Trust, curiosity, and learning in the agility spectrum.

Repeatedly following rituals or chanting the holy verses of a religion doesn’t make you a better person. Agility cannot come from the words you speak or the rituals you adhere to, it comes from your mindset - a mindset that finds a way to accept change, learn from it constantly, and can still make incremental progress every day.? Sustained agility requires trust, curiosity, and the ability to design your learning experience around constraints related to the problem you are currently working on.

Agility at its core is based on two tenets?

1. The future state is never perfectly known
2. All learning is iterative and progressive?

These tenets lead to two core principles of organizing work

1. Time-box work to the level of available knowledge about expectations from the future
2. Assess learning to ensure you are learning in each time box

Absolute agility is a state where you cannot create repeatable systems and structures - in biological systems, the most agile ones are often either elementary cellular organisms or they are scavengers or parasites. Stable structures tend to have some inertia and memory of how things work.?Sure we live in a VUCA world but absolute entropy is not a valuable construct for thinking about building organizational structures that involve humans and their need for security, trust, and belonging. And therein lies the challenge of enabling agility within larger teams.

Startup agility does not originate from the same sources as corporate agility but it is very attractive to preach that approach to large organizations. Startup agility originates from the need to manage constraints and achieve fast progress as a product-market fit is identified. Conversations around agility in large organizations tend to often originate from a desire to move fast and compete better.

Corporate kind of agility has become a religion with lots of bibles written and seminars given to the devout and the converted.?It comes from silicon valley serial entrepreneurs and those influenced by the success stories of startups that have grown into behemoths. These are organizations that have grown in the ecosystem of relatively infinite capital sources that Silicon Valley capitalism has enabled over the past 2 decades. This kind of agility assumes that there is enough capital to make or even repeat mistakes others have already made because you are a small portion of some VC investor’s kitty of a million bets. This kind of agility assumes that you will have the time and space to learn by doing something that you could also preemptively think more clearly and avoid. This kind of agility believes that you can rush to 100s of experiments run in parallel instead of doing one thing thoroughly well. Not everyone can or will be Amazon, Google, Uber, or Facebook.?

Corporate Agility

Corporate Agility of the kind that gets written about is the one where superheroes at the top orchestrate unique rituals with big philosophies that charm their entire organizations. It is often propagated by those who have often not shipped anything with ownership nor worked within a constrained setup to ship something successfully.?One failed startup does not make a great agility education. Corporate agility focuses on concepts like autonomy, rituals, etc. It has the ability to box complexities like trust, vision, and communication into methods and mechanisms.?While there is some iterative value to this type of agility education, those who get overfed or educated in corporate agility often lose sight of the core values of agility - a shared sense of ownership, trust, and curiosity.?These cannot be trained for and that means you have to curate teams to seed these behaviors and then expand their charter.

Pure agility is essential only in those cases where your team is dealing with clear unknowns in terms of capability as well as customer needs.?Only a nihilist can take the worldview that everything is unknown and thus we should assume that all work requires an agile approach all the time. You will see this in teams that refuse to estimate all their work even though only a portion of their work is purely unknown. Often teams that overemphasize agility tend to lack trust in their team members or their leaders. This is especially relevant in firms that are no longer small enough that everyone meets at the daily standup. While it is absolutely essential that leaders inspire trust, it is equally important to remember that trust is a two-way contract. Even the most trustworthy leader can distrust some of their team members or the most trusted team member may not trust the leader.?Agility then becomes an excuse for ‘ I don’t trust your decisions so I will assume everything is unknown including the reason that led you to make the decision that’s creating this task’.?

Now you can see where agility becomes a hammer that sees everything as a nail. In such cases where what needs to be done is clear but you don’t understand the problem but are unwilling to trust the decision because?

1. Your expertise doesn’t match the required decision OR?
2. The person leading the charter is a poor communicator OR?
3. You have made no effort to ask your questions to see if you can create a more trustworthy relationship.?

In this type of scenario, corporate agility efforts stall into endless conversations and workshops. Such teams need to remember the core of tenets of agility as visible in the success of startups and scale-ups.?

Startup Agility?

Startup agility requires a mindset?of constraint-oriented thinking - it works with limited options and accepts that planned work will change within days and weeks. It works with unknowns as a necessary input to the process of learning; You don’t try to avoid making commitments until you have scoped the problem and solution perfectly; instead, you focus on committing to the chunk of work you can do tomorrow and next week to improve your understanding of the problem and the solution space. This is a mindset and not a collection of rituals or methods. Startup agility understands that work plans will change because businesses and customer needs are not defined at a fixed point in time. Startup agility has to focus on working with the strengths of what you have while figuring out the one unique thing that the customer can get from your product or enterprise.

Startup agility requires?

• Trust in every team member for the unique skill he or she can bring.?
• Respectful and curious communication that tries to ensure everyone is better informed at the end of each question even if you do not trust someone or their capabilities on the team.?

This is the type of agility that inspires the language of ’squads’ and ’tribes’. ?

Repeatedly following rituals or chanting the holy verses of a religion doesn’t make you a better person. Agility cannot come from the words you speak or the rituals you adhere to, it comes from your mindset - a mindset that finds a way to accept change, learn from it constantly, and can still make incremental progress every day.? Sustained agility requires trust, curiosity, and the ability to design with the constraints around the problem at hand to make work a learning experience.