A Life of Lean Agile: A biography of sorts

I think it’s important for you to know…

I truly believe, to paraphrase Homer Simpson's musing on beer, that people, “are the answer to, and cause of, all our problems.”

This is all about human endeavour, creativity, conflict, cooperation, subservience, fear, courage, collaboration, empiricism, evidence, flights of fancy, rules of thumb, heuristics, craft, conscious and unconscious bias, nature, nurture, control and chaos. This is, as product guru John Cutler, 90’s popsters Swing Out Sister and 2017 Bulgarian Eurovision entrant Kristian Kostov put it, “The Beautiful Mess”. The beautiful mess of how we all relate to one another on this rock travelling through space.

…and so because this is really all about people, there are some things you should know about me, the head I inhabit and the lens I look through, the upbringing that encouraged and informed me and the curiosity that propels me….which feels like the propeller at the front of an aeroplane, pulling it through clouds, rather than that of a ship being pushed through waves.

I am the youngest of two sons, raised in a very loving household by parents, both from large families, in a place called Manchester positioned in the North West of England. Being the youngest I could get away with a lot which encouraged me to push boundaries, and being loved meant I could do this safely (though this doesn’t mean that none of my experiments were reckless or dangerous to my own person, it simply means forgiveness wasn’t too hard to come by - so I seldom sought permission). This situation also allowed me to understand the consequences of my actions from an early age….a la, here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into Turner, oh well pick yourself up, dust yourself down, start all over again.

Having a small nuclear family amongst a bigger clan was like being a “two-pizza team” in a large organisation. We had our own identity, meaning we could please ourselves, and we had the rough and tumble of surviving and thriving amongst a larger group…like any large ensemble, sometimes we held our own, centre stage and in the spotlight whilst at other times we were in the chorus trying not to “corpse” at the antics of others in our troupe.

The region I grew up in offered an immense array of role models… predominantly show offs, many of them mavericks in music, sport, science and manufacturing. As one resonant voice of my fair city, my dirty old town, Tony Wilson once waxed, “This is Manchester, we do things differently here”…a maxim all Mancunians seem to have written through them like a stick of the proverbial Blackpool rock.

I stand on the shoulder of giants in innovation, thought and humanitarianism, I walk the same streets getting soaked, not just in the same rain but in the same atmosphere known to Emeline Pankhurst (political activist), Anthony Burgess (writer, composer, futurist), Marie Stopes (paleobotanist & birth control advocate) Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (philosophers, revolutionaries), L. S. Lowry (artist), Victoria Wood and Caroline Ahern (comedians), Sir William Arthur Lewis (Nobel Laureate and Britain’s first black professor), George Best and David Beckham (you know), Kathleen Ollerenshaw (Mathematician, Politician, deaf since aged 8 and helped create the Royal Northern College of Music), Morrissey (lyricist) and of course Alan Turing (thankless saviour) whose words, “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done,” I often pass on to other enthusiasts of agility. They help keep me focused and determined amongst the unendingly, turbulent complexity of modern life.

Sport has played a big part in my life. Yes, we have many “world beaters” where I come from, but really, I have never been much of a spectator, and not at all partisan (I have to whisper it round 'ere but I fear I am in love with Jürgen Klopp). I have been much more of an enthusiastic participant and an appreciator of craft. I love the artistry of the engagement in a physical activity constrained by the rules of a game. I think it also provides the best situation in which to practice failure safely. To exercise the theory and attitude of “kata”, “le metier”, the improvement of form. You may have lost the game, ranked low in the race, crashed out in the competition…but you achieved that flawless back swing, felt the sensation of cornering perfectly, connected with the ball's sweet spot, it's is all in the bank because there will always be another chance to prove yourself. In this I summon the footballer, actor, artist, incendiary combatant of racism & hooligans... The legend, Eric Cantona, “I prefer to play and lose rather than win, because I know in advance I am going to win.”

Music... well let's talk about music. To convey, I believe for any of us, how music shapes what we do is at best axiomatic or least that terribly glib. Music exists in our heartbeat and pulse, it weaves many of our memories together. Our inner monologues conduct heavy guitar riffs as entrance music, calming nerves and pumping confidence before pressurised moments, we might summon some Bach we heard in a film score to calm an overly busy brain lacking in concentration…. And who hasn’t celebrated a personal or professional win with a few bars of Tina Turner or maybe a bit of Freddie Mercury?

In all of this I abide, but more than this I have been fortunate to have learned maybe a little more than average from music and the music industry, and in hindsight I often reflect how useful and influential my experience as a hip hop dj has been in the unfolding path of my professional progress to date. You'd be wrong to underestimate the skills built in reading a room, understanding customer experience (as they stare back at you unimpressed or shout in one gleeful voice as the beat drops), the fast feedback of a dance floor clearing as you discover that track you like is not appreciated much in these parts… and failure, have you ever been in a club when the disc jockey took the record off the wrong turntable and everything went deafeningly quite. I have!

