What is an Agile Leader?

Dear Mike, Having worked as one of your subordinates in the past, I have seen your change leadership in action. In practice, you have been successful in achieving appropriate dialog within the organization and had listened to diverse perspectives when taking decisions. So, I expect your book to reveal a good quality practitioner oriented view. I have been looking at scholarly perspective of change and more often have been asked to look for practitioner oriented view and synthesize with the scholarly theories. Speaking or theories which are generic, some objectivity may be necessary when understanding new problems. I see your thread as an excellent opportunity to investigate your practitioner oriented view on some of the related concepts and theories that may somehow related to the statements made by you in this thread. I would like to know you practitioner oriented view with some reflexive critique on the statements which I am going to make below. Your expert thoughts should help us to shape our understanding about change management. When you highlight the role of ‘Agile Leadership’, I presume that you are speaking from the point of view of the change leadership agency. In your thread I noticed the following: ‘What has changed: leaders can no longer choose a path forward with confidence that the path will be completely successful. Relentless change has reduced or eliminated that ability.’ (Russell, 2017) Caldwell (2003) recognizes the existence of multiple change agencies such as Leadership, Management, Consultancy and Team based. Each of these agency types has some importance. One of the reasons for the dilemma mentioned by you is due to the one dimensional models of analysis built based on each of these change agency perspective. It looks like the focus of unique attributes related to the leadership such as heroic qualities or traits seemed to have undermined the significance of the existence of other change agency roles (Caldwell, 2003, p.140). The reality is that the modern day problems have grown to be to complex that no one individual can not alone determine the fate of the change. Dooley K.J. (1997) provides the idea of the Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), as it is applicable to organisation behaviour (Dooley, 1997, p.69). The idea of CAS stems from three paradigms of management thought. The system theory paradigm allows the scholars to look at the organisation as a control system with feedback loops for correcting its strategy (Dooley, 1997, p.71). The idea of adaptation and resource constrained competition driving the process of change enables the scholars to examine change in a very complex organisation using the population ecology paradigm of thought (Dooley, 1997, p.72). This sort of evolutionary change (adaptation) is quite common in the field of technology (technology speciation), according to Cattani. G. (2008).Intelligent beings make intelligent decisions, so are the organisations which take organisational decisions. This notion makes it necessary to appreciate the paradigm of information processing (Dooley, 1997, p.74). In your thread there is another statement which attracted my attention: ‘Leaders must now adopt and promote a "wrong until right" mindset in their organizations.’ (Russell, 2017) I think the idea that "wrong until right" resonates the idea that most real world problems are not completely defined at the time of origins. Sometimes our actions shape the outcome, as there can be multiple possible alternatives and outcomes at a given point of time. However, the very fact that we recognize “Wrong” and “Right” depends on a mere perspective, the leader dominated decision-making related to change appears to be vulnerable to lack of perspective. The idea that ‘Leaders must adopt and promote’ might turn out to churn a dominant story. If that dominant story is monologic, that closes the door to other alternatives and perspectives of ’being right or wrong’. Beech, MacPhail and Coupland (2009) identify the existence of self-sealing monologic stories that can exist within the same environment giving an appearance of dialogical appearance. In conclusion, the presence of self-sealed stories so close to each other, drove the sense-making process to work in silos- that resulted in gaps in solution to the problem. Given this theoretical perspective, in my opinion, it is important to explore other paradigms of change research in addition to leadership change agency. As a software engineer, I have seen Agile being used as a process to change. With your leadership twelve years ago, we did Sprint Retrospective work. These retrospective meetings promoted dialog within the community enabling us to question the process itself (which practice to retain and which practice to eliminate). Therefore, I think, it is worth to mention that it is not just assuming ‘wrong until right’, which a kind of single loop is learning; but also adjusting the process which involves a double-loop learning (Argyris, 2002) may be important. I am looking forward to get your practitioner oriented input to fill the gaps of our understanding on this topic. I will visit you website and read more. References: Argyris, C. (2002) ‘Double-Loop Learning, Teaching, and Research’, Academy of Management Learning & Education, 1(2), pp.206-218. Beech, N., MacPhail, S. & Coupland, C. (2009) ‘Anti-dialogic positioning in change stories: bank robbers, saviours and peons,’ Organization, 16 (3), pp.335–352. Caldwell, R. (2003) ‘Models of change agency: a fourfold classification’, British Journal of Management, 14 (2), pp.131–142. Cattani, G. (2008) ‘Reply to Dew's (2007) commentary: "Pre-adaptation, exaptation and technology speciation: a comment on Cattani (2006)"’, Industrial & Corporate Change, 17 (3), pp.585–596 Dooley K.J. (1997) ‘A complex adaptive systems model of organizational change’, Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Science, 1 (1), pp.69–97. Russel, M. (2017) ‘What is an Agile Leader?’, LinkedIn, [Online]. Available at: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/what-agile-leader-mike-russell. [Accessed: 11 Apr 2017].

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