How to Really Scale Agility

It’s not about process. The Agile “scaling frameworks” have it all wrong. Really.

Someone asked me in a LinkedIn response,

but how is an agile organization structured to not having N/2 * (N-1) communication path between N people?

A legitimate question, but it presumes that the solution is structural - that communication pathways need to be - can be - predefined.

Yet if one looks at highly agile companies, communication pathways are not predefined.

How do they do it then?

What Real Agility Looks Like

Real agility is when the organization quickly realizes that a prior decision is obsolete, rapidly canvasses and integrates opinions about what to do, reaches a quick but robust decision about what to do next, and then immediately puts that decision into action.

That does not happen through process. It happens by people getting out into the field, asking questions, trying to understand causes, reaching out to others who might have insight, conducting effective and expeditious discussions, making a good decision based on what is known, and then putting the decision in motion.

It sounds chaotic, but it is not. It is not chaotic because the individuals involved have been taught, by observing and interacting with their leaders, to behave that way.

It is all about behavior, and the expectations around how people are expected to behave - in other words, the culture that leaders have created.

A Strategic Approach

Setting up processes is tactical. Frankly, anyone can do it. Agile frameworks treat it like it is magical, but defining workflow processes is the most mundane thing that people do. You don’t need to tell them how to do it: you just have to challenge them and help them to think through the approaches that they come up with.

To create an agile organization, you need a strategic approach: you need to create a culture of expected behavior. If you do that, people will naturally create the processes they need, when they need them.

Process is an outcome of agility - not a starting point.

It is not that one never starts with process for anything. Consider for example a company that builds engines. To manufacture an engine, a lot of process is needed. However, engines are not all the same. The way that Toyota builds its engines is quite different from how Ferrari builds its engines. To set up an engine production like one has to draw on experience from similar situations.

But creating an assembly line to build engines is not a one-and-done thing. Today our products are ever-evolving. That means that product design and engineering need to be closely tied to the manufacturing system. That is why Tesla locates its engineers in the factory - so they can see the cars being made, and talk to the people who are building them.

At Tesla there is no model year: the car design changes continuously. If your neighbor buys a Tesla Model 3, and two months later you buy one, your car will likely have improvements that your neighbor’s does not.

We need to consider what happens as the car’s design changes. The designers and engineers need to make changes to the assembly line and other manufacturing steps. If one were to predefine communication paths for that, we would have a very long sequence of design reviews. That is not what they do. What happens is that design engineers reach out to manufacturing engineers, and to other engineers who are working on connected things. They also go and talk to the people who are performing those manufacturing steps.

These conversations are not predefined. They are ad hoc. But there is a cultural expectation that these conversations happen. There is pressure to reach out, and to take action. There is pressure to own an outcome - not merely complete tasks.

How It Gets Done

All this might sound like herding cats. But people are not cats: people can respond to goals, and people also respond to examples that are set. If leaders behave in the way described, and make it clear that they expect others to behave that way in the leader’s absence, then over time people will start to behave that way.

That’s why leadership behavior is the primary cultural lever. Leaders need to explain the behavior they expect, and demonstrate it as well. Leaders need to get out of their offices and into the field. They need to ask questions, make suggestions, talk things through with a group. And a leader also needs to have good judgment about when to say “That’s what we will do” or instead say “Do what you think is best” and walk away.

Structures are important. The culture will become competitive and all of the behaviors we have described will become impossible if people are competing against each other. That’s why incentives have to be win-win for people. You can’t pit people against each other and expect them to reach out to each other and collaborate the way that we need them to.

You need to have what organizational culture experts Human Synergistics call a Constructive culture. Fixing your incentive structures so that people support each other instead of compete with each other is the first step. Setting good examples for desired behavior is the next one.

Culture is not enough of course. People also need to know Lean and Flow patterns for organizing their work. People who are empowered and who are goal-oriented will define the work processes that they need. Process becomes something they create - not something they are given. And process becomes fluid - changing over time as people need to change it.

This is why my company developed the Constructive Agility approach: to help organizations to learn these things in a progressive, managed way. You should never try to “stand up” an “Agile process”. That is not effective. What needs to happen is that people in leadership roles need to learn new behaviors. They need to be intentional about the culture and behaviors they expect and exhibit themselves.

This takes time: becoming agile is a learning journey, and it is generative. It is not a workflow process that you give people.

Be strategic.