Music, and the music industry, is highly competitive and cutthroat, built on incredibly emotive content, offered up to extremely critical audiences by those who unapologetically wear their hearts on their sleeves. It helped me learn a lot about people, about selling ideas and services, reconstructing myself after devastating feedback…and leaving things behind to live in that moment. Like sport it’s a supreme boot camp for quick thinking, creativity and resilience.

The most important thing my family and their backgrounds, my environment and its sons and daughters, have instilled in me is a deep sense of care. I care.

I care about others, society, a greater good. I care about those who don’t, who can’t and even those who won’t; because it matters that I do. I seek to create tides that raise all boats. Later on in this chapter I'll impart how I came to learn about Systems Thinking through Seddon and Deming and the Theory of Constraints through Goldratt… but these great thinkers didn’t ignite the spark in me, they simply fanned the flames. I already had the desire and emotion, the vocabulary to better articulate these notions came later, and I owe it to them.

Principles; the clock stops when the last team member crosses the line, it’s the lowest part of a body that clears or knocks off the bar in the pole vault, the gate is locked when all are over the threshold; and how we interact, cooperate and coordinate as a unit will determine the success of our endeavours …. I’ve held these notions dear for much longer than I’ve known about agility.   

So there you have it, a small glimpse in to some of what motivates and informs me. Thank you for the indulgence. We are unified by our uniqueness and whilst there is much that makes us the same (for example, I bet we’ve all heard “Yeah I like the idea of that but it would never work here!”)…how we compute and interpret all those messages, and patterns that exist around us, is exclusively ours alone.

Context rules.

It shapes our cherished and tightly held principles into ever so slightly, or maybe even radically, evolved practices, each and every time we cross a new threshold. Let us keep that front and centre as I describe to you my experience of agile.

Before I knew what it was…

I started my IT career on the ‘ground floor’, at an IT Service Centre or helpdesk as they were known, for a global bank in the mid ‘90’s. Prior to that my only real understanding of ‘Tayloristic’, command and control operated institutions was of course education. Whilst I generally enjoyed school (I was lucky enough to be fairly carefree as a kid) I did not always see eye to eye with teachers and heads and principals. Maybe this was some sort of portent; feeling the discomfort early on of the distinction between learning, and being told and measured on what to know, has many parallels with modern work environments.

As the late Ken Robinson would often call out; towards the tail end of the 20th century, and even more so now, the education system has become an anachronism and its focus on Victorian industrial norms is not preparing those who pass through it for our fast paced, disruptive, and complex digital world. Maybe this is why happiness and fulfilment, and the scarcity thereof, is a constant topic of discussion nowadays. Maybe this is why I opted not to continue in to higher education, and instead take my education in to my owns hand and try, as in agile, to learn the right things, learn it right and learn it at my sustainable pace.

My desire to learn, and through learning improve myself, my work and the organisations around me seems on reflection to have inspired a cyclical set of responses, that burgeoned into a natural pattern…

1.     My enthusiasm and intelligence would shine at interviews through my grasp of story-telling and evident competency in the skillset needed for the roles I would apply for.

2.     I would generally make a resounding and immediate impact in terms of improvement and capability uplift with the teams I joined or managed.

3.     This would continue through probably a 2-year honeymoon period.

4.     Once my immediate area was optimised, I would venture elsewhere in the organisations (upstream, downstream, parallel dependencies) and offer help and insight into optimising those…watch out, what is this behaviour…you are not staying in lane!!!

5.     Many organisational silos, (and especially those parts of IT such as service management, not comfortable with the collaborative, transparent and holistic notions of the nascent practices encouraging agility) would confuse this offer of help as me not understanding that you can’t just go around poking your nose into other people’s business. Everyone should be accountable for their own success…even if they were trying to do that by drilling holes, below the water line, in their side of this boat you are all sharing.

6.     I would leave to find somewhere else to help.

7.     Rinse, repeat.

The behaviours I witnessed are very similar to those we now associate with failing organisational changes such as those we often hear referred to as “Large A, Large T, Agile Transformations”

“Transform your enterprise in to a modern, learning organisation by following the tried and tested traditional methods of change, and in 2 years you will be Done!”

Before I was ever introduced to these terms I had already “banked” a huge amount of experience in increasing team productivity and effectiveness, whilst at the same time saving lots of money. I owe this to my background in operations. Where budgets are generally shrunk year on year, and where the scope that the capex could not afford (the project ran out of time) will usually end up being delivered. Operations is a great school; it teaches you how to be very resourceful with your resources and though I didn't know it at the time the "Rinse and Repeat" kata I had fallen in to was a great preparation for my life as an independent consultant and coach.

