What do agility and the Communist Manifesto have in common?

In 2014, I gave a talk at Manage Agile in Berlin entitled: "Scrum: Requirements for personnel development and leadership". I opened the talk with the provocative question, "What does Scrum have in common with the Communist Manifesto?"

At the time, the image on the typical member of a Scrum team was more than glorified. The common developer was supposed to be a team player, communicative, striving for technical excellence, economically minded, creative and innovative. There was the image that the broad, individual competence then also made it possible that the team could establish an inherently hierarchy-free togetherness.

I felt and still feel that this was misguided. People are diverse and any conceivable model of cooperation must take this into account. The comparison with the Communist Manifesto forced itself upon me, because it too is based on a strict conception of man.

Experience has now shown that Scrum can certainly take this into account in its methodology and that this exaggerated perspective is not a criterion for success at all.

But even today, we are pushing for a "change of attitude" in agile in the transformation process, especially in management. Stefan Kühl interpreted this already in 2018 in a lecture in Zurich as a strong sign that the management hype agility is already dying [1].

In my opinion, this very drastic assessment is refuted in that agility still plays a major role in organizational development. However, the question rightly arises whether with the demand for the development of an "agile mindset" we do not have to allow for similar concerns as I have formulated regarding the original human image behind Scrum. Kühl also sees this connection in his presentation. This motivated the titling of this article.

To answer this question, I proceed as follows:

• I try to present what agility is in the first place - in a broad consensus - on the organizational level and what consequences follow this on the implementation level.
• I explain why it follows from this that a specific (management) attitude is required to set up an organization in an agile way. In this way, I also counter all those who understand agility purely methodologically and consider the discussion about an agile mindset to be superfluous.
• I elaborate on essential partial aspects of what agile mindset means to me and thus arrive at an expanded definition of agility.
• Finally, I am ready to turn back to the opening question: By wishing for an agile mindset to be adopted, are we formulating an unrealistic demand because it denies diversity?

The basic definition of agility doesn't give much away

Ask five Agile Coaches for a definition of Agility and, in all likelihood, five different answers will be given. The accompanying science also faces this challenge of a lack of clarity.

In 2012, for example, F?rster and Wendler said they only looked at a subset of the evolution of agility's meaning over the past 80 years - they left out agile project management and software development. Despite this simplification, they concluded:

"One difficulty arises, however, from the fact that there is no unambiguity in the literature about what is meant by the term agility." (translated) [2]

Fortunately, we nevertheless do not have to bury our heads in the sand because of this. The elaborate analysis was not quite so unsuccessful, because the two authors at least conclude that (rather vaguely) agility always has something to do with time, costs, competence and flexibility, but in any case with a specific adaptability of an organization:

"*Other undisputed hallmarks of agility are reactive and proactive responses to market changes with a focus on customer satisfaction." (translated) [3]

I would like to connect to this lowest common denominator in the following. Agility as an organizational characteristic is to be understood in the future as the ability to serve customer needs efficiently under rapidly changing environmental conditions. In the following, I would like to understand this definition as a "basic definition".

The question of how

If we end the analysis at this point, we can only agree with those who say that agility is nothing new. No manager in the last 100 years would claim that the ability to change in the interests of the customer is not an important characteristic of a company.

The decisive question, however, is what priority I give to this organizational characteristic and what means I use to establish it. I will come back to the present importance and thus the prioritization of the property later, but first I would like to discuss the means for establishing agility according to the basic definition.

Beyond the basic definition, the notion of agility is loaded with a specific idea of how change capability should be produced and what optimization criteria the organization should follow in change. Here we then encounter borrowings from a wide variety of organizational development approaches ranging from lean management and learning organizations to systems theory and the considerations of self-organization of teams.

What is new about agile is the pronounced focus on creating frameworks for the self-organization of teams, i.e., rather cellular, decentralized structures in what is in doubt a much larger whole. In agile thinking, self-organization is the means for creating adaptability in companies. Other aspects, such as lean management thinking or theories on the learning organization flank this concept or are rather guard rails that must also be taken into account, but not the leading idea.

I will not answer here the question of whether self-organization with a highly decentralized structure best meets the challenge of adaptability to customer, environmental and internal needs of the organization. That is a consideration for another day. There may be other approaches here.

