How far have we come with Agile? Not far enough I say. We need to listen to Greenleaf.

The Agile Manifesto is more than 15 years old. Agile, as the latest silver bullet, is closing in on a decade of increased emphasis and prominence. Many of us were fortunate to work in small, multi-disciplinary and evolutionary teams delivering increments of a product or solution before The Manifesto was crafted (and learned Scrum and XP, too.) I thank my mentors, good fortune and great coffee for those experiences!

I've come to accept that we need to understand, introduce and live-by-example the guidance shared by Robert Greenleaf and his vision for servant-leadership. Each of us, not just Scrum Masters, Release Train Engineers or other Agile Roles amongst us need to embody effective servant-leadership if we're going to see and experience the significant gains Agile was intended to deliver. It will take me a few minutes to explain why...so bear with me.

The Scrum Master takes care of all that process stuff. Leave me alone to code.

When I examine Agile survey results, reflect on my most recent engagement experiences and discuss engagements with other coaches and practitioners, I continue to see recurring failure patterns regardless of company size and history, professional and process maturity, and Agile training and coaching. The VersionOne State of Agile Report has been a good barometer for me (and correlates with what I continue to see and hear, too.) Here's the 2017 report's Agile challenges metrics:

Agile is an IT thing.

When I use this figure with my clients and in my workshops, I explain it as follows:

Before sending people to training and adopting an Agile Lifecycle Management (ALM) tool, let's examine culture and organizational design and plan for evolutionary changes in these areas together with those impacted.

I almost always learn that client teams have already been trained (often months ago) and an ALM is in place (and often in use with one or more product backlogs.) I also learn that decisions precipitating these changes were made by a small group (not including most of those impacted. How Agile is that!?) It's assumed that culture change and organizational design (if even considered) will just happen as a side-effect of Agile adoption, (Agile transformation aside), the use of an ALM and the transition to an Agile framework.

We have JIRA, and we're using three Scrum Teams. What else is there?

Agile earns a black-eye under these conditions. When I share this figure, I do 2 other things: I show a comparable figure from the 2007 State of Agile report, (the first year this survey was distributed), and I relate my first professional software development experience. Here's the 2007 report's Agile challenges metrics:

What this figure tells me is that 10+ years ago, we were struggling with the how and to some extent, the why of Agile much like many are today. Who would agree to stand up Agile teams if there's insufficient planning to use them effectively, no guidance around predicable outcomes and a lack of engineering discipline? Culture issues. Management issues. Understandability (if that's a word!) issues, too. Too little has changed in a decade, I believe.

My first professional software development experience? (1) Open Space, (2) 100% Dedicated, multi-disciplinary team including specialists, (3) Co-location with customer, and (4) Office amenities (for the time.) We worked for close to two years and didn't deliver enough functionality to satisfy our customer's expectations. Our project was cancelled. What did I learn? Shortly afterwards, interviewing for a new role with a young, technology company, I summarized my whiteboard presentation as follows:

I can deliver this in hunks and chunks if you give me a some time to develop an initial plan, some resources for prototyping and access to the domain experts to validate my plans and outcomes.

That catastrophic outcome experience ran from September of 1974 to May of 1976; forty years (and many silver bullets) ago. Many teams and organizations are are in the same place we were then, and I believe Greenleaf has a solution for ending up in much healthier place: servant-leadership. FULL DISCLOSURE: This 1970's experience pushed me to avoid or leave engagements and situations where I'm directed to focus only on my own deliverables in a variety of roles including developer, manager, director, Scrum Master, program manager, Agile Coach, etc.

So, what about Greenleaf and servant-leadership? How does this improve our ability to be increasingly predictable working within an Agile culture, framework and team of teams scaling engagement? Servant-leadership presents opportunities and challenges for each of us to move beyond the standard Agile framework prescription for service (AKA, the Scrum Master serves the team, and the Release Train Engineer serves the teams of teams) to a much more prolific framework where we are of service to each other. What does that really mean?

Translation: Each participant in an Agile initiative, regardless of role, title, experience, group or location commits to be of service to one another, to our customers, to our vendor parties, to our work and to our outcomes.

This includes Finance, Operations, Networking, Middle Management, Senior Management and all the other support organizations, teams and leaders so that (a) Agile moves beyond being an IT thing, (b) We gain the benefits of a much more robust support network for planning, development and delivery versus aligning our teams (and teams of teams) around a centralized service role, and (c) We continue to translate and transform the intent of The Agile Manifesto into a mutually supportive Agile culture. What does this look like in practice? Well, it feels like this (illustration courtesy of Jurgen Appelo. Notice, everyone is smiling!)

It's an all-in, fully engaged model for collaboration (independent of the Agile framework(s) in use.) Effective servant-leadership warrants its own post (coming shortly) but suffice to say, it includes these properties, qualities and expectations for each of us: Effective Listening, Empathy, Compassion, Humility, Wisdom, Self-awareness, Foresight, Development of Others, and more. Reaching proficient levels in these areas in addition to delivering value? Yes, a challenge, but a worthy one. I'll explain why in my next post.

MORE DISCLOSURE: Coaching camps, workshops, webinars and practitioners are trending in this direction. It's not mainstream (enough) to be highly visible, but it's happening I believe.

It takes much more than understanding how Scrum works and why SAFe is popular to stand up an effective and sustainable Agile culture and delivery organization.