They’re going through an Agile Transformation…

There are many wonderful books describing the pitfalls of the Agile Transformation trope for organisational change and I’m glad I can count a number of the authors (Jon Smart, Zsolt Berend, Myles Olgivie, Sunil Mundra, Dr Cherry Vu & Rob England) as friends and colleagues. When invited, by Karl Smith, to contribute to this collection of perspectives, I was delighted that he emphasised the desire to hear something more personal and less academic than other books, excellent and necessary as they are. What follows are a series of anecdotes from a range of change scenarios that I have either learned from or confirmed from. If referred to as case-studies, you might say they range from nano through micro, but none detailed enough to be macro or mega. A few tales that may have you learning or even just affirming your experience. It's beneficial to swap stories. It can help us feel that we are part of something. We are not alone, and we are notdaft for making some of the decisions we make, even though we are often going against the grain of popular opinion and it's received wisdoms.

The insurance aggregator

I first heard about, or rather paid attention to, Agile in 2009. I had joined one of the UK’s most successful online aggregator brands at the tail end of their own “Agile Transformation” being expertly facilitated by the rather excellent Thoughtworks (more of them later).

It was here, as an IT Operations manager, I came to understand the purpose of agile, the practice of scrum and had the great fortune to be introduced to a number of models, principles and methods such as The Theory of Constraints, Systems Thinking , Little’s Law, all through the application of (my much loved) Kanban.

It must be said, as many others do, prior to this point my innate and intrinsic codes and behaviours reflected much of what these practices described. Many of these bodies of knowledge draw from and emphasise practices for success and sustainability that existed before the first Industrial Revolution. They are not new, but they had been drowned out by the desires to dehumanise and mechanise production, even where humans remained a key actor, to encourage “growth”. Efficiency conflated with effectiveness. A single-minded and maybe short-sighted definition of value.

This epiphany, for me, was not about finding a new path…it was finally feeling like I fitted in. I might now be able to leave behind that honeymoon cycle behind. I had a tribe to identify with and a vocabulary to use that would help me justify and convince others that this break from tradition was worthwhile.

Unfortunately, or fortunately (considering it has kept me gainfully employed), I came to understand that this might have been a na?ve view… and as the 20th anniversary of agile passes us by, maybe we all understand now that whilst many of us are ready for the next evolution of change, there are way more still immersed in what came before.

I owe a lot to the aggregator, especially the friendships struck with people like Paul Joseph (serial CIO/CTO/Intrepreneur), and the renowned Kanban practitioner Ian Carroll, who I still call colleagues and inspiration today…. But the success stories I produced there were not agile as such… maybe proto devops in terms of the automation of enterprise monitoring… but they were generally other people’s stories that gave me a sound platform to exercise my learning in later roles in other places.

The unicorn foal

2020 may have produced several UKnicorns (I’m copy-righting that), but the North West of England heralded a particular success story, of an online retail group in the health, beauty and fashion sector. We all need a bit of luck and I count my spell there, in the early 20-teens, as a great learning curve in coping with complexity, surviving and thriving in an enterprise-wide entrepreneurial context, and managing IT work to present options to the organisation as opposed to making the organisation define specific, long term plans and enter into them as a contract.

I often re-tell this story to illustrate how teams should deal with stakeholders when demand outstrips supply…. With radical transparency and conspicuous, meaningful conversation.

I looked after a team of 4 data analyst that made routine updates to production text and data changes whilst also providing a frontline IT call logging role and 2, what would now be called Site Reliability Engineers. Volumes were high as were turnaround expectations.

We used a whiteboard with wheels to display a left to right delivery process, the work we felt substantial enough to bring discussion to, numbers indicating volumes of small tickets in other backlogs, avatars to show where team members were expending effort and graphical performance data for throughput and lead times. Most significantly for this story we had a WIP limited input or “next” column.

Our stakeholders were the “Heads of” from the 7 organisational “verticals”. Our input WIP limit was set to 4.

We held our team stand-up at 9am and at 9:45 the 7 Hofs would gather round and replenish any spaces left empty by the previous day’s completed endeavours.

There were many “priceless” side-effects of what came to be known as the “horse-trading exercise”.

• The Hofs were able to get a real sense of progress, dynamism, and dedication to deliver from the team without having to disturb them and put them off their flow.
• Each of the Hofs were better for understanding that delivery was constrained and finite. In a highly entrepreneurial environment ideas are infinite…but only a few are worth doing… this exercise meant that only the best would be selected.
• The team were able to witness and overhear (what is sometimes referred to as “legitimate peripheral participation”) debates about strategy by senior staff and therefore, over time, built a great understanding of what decisions these people made and why. This helped the team suggest solutions that increased in tactical and strategic application, and fitness for purpose, simply because they had been exposed, on the “shop floor” to board room style conversation.
• Alignment, positive results and trust grew in steady and equal measure, alongside stakeholder and team satisfaction.

