Key learnings from “rethinking Agile” by Klaus Leopold

The first book that we reviewed at the Agile Book Club was "rethinking Agile" by our dear friend Klaus Leopold. If you're not a huge fan of podcasts, I wrapped up my key learnings for you. Or maybe you heard the podcast, simply loved it and need more...

About:

“All of the agile cards have been pulled, and nonetheless new products still do not get faster to the market. If this situation seems familiar, you should read this story about a company that prepared their agile transition in exemplary fashion: 600 employees reorganized into cross-functional teams, their work visualized and practically perfect Standups and Retrospectives held. The result: Time-to-Market for the products became worse – and there was no trace of business agility. This book shows what goes wrong with many agile transitions and why the desired improvements fail to materialize. It also learns how to get out of a dead end and what can be done before starting a transformation in order to prevent heading down a dead end to begin with. A little preview: Do not start by making teams agile – this will save your nerves and lots of money!”

Who should read the book?

I would recommend this book for everyone who took part in any failed Agile Transformation and decided to come back to old practices claiming that “Agile will not work here”. It’s also a great starter for everyone who is wondering about introducing Agile into the current structure. By seeing what went wrong somewhere else, we can get low-cost learning for ourselves.

First reflection:

The first 15 pages of the book got me into a sad reflection (same as Linkin Park song "In the end") that sometimes doing our best is simply not enough.

Without too many spoilers, let's check the 5 takeaways!

#1 Design your OWN organizational model

The Spotify model had and still has its moments of glory. Many companies hoped that copying it inside their organizations will make them successful. Surprise surprise…. It didn’t. Why? The Spotify model doesn’t make Spotify agile. What makes them agile is adjusting their team setup to specific challenges that they had to overcome and results that they wanted to deliver. 

So, the organizational change should begin with the organizational process because it’s a way to fulfill customer expectations.

#2 See the BIG picture

Scan the organization in System Thinking categorizes. Identify and understand its elements, interactions, and purpose. 

The struggle that Klaus presented was that all teams made a really good job of adopting new practices, visualizing their work and even measuring results. Unfortunately, at the end of the process, their performance got even worse. How depressing…. So what happened? The answer is pretty simple and common - hidden dependencies. 

In the case presented in the book, each team was taking part in a separate race of delivery. Which means team A finished a piece of work for team B before they were ready to pick it up. Team A was fast, agile and proud of their speed. Unfortunately, it didn’t matter if they would deliver it in one or two days if the second team has the capacity to work on it in 20 days. That kind of local optimization leads to system sub-optimization. To picture it better, imagine this: if you’re stuck in the traffic, it doesn’t matter if you’re sitting in the new Ferrari or in the old car. If the system moves with a speed of 2 km per hour, your ability to move 200 km per hour simply won’t help or change anything.

#3 The importance of strategic portfolio management

One of the challenges that Klaus came across was a lack of strategic portfolio management. Which led to pushing too many new initiatives to the system at the same time. Many managers were taking isolated decisions without a clear vision of the current goal or communication with others. As you can imagine, if too many projects are started within a company, at some point neither of them is moving. 

As in many companies, at the end of the year, the executive management prepared a strategy for the upcoming year. Next, someone added it all to a few overloaded Excel documents that almost no one wants to read or update or follow. After planning in December, the company started pursuing their visions. Luckily, thanks to Klaus' advise, the way of building the company’s strategy had changed. It became a continuous process and an open chapter for 365 days and all managers could update it while they were responding to the market.

#4 Flight Levels model

I loved the way Klaus illustrated 3 different levels of collaboration and communication within a company. He uses a metaphor of ‘flight levels’ to present what details are visible for you depending on your current position. For example, if you’re on an airplane, you can’t see every person that walks on the street. You just see an overview. Once you go lower, the number of details that you see is bigger. In the Flight Levels model - each level has its own characteristics, advantages, and limitations. 

Illustration by: Matthias Seifert

So, going from the top:

• At flight level 3: it is an overview of everything that is happening in the company. The main focus is on the strategic direction of the company. Having this holistic approach enables management to build a strategy.
• At flight level 2: we zoom out from the team level and look at all interactions between teams. The goal here is to coordinate and optimize team interactions.
• At flight level 1: we look at the operational level and teams, projects, and tasks that are delivered.

The flight levels model is a way to visualize and organize a type of work within a company.

The crucial aspect of Flight Levels is to uncover and manage dependencies. As Klaus said in the book: you can’t move all dependencies (fair enough) but you can learn how to manage them (sounds hopeful for us:)).

#5 Business agility starts at the top

I simply loved Klaus' words, that many people believe that there are self-organized companies that function without hierarchy. However, he doesn’t believe that it can work without any management. Why? Because even the decision to ‘work without hierarchy’ has to be made by someone. 

I also agree that business agility doesn’t need a business administrator who lives in Excel or a “forward manager” who just escalates the most urgent cases. I think it needs a business leader, who, together with others, builds a safe place to work in.

Having executives on board is also crucial for any company's change. I would say it’s because of one simple reason - once they build the new process, culture, structure with you, they have less incentive to be resistant. They may be your strongest allies and change agents. In this case, an Agile transformation may be led by example.

  Favorite Quote:

We’re going to implement a waterfall project to become agile.

If you would like to learn more about Flight Levels, check our book review here or listen to our interview with Klaus Leopold.