Setting the Right Expectations: The Soft Problems That Make Agile Hard

First part of a series on Enterprise Agility's Role in the Post-Pandemic World

Quick Summary

• The Agile movement started from the desire to bring more realism to product development, by facing the human and social aspects head on.
• But this is not easy, simply because of the fact that “soft problems” are hard to grasp.
• While Agile practices provide the environment to handle the complexity of “soft problems”, most people cannot take advantage of it because of our ingrained mechanistic view of the world.
• If you want an Agile transformation to be successful, you have to address the most important factor on the table: each person’s mindset.?
• Setting the right expectations around mindset and allowing people to display their courage in handling complexity drastically increases your chances of success.

We don’t sufficiently acknowledge the challenge of being part of an Agile team. As a result, too many teams fail without being given a fair chance to succeed.

You wouldn’t teach a person to swim if he is oblivious to the dangers of drowning. Yet, we don’t emphasize the chaos that can ensue if autonomy isn’t granted to the team appropriately. Or if the product owner is constantly overridden by powerful executives with their respective agendas.

By not focusing on the risk and the effort expected of those who need to transition to an Agile working style, you set the team up for failure. Setting the right expectations may be the single most important thing an Agile coach can do at the start of a client’s journey.

At the team level, at least, the hurdles to success aren’t extremely difficult to overcome. It is often determined by how quickly the team can adopt the mindset and values that will bring them their optimal agility. And how geared they are to continuously improve.

I will give you an example of one such mindset that is often overlooked: innate curiosity. This is the ability to keep a sharp eye open for insights that will drive outcomes, and learn from whatever is thrown at you. It requires discarding your sense of what is right, from time to time, and exploring new territory to see if a fresh perspective is warranted.?

Let me walk through a scenario that you regularly see as Agile teams, their sponsors and key stakeholders, start their journey. A common misunderstanding that surfaces at the beginning is the notion that Agile is essentially equal to “speed”. More often than not, it’s a vague notion of how “quickly” things will get done. We are fast to point out that it is not speed per se, but how accurately and fast the right things will get done. But that explanation is like telling the boss that her decisions are sub-optimal. As a result, it gets gently pushed under the rug, by the boss herself or those around her who don’t wish to ruffle feathers. Of course, this is not always the case. But in traditional organizations, without much outside exposure, it isn’t uncommon either.

The results can be dire for the team. By ignoring the reality facing them, they set themselves up for a doomed Agile journey. They either flat out fail to achieve it, or find it difficult to go beyond a certain point.

Let’s dig a bit deeper. As I mentioned, a key reason a lot of teams cannot excel in an Agile way of working is that team members lack sufficient curiosity. What’s at play here? Curiosity stems from humility. Which stems from knowing that you don’t have all the answers. This is a tough state to achieve if the boss believes he is all-knowing, or resourceful enough, to find the answer by himself.

Sometimes the boss may display humility, but his or her team may strongly expect or even demand that they know the answer. There may be other motives at play, too. Team members may not want to be directly responsible for the outcome, so they divorce themselves from the decision-making. They may just wish to finish the work, because that’s how it’s been done and this has reaped the best consequences so far. In very dysfunctional teams, members may have reached a state of apathy where they simply don’t care. They may want to check in, do the work, then check out, and get back to what they really care about.

Now consider the alternative case. The boss displays humility and emphasizes that in order to succeed as a team, they have to be curious and continuously learn. For such a work environment, not only does there have to be a shared acknowledgement of failure as something to welcome, but a proven way to fail safely and extract the most important lessons from it. Too often, this is difficult for teams, not because they don’t get the principles, but because they lack practice (“muscle memory”, so to speak). They may also have to deal with external forces that don’t support the behavior. Usually, a combination of these is what makes this key Agile behavior so challenging.

But what happens when you are able to overcome it? When curiosity and a learning culture is an intrinsic part of the team, many doors automatically open to drastically increase their agility. The conversation shifts from “what did we do?” to “what have we learnt?”.

Despite its importance, how often does an Agile coach, or the leadership backing an Agile transformation, mention curiosity as a key factor to their success? My answer is (as you may have gauged already): Not often enough.?

There is a reason behind this reluctance. Simply put, this type of a “soft problem” is difficult to handle.

To build real curiosity, you have to first be able to grasp the “soft problem”, despite its softness. Then you contextualize it to the team’s particular situation, and translate it into changes in behavior that can help the team grow in that aspect. Agile practices provide a fertile environment to do this very thing. But without having a common awareness of issues, this environment goes largely unappreciated and not used, therefore.

It is these “soft problems”, which are difficult to grasp, that make Agile hard. It is these “soft problems” that are becoming increasingly important as we build our capability to deal with an increasingly VUCA world.

Next time you interview an Agile coach or a new member of an Agile team, see if they realize the difficulty of these “soft problems” and challenge themselves, and you, by setting realistic expectations for solving them.?

If so, you’ve got a keeper.