One might mistake our activity for mopping the floor, but we were putting people on the moon. That company went on to IPO for over a billion pounds before the decade was out.

The national infrastructure

I had been working on the railways (that always sounds so romantic to me!) for around 18 months, applying a lot of systems thinking and theory of constraints principles with the ITSM Operations environment I looked after. I had a great deal of success and had won some attention and plaudits for the culture of improvement I had instilled. Until this point I had not overtly or explicitly extolled the virtues of or installed any Lean Agile practices.

Many requirements for change are event driven. Organisations, being complex adaptive systems, are shaped by constantly modulating internal and external forces…and one of these had just exerted itself.

Above my tight knit team, of highly competent managerial peers, arrived a new boss. New to the sector and new to such a level of responsibility, this lovely, charming and immensely capable person arrived with great enthusiasm and a completely understandable desire to prove his worth.

This is a tale of a huge shockwave of demand and how visualisation, radical transparency and respect can restore stability, quickly; accelerating this group through the inevitable effects of the Tuckman model: Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing.

The situation was this; sometime around his second week the boss started to use his train journey each morning to formulate some sort of action that would be very beneficial for me and each of my peers to implement in our respective domains, and naturally increase his immediate impact.

After a week this equated to 25 actions, 5 of us, 5 pieces of work each and these were in addition to our own standard operational demand, our self-generated improvement activities, and being in Operations, the emergencies that regularly occurred. Over the weekend the cracks started to appear as the pressures amongst my peers started to show, of course, we all wanted to make a good impression on the new principal in our team.

By the end of week 2, when the extra demand had grown to 50 items, we were in full storm mode and a meeting of my peers was called to come up with some way of throttling this overwhelming demand. It was then that I introduced the team to the Kanban Method. I suggested that we each build a visualisation next to our teams of all the improvement work we had queued up, in flight (the stages of the implementation and validation processes), and completed. I explained that we could bring the volumes to the boss’s attention in a humane and respectful way; and explain that he himself, at this stage of his new job, probably hadn’t realised the impact of his enthusiasm.

During “week 3” I helped people visualise the work on Kanban boards dotted around the department and a specific one, joining them up as a portfolio of higher level improvement activity for the management team.

A new era of understanding and alignment was ushered in for everyone. The many benefits of Kanban practices such as limiting WIP, increased throughput, decreased lead times were witnessed but the stand-out outcomes in this context for me were these;

For the management team

• each time the boss came up with a new idea, my peers and I had somewhere to take him and show him the levels of demand already being experienced.
• We could hold up our card and sharpie and ask, is this as good or any better than the things currently up there?
• What had previously been the handing over of a “hot potato” could now be considered in the context of everything else… and many of them, frankly, didn’t cut it… so a whole load of stress and wasteful activity was headed off at the pass.
• Happier boss, happier team.

For the technicians and analysts

• For the first time our portfolio of department and team levels improvement opportunities were displayed for all to see
• They themselves could interact with this manifest of valuable “extra-curricular” activity.
• They could volunteer to take these initiatives on as individuals or groups.
• They could see opportunity and join in, in a very democratic way.
• Also, and at this time, in this environment, this represented a very unsatisfying part of working life…it massively improved quarterly and annual appraisals.Every improvement card that was completed was stored safely in a box on the managers’ desk.
• This changed the dynamic of appraisals from the usual think back and justify a good score, often skewed by the “primacy and recency effect”, to don’t worry I’ve got all the extra mile work in the box on my desk, I’ll bring it to the meeting.
• Managers were now seen as supporting not challenging, because actually, that is what they started to do.

higher education

I’ve heard it called the Gemba, I like the term Go, Look, See but during my time at one of the largest inner city university campuses in Europe I called it wearing out the shoe leather.

I was given the task of bringing IT support, field and web services across 5 faculties into a single centralised corporate function. As with any big transformational undertaking I had experienced before, and since, I kept at the forefront of my mind the Peter Senge maxim “People don’t fear change, they fear being changed”. Marrying this with (above everything else, humane) Kanban change principle; Start with what you do now, I ventured round all the teams in their many buildings and asked if they would participate in an exercise with me. I told them I had a hunch that they were overworked and underappreciated, but I needed to see if my hypothesis was correct. Would they help me understand it better through a visualisation of their work? The process they employed to meet the demands placed on them and in amongst all of that I’d like to depict them, the talent.

This was met with a full spectrum of responses; from highly enthusiastic positivity through underwhelming ambivalence all the way to extreme suspicion and anger. Each perfectly valid, illustrative of the treatment and support, or lack of, these people had experienced over the years.

The interaction that springs to mind the most, was when I spent a couple of hours introducing myself and this way of working to a highly effective and experienced squad of cross functional desktop, server and software technicians in the scientific faculty that had to deal with everything from ms outlook problems for a student or admin staffer to a professor’s high end compute software on some bespoke standalone hardware for innovative research purposes. The variety was immense.

