a crisis before people will be willing to try to change again and the solution is beyond the scope of this article. However,? contact us if you want to know our proposal for how to do it. You could also attempt an incremental and iterative approach. Find a good team to start with, if in doubt start with a team facing real customers that can drive a change up the value stream in the organization. An incremental approach is always a safer, albeit slower bet.

Conclusion

Agile orthodoxies and the bureaucracies that inevitably follow are every bit as damaging as the previous neoTaylorist ones and need to be uprooted like any other organizational weed. In an agile organization we are working with complex problems, that is, unstable situations that require a constant and persistent influx of energy to keep the balance. Otherwise, we tend to drift off to one or the other form of totalitarian orthodoxy, so stay alert!