The future of agile: proceedings from 15 years of agile coaching

In this article I provide a brief summary of my proceedings from the last 15 years and I share my personal key takeaways that determine my way of moving forward. After starting to adopt agile engineering practices such as continuous integration, refactoring and test automation in 2004, it was in February 2008 when I shifted my focus over from working inside of Scrum teams to creating impact by focusing on improvement topics across teams. It all started with supporting teams to adopt? agile engineering practices that mostly are tied to the Extreme Programming (XP) movement. It was not even called agile coaching at that time. I liked it a lot to become a cross-cutting enabler, to relate my work to an energetic place inside myself and to base my actions on intent rather than requirements.

Unity of doing and being

From the very first days of adopting agile in the 1980's, it was clear that in order to harvest the benefits of agile, implementing the Doing part of agile (practices and processes), needs to be embedded into a culture that somehow differs from the existing one. In agile we call this balancing Doing with Being. The Being part is related to culture and leadership. Culture and leadership needs to grow in a reinforcing loop:

When you look at the principles from the 2001 Agile Manifesto, you may easily observe that it's exactly not about replacing a wrong way of doing things with a right way. Rather it's all about creating full awareness about the circumstances and to take informed decisions.

Confirmation bias

The reality of corporations adopting SAFe is just the spearhead of a dynamic that seems to tell a different story. Corporations continue to spend millions on adopting SAFe “properly”. Such kind of agile adoptions are optimized on maintaining a blind spot. Essentially, that blind spot is the belief that we can implement agile while maintaining the status quo. The spearhead of confirmation bias is the role of middle management, as the existence of their role is intrinsically dependent on identifying leadership with hierarchy. Making the blind spot visible would make their role meaningless.

Over the years I have observed an ever increasing level of anxiety and refusal towards what really matters to adopt agile. Where is this coming from? It’s important to notice that this is embedded into the overall dynamics of society. Thriving with uncertainty is manifesting as the attempt to manage a system with defined constraints. As a result of putting an over-emphasis on the dynamics inside of a system, any sense of holism is lost.

Ultimately, we are clearly talking about a socio-political matter. No enterprise whatsoever can change the socio-political system, so the question to be answered is, what CAN be influenced. Bear with me.

Acknowledging the levels of meaning, awareness and human relations

As a Co-Active / ICF coach and agile consultant who has experienced the dynamics of "agile leadership" and who developed the space of personal intent over many years, I am acting from a place of awareness, integrity and sincerity. Rather than dissonance, there is a high level of consistency of values between the private and the professional sphere. Essentially, coaching agile mindset and leadership ultimately is beyond practices and processes whatsoever. Rather, as an “agile change agent”, the subject matter is all about emotions. Why is this about, and why does it matter??

To adopt agile means to increase the awareness of meaning. This in turn is an invitation to look inside yourself (aka “Search inside yourself”) and that’s where personal leadership starts. Exploring yourself is all about discovering true personal values and distinguishing them from foreign values. When that happens, it elevates the clarity of your intent. In turn, with increased clarity of personal intent, the sense of meaning of the organization is excelled. Here we go with the third reinforcing loop.

Just as a reminder, what I am talking about here is the case of enterprise agility and how I relate to it as a coach and consultant. I’m not giving advice, especially not from a "general point of view". I’m not claiming objectivity whatsoever (as that is an illusion anyways).

Igniting meaning and intent

Consequently, adopting agile ultimately cannot skip the case of leadership and meaning. It all starts with individual leadership development. At first, a decision maker responsible for steering the cause of the enterprise needs to be ready to look at the questions that really matter. It needs a great coach to mirror and to confront.

The sponsor needs to act as the initial multiplicator to create the space of meaning and intent for the organization. Notice how this overcomes the pattern of delegating agile to experts, to teams or department. This reflects the fact that culture and leadership is like "dark matter" (Mary Parker Follett) reflecting meaning and intent.

Scaling intent

Now when it comes to scaling meaning and intent into the organization to create the culture that allows for enterprise agility, there are a few simple core concepts which I'd like to share with you.

Shared responsibility of leadership

When meaning and leadership is seen as something that's genuinely available to any human being, there is no place for exclusion whatsoever. Raising the level of self-leadership is not only encouraged, but obligatory for any employee. Creating the space for individual leadership responsibility has another side to the coin: the elimination of titles and the disassociation of roles with individuals. With self-leadership comes personal meaning and this in turn is related to the organizational intent.

Transparency of intent

The body of evidence speaks a clear and explicit language. Rolling out intent in the form of broadcasting values or installing an agile process doesn't lead to enterprise agility. It leads exactly to the illusion of agility as described by Gunther Verheyen more than 4 years ago.

In the agile enterprise, human relations are deeply meaningful. Underlying playful collaboration, the serious game of value delivery is unfolding. Intent is a reflection of meaning which in turn is the result of awareful conversations. Thus enterprise intent comes as a cross product derived from individual leadership. The space of enterprise intent is an energetic place that is reinvented on a daily and situational basis.

Notice how intent is distinguished from intention.?As intention is the result of defining a project plan and implementing it step by step, it is a mind based process. In contrary, intent is a reflection of situational awareness as well as of personal values.

Acknowledging the human being

In the agile enterprise, employees are not only encouraged but challenged to show up as such. When self-leadership is not only supported but a key requirement, there is no more space left for hiding behind roles, titles or processes. The level of discipline to show up with full attention and awareness is excelled.

@agile coaches: how to make it happen

The unanswered question how can we support clients to make this happen? My highly unsatisfactory answer is: be open, watch yourself on a daily basis, reach out to people, follow your intuition and create meaningful relationships.

The rest will come as a surprise and you can't control it. For agile coaches, there is no sales process whatsoever which could be applied consistently. Rather it's all about the clarity of intent. Do the work that you want to do with your clients with yourself. Observe yourself what's happening. Eat your own dog foot.

Footnote

agile coaches, managers, leaders, I am curious as to how that lands with you. Please share your thoughts as a comment.