In this room alone I was treated to all three of the responses I listed above, at one point having to soak up a Fergie like hairdryer moment from one very respected, senior technician asking “Who was I to waltz in here asking these questions?” going on to state, “We haven’t seen a manager in here in 2 years!”

Safe to say their picture was probably in some dictionary somewhere as the definition of “Mushroom Treatment”.

When Fergie was done, he agreed that I could carry on with the rest of the team and I was ok with him continuing his work in the corner and ignoring me.

We then spent a couple of hours finding a sizable space on the wall and “getting out” all their work that had pretty much lost itself in the decrepit workflow management tool. By doing so we found about 30% of it was either done or needed abandoning (it had been started but on contacting the requester and they said to can it) or discarding (not started but we contacted the user and they said they would no longer find it useful). This, in itself, began to help us see the wood for the trees.

Notably during this part of the process, seeing that I was chipping in, negotiating diplomatically with users we were contacting (some very influential academics, others fresh faced students, scared and needing help) and hearing the types of questions I was asking and how interested I was, Fergie started to pay attention and contribute…and thank goodness, he was after all and pivotal member of the team.

By the time I left their office, on a cold, dark but unseasonably dry Winter’s night we had reduced the backlog, the levels of WIP (work in progress) were now conspicuous and known, we could see how much actually had people working on it and how much of it was languishing with the clock ticking and no one progressing it. On many of those we had attached little pink stickies that described dependencies and blockers that needed a decision or assistance which could only come from outside of the team. I described to the team, this was my work. This was the work they set me.

I. Was. Working. For. Them.

I left, Fergie by my side, escorting me out, he shook my hand and said yes, let’s give this a go, after all we’ve never had a manager come in here ever, never mind in 2 years, and done this.

I set the same thing in place for over 20 teams. In rotation, each morning I would visit as many as I could, in their location, their context, where they felt at home and ran stand ups. I offered guidance and decision making and when the time was up, I went away with a list of “pink sticky” work, that would keep me busy each afternoon clearing blockers….then I would report back to them.

This is what a mechanism for servant leadership looks like.

The local government

It is at this point where the culmination of my practicing, failing, learning and succeeding begins to transcend frameworks and methods. Reflecting on the concept of Shu-Ha-Ri, weaving in the experiences I have shared with you so far (and quite a few others I have not), I began to realise that I had applied these practices with such a wide variety of people, work places, industries and economic sectors that I had a growing confidence in identifying and using some patterns for success. Things I could do, and behaviours I could role-model and teach, that would help people get what they need if they wanted it enough. I could show, in any context, how to start a process of unlearning, breaking the habits that, whilst comforting, created unsatisfactory outcomes. Then help people learn new ways, that start with discomfort, like an athlete learning to use the opposite hand or foot, than is natural to them, in order to improve and attain a greater degree of resilience, optionality and flexibility.

It was because I had used lean and agile practices in so many different scenarios, and had seen the benefit for me and others that I could be very assured, used wisely and with integrity they would generate improvement anywhere. I put this down to models like Deming’s PDCA, Boyd’s OODA and ‘the Scientfic Method’ (often credited to Sir Francis Bacon but more likely from Abū Ali al-?asan Ibn al-Haytham al-Ba?rī 600 years earlier). Timeless, tried and trusted if not in ours then in many other contexts!.

I had two stints at one of Greater Manchester’s borough councils. My first visit was part way through an adoption of agile, predominantly scrum, within the software development teams. Alongside the brilliant Thoughtworks the council teams were overhauling their website from a means of broadcasting information to a platform for offering public services digitally.

Intelligently the council had decided to learn how to create this platform by doing it. Building reusable capabilities alongside their partner, Thoughtworks, in that same Shu-Ha-Ri model I mentioned earlier. William Stewart Halsted employed a similar method, known as See One, Do One, Teach One to train surgeons at John Hopkins University, and Jon Smart’s Sooner, Safer, Happier “Ski Instructor” metaphor is used to encourage a similar approach.

At the forefront of this approach is an explicit acknowledgement that if you have not done something before you will need to learn it, and the best way of learning is by trying. How did any of us learn to ride a bike, or how to swim, or how to kick or hit a ball, or how to deliver digital services with a continually constricted budget to a growing population through an ever changing technology landscape...well not in a classroom from a text book; there's a secret worth sharing right now!

On my arrival it was explained that whilst approximately one third of the IT dept had been pointed at this digital endeavour the other two thirds had been left to carry on as normal. Inevitably the Transformation, IT and Strategy leadership had learned that this was much more than a technology and technical skills programme of change. They realised they were trying to change the culture of the whole department, but a gap had opened up between the deliverers of software and those delivering other IT services and could I help?