The point is simply that the concept of agility incorporates the property of self-organization to clarify the "how" of adaptability. This is what we want to work with further.

A new image of people is needed

Many authors have worked on the answer to the question of how self-organization can be brought to life in teams. For me, two factors crystallize as the basic conditions for self-organization in a company.

1. I must have superordinate rules that define the overall system (governance). Otherwise, anarchy prevails [4].
2. governance leaves so much room for maneuver that subsystems are able to form their own operations and maintain them independently of the overall system. Niklas Luhmann speaks of the property that
3. "The structures of an operationally closed system are built up by its own operations." (translated) [5]

Even the first point is difficult to implement in classical organizations. In extreme cases, the only boundaries to which a manager feels bound vis-à-vis his employees are the law. Because he can, the rules that apply to everyone else are stretchable for him according to the situation.

But let's assume that there are effective, cross-organizational rules. These rules are transparent in the organization and the management also adheres to them. What then needs to be done for the second point to be effective?

In terms of agility, we expect the self-organized team to be able to make situational decisions in direct exchange with its environment, to adapt working methods, and to continuously optimize itself in the interests of the customer. Only in this way does self-organization fulfill its purpose, namely to establish the adaptability of the organization.

The team should also take responsibility for the decisions it makes. However, the assumption of responsibility presupposes freedom of action, albeit within a set framework (see point 1).

If I grant employees freedom of action, this means that I am convinced that they will not only not exploit this freedom, but that they will use it for the good of the company. This requires a specific view of human nature on the part of the person who opens up the scope for action.

Douglas McGregor put it this way in 1960:

External control and the threat of punishment are not the only means for bringing about effort toward organizational patterns. Man will exercise self-direction and self-control in service of objectives to which he is committed. ... The average human being learns, under proper conditions, not only to accept but to seek responsibility. " [6]

This conception of man is elaborated even more clearly in the 1990s in its consequence for dealing with employees by Norman Kerth's Prime Directive.

"Regardless of what we discover, we must understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand. " [7]

If I accept this for myself, I believe in the individual capabilities of the people in my organization and am convinced of their good will, their abilities and their possibilities to contribute their best to the common goal. They are limited only by the framework conditions that I set as a manager.

Let's try to summarize what has been said so far. Generally, establishing the organizational capability to form self-organized, smaller structures is considered the means - the "how" - to enable agility in its original sense. In order to tread this path, in addition to the relatively trivial creation of basic rules for the overall system (and the less trivial binding nature of these rules), leadership behavior is required that supports the development of self-organized action. I can only acquire this leadership behavior if I adopt a specific image of man, which I would like to call a "positive image of man". This positive view of people is also exactly what I understand as the core of the agile mindset.

The basic meaning says something about the world view

Let's now return, as promised earlier, to the importance of the characteristic of agility for an organization. If agility, in the sense of the basic definition above, has been able to attract so much attention in the last 20 years, it can only be explained by a general shift in management's perspective on the world.

Of course, the need to adapt to new situations also existed in many ways in the decades before. Wars and crises have always determined social life, and technological advancement has not been foreign to any generation since the beginning of industrialization. In the general perception, whether right or wrong, the latter effect in particular has picked up speed in recent decades, enabling market conditions to be disrupted and reorganized within a very short time. New technological developments - in IT, we call this trend part of digitization - have the potential to level market entry barriers in the shortest possible time, which the top dogs previously thought they had.

In my view, part of what we consider agility is therefore also the perspective that change, including disruptive change, is a significant component of our reality, which I must take into account in a superordinate way and thus with high priority in my organizational management and development.

Furthermore, agility incorporates a postmodern mindset developed in the 1960s that the world should not be grasped exclusively according to the currently valid paradigms of natural science, but also via socio-cultural contexts. This is reflected in the skepticism about the analytical plannability of social (and thus also entrepreneurial) events and leads to the iterative characteristics of all agile methods [8].

This also closes the circle to the focus on self-organization as the means to create the ability to change. If I were able to plan change and its consequences from a helicopter perspective as a manager, I would only need a tightly organized command and control chain through which to implement the respective adjustments in my organization. But since I am convinced that I cannot do this, I decentralize the respective adaptation decisions to self-organized teams that work their way forward step by step, analyzing the respective current situation.