Here I give a nod to Andy Carmichael and the Kanban Lens. I began conversations with everyone and invited them to view the organisation as a “network of interdependent services”. They offered services out to other areas of the organisation and to do so they need to consume services from those other areas.

We are all reliant on one another. Our successes and failures are intertwined.

Our work is always a series of knowledge discovery steps. As we deliver, we learn. In complex adaptive systems such as these organisations we may be delivering what we think is the same thing over and over again, but all the while the world around us and the organisations is changing and that also has an impact on what we are delivering and how we are delivering it. Maybe in very subtle, incremental ways but over time it can become very different and each time we must study what has changed or risk being surprised and maybe lose control at some point in the future.

Think of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, paraphrased here;

“No one ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and they is not the same person.”

In having these conversations, I looked for those people and teams that responded with curiosity. Those who saw it as a distraction would need more convincing and unlike the council’s other transformation partners, I was a one-man band, I couldn’t afford that much effort.

In attracting those who might be described as Innovators or Early Adopts (see Everett Rogers, diffusion of innovations) I was able to get people to join in and try visualising and understand how their work flowed. More importantly we began to understand where and why it did not flow. Where it got blocked. These were predominantly where an interface in the “network” with another service was broken. These were relationships that were not healthy. I have an example…

One of the teams who quickly threw their lot in with me looked after (maintained and configured) a huge finance system that controlled rents and rates from the borough then processed and reconciled how this revenue could be channelled back to residents as benefits with some interactions to central government systems. The IT team, the system and the service team (what we might call the “business”) were all known as Revs & Bens. Paul was the team lead looking after the small IT team and Alison was the senior manager responsible for the large finance department running the service.

I spent a few weeks with Paul and his team visualising the usual things; the different types of work, the work flow, where they were active amongst everything. We also began to identify a couple of rudimentary classes of service they offered. We named them Mandatory and Elective.

Mandatory were generally calendar driven; end of month, end of year, financial reconciliation. We wrote those on red cards.

Elective were those pieces of configuration work that would allow the service team to make use of new functionality and capability offered by the regular updates to the tool. These were written on blue cards.

We went through the interesting process of depicting all of this, which often produces several “penny drop” moments for the team, where many assumptions about how things get done are exposed and exploded (this is what studying your work and workflow does!). We arrived at a point where the Kanban board illustrated their everyday situation, warts and all. It matched the narrative they needed to tell… they had the words, now they had the pictures to deliver a compelling story.

This is the moment I encourage teams to invite stakeholders to the board, and tell them the story… and they do.

Alison arrived with her service leadership team. The Head of IT (HoIT) and I stood at the back of the group while Paul, using the board, expertly and earnestly facilitated the conversation. The main message he delivered was the unfortunate situation that the team were so overburdened with Mandatory work, and another end of year was looming, that they could not predict fulfilling on anything elective any time soon…. And they hadn’t delivered any elective work for almost 11 months…. The backlog was growing and no signs of bringing it under control were apparent.

Understandably Alison was not delighted, and the HoIT asked me (once everyone had dispersed), and in the nicest possible way; what had I gotten him into?!

We made sure to invite Alison and her team back to the board every 2 weeks, which she accepted, just as the HoIT asked me to explain how this had made his world any better. I explained that it was about time we levelled with Alison and with our radical transparency we could now begin to think about making the situation better. I told the HoIT that Alison had accepted the invitation and this meant she was getting closer to the problem rather than running away from it and leaving him to carry the can. This was exactly as I predicted.

2 weeks later Alison came back with her team. In the intervening time she had been in constant conversation with Paul. This next meeting was perfect.

Alison was able to identify 6 pieces of mandatory work that her own service team could complete, but due to their own overburden, had passed over too quickly (we will always seek the line of least resistance when in survival mode). She took those off the board which alleviated the burden on the IT team. At this point Paul quickly brought 6 more mandatory pieces of work into the workflow. I suggested that they might want to ask Alison whether she wanted to select which work they brought in. Alison selected an equal number of reds and blues and now we started to balance out everyone’s needs.

This intervention was the beginning of a systemic improvement. The Elective work would help to unburden the service team, by making them more effective, meaning they would not pass unsuitable work to the IT team… and the vicious circle becomes a virtuous cycle.

This is a tale I often recount. It personifies that maxim often uttered, mostly flippantly, that “we are One Team!” When Alison took that burden off IT and back with her, when Paul offered Alison the chance to choose, that is the moment when both sides started to act in each other’s best interests, they truly became One Team.

This is also an illustration of how radical transparency of a delivery capability can help you shape demand such that both can be optimised. Alison very quickly took what she had learned at these stand ups and encouraged her own, over-burdened teams to adopt limitation of WIP and management of flow. Now everyone in her value stream was learning, collaboratively, experimentally, how to get better.

Alison’s part of the finance department were the first of many Service (“Business”) teams that approached IT and I to learn how they could improve at the same rate and using the same methods as we were demonstrating in our area.

This was the first sign of a “tipping point” in to the rest of the council that these were behaviours needed in a digital age… not just a digital department… and the whole organisation has been learning together, and learning by showing similar organisations how to do it, ever since.

The global blue chip

I arrived at this world-famous manufacturer of aircraft engines and power systems about 6 months into a substantial corporate service restructure. Acting on behalf of a distinguished consultancy firm, I could see that many of the situations, I stepped into, were filled with the usual worry and confusion due to the pace of change and the amount of unanswered and seemingly unanswerable questions.

Change is complex. The most successful changers, in my experience, quickly understand that it is not about the rate of change but the pace of learning how to change that is indicative of success.

I share this experience in order to show the benefits training can unlock in a workforce that is treading the seemingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous path of an “Agile Transformation”.

In this instance, and in many others before, the organisation in question was short on time. They were happy to balance the risks of making swift decisions, which can affect your ability to communicate, and take people with you, at the same rate. My first suggestion was to instigate a 1 day Lean Agile “boot camp” open to anyone and everyone impacted by the restructure.

This boot camp would be an intensive intro to the practices and vocabulary of sustainable, hypothesis driven change and improvement. More than that it would offer time away from the stresses and strains of their current working day, which was rapidly becoming very different from what people were used to and the discomfort was showing. It should and would be a bit of fun also, with half a day of teaching and half a day immersed in a simulation game combating the random slings and arrows of complexity, learning how to restore, lose and restore flow again. A taste of how to survive and thrive amongst the situations they were increasingly associating with their world of work.

My intention for these sessions can be best summed up in this quote from the French poet, journalist and aviator Antoin de Sainte-Exupery;

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the (people) to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

…and that is what they turned out to be. We, my agility coaching associates Steve and Tom and I, equipped all those who volunteered to attend with a set of skills and an enthusiasm to put in place improvement techniques that might not give them every answer they craved upon leaving the session, but they knew that they would have the means of biting off only as much as they could chew and they could work each answer out in turn.

…and what those sessions gave Steve, Tom and I? They gave some safe space to encourage conversation. As STATIK, the Systems Thinking Approach To Implementing Kanban would have you do first and foremost’ you must understand internal and external sources of dissatisfaction. The day we spent together, trading stories and experiences, memories prompted and provoked by the situations occurring in the simulation game, unearthed a fantastic amount of information and understanding of the perspectives shared by the teams affected by the change. We also used that time to discuss how the practices we taught could help. Once through the boot camp, we coaches followed the participants back to their work environments and worked alongside them to build visualisations, workshops and decision-making aides to allow them to bring a bit more control back. As is usual, a feeling of control, a feeling of self-determination can work wonders for morale…and high morale has the wonderful power of restoring confidence to an unsettled group.

The scientists  

If there is a lack of top-down support then you can still achieve great things bottom up.

In the latter part of 2019 and for a year thereafter I found myself working with one of the foremost manufacturers of scientific measurement instrumentation in the world. For a lean agile practitioner and a proponent of the scientific method it was a very exciting opportunity.

I often say and have often heard said, including most memorably by the ace Prof. Dave Snowden of Cynefin fame, that stories, not people, have the highest agency for change. Project people often refer to themselves as change agents, but in actual fact, the honourable application of an individual’s elbow grease and hard work will have much less effect than that individual inspiring a great many others through the telling and retelling of a compelling narrative, myth or fable.

Change is hard and many think it too difficult to even attempt. If you can inspire them to try, by filling their heads with a story of triumph over adversity then you are on a winner; if the story concerns people not unlike them it’s relatable, if it concerns people on the next floor or at the next bank of desks it is do-able. So reader, find those myths and communicate them.

Me, there, I saw scientists everywhere. I wanted to inspire groups of software deliverers and managers and leaders to throw themselves into improvement activities, when the pressure to deliver had them heads down, nose to the grindstone, instead of head up observing and identifying improvement opportunities. The scientific method, unlocking measurability. That was the myth, and ultimately that is what got people’s attention for long enough to be inspired.

I set my sights big, started small and helped them learn quickly. I introduced a single team to “lead time”…how long does it take for them to fulfil a need, as stated to them by a customer or stakeholder.

Start with what you do now. How predictable were they as we started? How much throughput where they delivering, how long did it take to finish something and how many things were they starting or have “in-flight” at any one time.

We used a mixture of formats to represent the data such as, Lead Time run charts with upper and lower control limits (based on standard deviation) so that we could see changes over time ; Lead Time histograms so that we could represent percentage confidence levels over distribution of delivery times and model Service Level Agreements based on these; Cumulative Flow Diagrams to see where work dwelled and similarly blocker clustering and analysis to uncover stronger signals of systemic blockers from the weak symptoms we experienced.