What I am describing here is a specific perception of the world that agilists must have acquired, otherwise their actions and choice of methods would not be coherent. This, too, represents a dimension of what I understand as an agile mindset.

An expanded definition of agility

Now we are ready to expand the concept of agility a bit. If I try to operationalize the bare organizational characteristic found in the basic definition of agility in my company, this requires a basic attitude that can be concretely captured in at least three aspects:

1. I have a positive view of people and am able to trust.
2. my view of the world gives me the feeling that the ability to continually adapt to a volatile environment is a decisive success factor for companies.
3. in partial aspects I have acquired a postmodern way of thinking.

This brings us to an expanded definition of agility. I want to talk about a meaning of agility for organizations and a meaning of agility for the people in the organizations.

The meaning of agility for organizations is reflected by the basic definition.

Agility for organizations means the ability to efficiently and rapidly adapt to new environmental conditions for the benefit of their customers.

Agility for people in organizations means adopting a basic attitude that, because of the world as it is, recognizes the need for the ability to change as crucial, considers analytical planning approaches insufficient for this, and approaches people positively. I understand this attitude as the agile mindset.

Agile mindset is not an imposition

Let's now return to our initial question. Are we demanding too much from people with this mindset? Are we denying diversity in the expectation that such an attitude will be accepted?

To a certain extent, yes. But no more than we do in our organizations anyway, even in the classical ones. After all, it would be na?ve to assume that classically run organizations don't also make implicit assumptions about people's attitudes.

In such organizations, we encounter a mindset that encompasses opposing positions on agility, such as a strict belief in the ability to plan for the future, a view of people that contains elements of mistrust (trust is good, control is better), and the conviction that there are natural differences in rank between people. Otherwise, it would be impossible to explain why it makes sense for a manager to be able to control employees by giving them instructions.

Employees whose actions are coherent with the implicit attitude requirement of the organization can then be particularly successful. Others are more likely to perish in this system. Thus, the consideration of the diversity of people obviously also takes place here only to a limited extent.

Due to the fact that the behavior and the underlying attitude is handed down to such a high degree, only no one notices this. The underlying image of the world and people thus appears almost natural and is no longer questioned. Anyone who cannot fit in is simply not "normal".

I even consider the agile mindset here to be more diversity-friendly, because it is more liberal and gives people a lot of room for personal development. If a person is different and thinks differently, then as a manager I try to create the framework conditions in the common system in accordance with the Prime Directive so that he or she can still be successful.

The initial question is thus answered insofar as with the desire for the expression of an agile mindset, we are actually expressing a specific image of man and making a demand on the attitude of the employees in an organization. Nevertheless, the comparison with the Communist Manifesto does not seem to be valid, because this claim regarding the adoption of a basic attitude is no more exuberant than is the case in our traditional companies.

It is just different.

Sources

[1] Kühl, Stefan, “Die Tücken der agilen Organisation”, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3LDABxF96c , viewed on 6/26/2023, 17:30 CET

[2] F?rster, Kerstin; Wendler, Roy, “Theorien und Konzepte zu Agilit?t in Organisationen”, Dresdner Beitr?ge zur Wirtschaftsinformatik, Nr. 63/12, Universit?t Dresden, S. 33

[3] F?rster, Kerstin; Wendler, Roy, “Theorien und Konzepte zu Agilit?t in Organisationen”, Dresdner Beitr?ge zur Wirtschaftsinformatik, Nr. 63/12, Universit?t Dresden, S. 32

[4] Appelo, Jurgen, “Management 3.0”, Addison-Wesley, 2011, S. 107

[5] Luhmann, Niklas, “Einführung in die Systemtheorie”, Carl-Auer Verlag GmbH, 8te Auflage, 2020, S. 97

[6] McGregor, Douglas, “The Human Side of Enterprise”, Annotated Edition, McGraw-Hill Companies, 2006, S. 65

[7] Kerth, Norman L., ?Project Retrospectives - A Handbook for Team Reviews“, Dorset House Publishing, 2001, S. 7

[8] Kaeser, Eduard, ?Aufkl?rung, jetzt aber richtig verstanden – die 68er Brise in Technik und Naturwissenschaft“, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2018, ********https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/aufklaerung-jetzt-aber-richtig-verstanden-die-68er-brise-in-technik-und-naturwissenschaften-ld.1439050 viewed on 6/26/2023, 17:30 CET