In the space of a few months this first team had improved performance, predictability, and confidence massively. They had become a story to tell and the word travelled faster than we possibly could.

I began to support another team in adopting similar ways of working, this time they doubled down even deeper on flow and lean practices to increase throughput, even installing a virtual “andon cord” with policies, backed up with data that informed them when a piece of work was falling into jeopardy, statistically speaking. (If a user story went beyond 5 days it was in the upper quartile of predictable delivery, therefore it was in danger of not being delivered with the 2 week timebox)

At this point the team would down tools and take a closer look, deciding quickly what intervention would need to be staged.

The flow metrics had been evolved to such a point that they could see, on the occasions they ignored the policy, delivery went out of control; i.e. they delivered less and what they did deliver took longer.

As we can all attest to from sci-fi movies, Greek mythology, to neighbourhood gossip, a story never loses anything in the retelling and the story of how these teams were gaining control and increasing performance became a hot topic. More scrum masters, agile practitioners, project managers from across the organisation globally began to ask for my time and that of these teams who had made it happen.

Over time, increasingly senior, leadership became aware of these techniques and the impact they were having. It was met with equal measures of enthusiasm and trepidation. Previous injections of Agile had not had such dramatic outcomes. The organisation, like many others, were struggling to transform all the way to the top… that great old meme springs to mind of the speaker at the lectern asking the assembled crowd, “who wants change?”, all the hands go up…” who wants to change?” half the people disappear… “who wants to lead the change?”, the speaker finds themselves alone in the room.

Once again this was a grass roots phenomenon, started by this organisation’s innovators and early adopters, gaining momentum as the stories and evidence stacked up and were communicated freely…

…Until more people were behaving in the new ways than the old and a culture shift had occurred.

These have been brief, hopefully alluring, descriptions of a good few years helping change happen. There are many more untold stories and even these, as you can imagine had much more left unsaid. They are not special in any way, there is no magic sauce. I hope more than anything they are a comfort and an encouragement to anyone trying to help people in the same way I continue to do.

Agile for me, over the years, has been a way of life. It has solved many problems and also got me in to some scrapes! (Images of Quint, Hooper and Brody sat round the table on the Orca, in Jaws, sharing stories of the USS Indianapolis or Mary Ellen Moffat breaking hearts spring to mind!)

 At times I have found out, from its use, that I may well be in the wrong place or that I am very much in the right place…. but it has never steered me wrong and it has always allowed me to be true to myself. Long may it continue into the future.

The future?

Of course, this reflection has been inspired by the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Agile Manifesto, but what next?

For me I am becoming increasingly interested in the field of Behavioural Economics and what I have heard called “Decision Architecture”. The visualisation aspect of Kanban could be seen as an interface into an otherwise invisible, intangible system. Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy and TED fame has said the interface will influence the behaviour, and through this, and other methods, I wish to enable organisations and people to make decisions that prove to be healthy, wealthy and wise. Decisions when solely based in “neo-classical” economics create those anti-patterns that produce surprising and unsatisfactory outcomes. (Picture Stephen Elop of Nokia lamenting “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”)… Decision Architect has a nice ring to it.

I agree with Simon Sinek, and my pal Rob England, that modern day Capitalism, is not infact capitalism but Friedmanism. Profit is not merely growth and shareholder value, it is the improvement of our global ecosystem for all who exist here. I would like to help organisations feel compelled to make the types of decision that further this outcome. There is a lot to improve upon and first and foremost I see my role as a continuous improvement and transformation coach. "...plenty there that needs to be done." In't that right Alan?

As for the Agile Manifesto; I do not think it is ready to be updated. If it truly was ready, it would have changed. Plenty of very intelligent people have given it a go, or suggested others should.

There are people, and I am one of them, that have substituted “software” with words like product or service. The fact that this can happen and the manifesto still makes sense - is still helpful - means (to me) that it still applies.

Maybe a time will come when a new way of thinking will be needed to solve problems the human race has not seen before. I expect when that happens a new manifesto will emerge. Necessity being the mother of invention.

Maybe this will come with the colonisation of other planets? When the scarcity of a single planet’s resources is no longer a limiting factor and thereby a source of such conflict. It may seem fanciful but how often, in that last 100 hundred years, has science fiction become science fact?

Whatever you think, I believe a new manifesto will appear when it is needed…those that have been put forward so far do not seem to have caught on. I can only conclude the law of natural selection applied. 

Thank you for taking the time to get this far down the page. I hope, at the very least, you've had an amusing distraction from whatever it was you should have been doing.

Thank you to the wonderful Karl Smith for encouraging me, and I think a few others, to manifest some of our agile memories for the equally wonderful #Agile20ReflectFestival. I had a nice time doing it.