When Agile Becomes Survival

Most of us reading this have fallen in love with Agile for amazingly positive reasons: for the speed, for the efficiency, for the people-practice, for a need of better, for the future-proofing and we’ve oftentimes retrofitted the concept of VUCA once it became mainstream and by the time we did, our investment into Agile alleviated the anxiety it would otherwise cause. Because we now had an inbuilt mechanism to deal with the volatility and uncertainty and we could stomach the ambiguity and knew how to chop the complexity into cards on the backlog. We had just the tool for the monumental task. 

Everyone else hasn’t had that luxury. Some people had only heard of Agile in passing, they filed it under the same “Aww isn’t that adorable” drawer where they parked the concept of flexible and remote working, all that talk of failure and experimentation, Lean and so on being good, and where they wrote down the name of the books on courage and dysfunctional teams they were going to read one day if they found the time. Many others still, were just being brought along when the world changed overnight. They are now actors in what must feel like their own cruel cross-over between The Truman Show and some Stephen King novel. That drawer where all these things were parked seems to have exploded all over their lives like mad, reality-altering confetti and nothing makes sense anymore. 

I can’t imagine how hard it must be for unAgile people at this time. No, seriously, have you considered it? The enormity of what is suddenly required of anyone who had previously spent their entire life with their identity wrapped around eliminating risk and safeguarding against failure. The immense ask of anyone with a need for long runways, stability and spelt out complex plans. The staggering amount of uncomfortability they have had to adapt to on the double. And there’s nowhere to hide and no one to blame. Which makes it worse. 

We’ve all seen resistance to change in Agile transformations. The crucial difference between what those people go through and what the rest of the world is going through now dealing with this VUCA on steroids exercise is two-fold: on the one hand, in a “times of peace Agile transformation,” there is a (hopefully) spelt out imperative that suggests the change is being brought about for good reason and that the results will be amazing -this serves both as the explanation and as motivational desiderata- and then there is a common “enemy” to moan against when it’s hard. The man. The company. The management. Whoever it is, they fill the role of the hated when a valve is needed. In this now, there is no higher purpose and good outcome to carry us through, and no common enemy we can fantasise to battle when it’s all too much. This is not betterment, this is survival.  

This is different and hard and painful for everyone, yes, but I put it to us that we need to be extra compassionate towards those we hadn’t managed to bring along to the right side and we hadn’t helped become Agile at heart before the crisis hit, because if we are tired, overworked, anxious, fearful, bewildered and paralysed and this is not our first brush with VUCA, imagine what it is like for them. 

It’s not only hard for the unAgile people, it’s also especially hard for the critics. The whole “Agile is dead” brigade has it bad. All the time and energy spent collecting reports and stats to show it “doesn’t work” and their well-prepared speeches as to why should drop it and accept waterfall 2.0 as the saviour, has been thrown completely out the window with the pandemic. It is no longer a choice. Sure, in some places they may have scored what seems like a victory when the move to remote left behind a tentative Kanban board on a physical wall and they went back to project management tools of the 90s, but they know it’s temporary only and they can sense that the monumental shift to accepting flexibility and putting people first has now already happened. But it’s also a loss to all of us to have lost dissenting voices and speaking-up and that we must correct.

Of all the big lessons we are learning about ourselves, our work and humanity, one of the most amazing ones is how one of the responses to the pandemic is a giant case of abiding to the main Agile Manifesto: Putting people before process. Everywhere in the world that safeguarding decision is happening every day that this unfolds, not only at an enterprise level but at a country level. While we may dispute the approach and the results, the intention is the same across the board: put people first. 

Everyone woke up in an Agile world this year and while some of us were living in it already, others find it hard to find a path and everyone, absolutely everybody across the board finds it terrifying. I think it’s worth spending time thinking of where everyone is on the acceptance curve and finding ways to help them find a spark of excitement for the change, uninvited as it was. Unfortunately results are hard to show right now so we can’t use that to “sell it” - an ecstatic end-consumer is likely missing for everyone; incremental experiments hard to construct and demo; and, if we’re honest, a few other things are missing in action as well: team’s courage, its creativity and voracious appetite for learning, its overall magic are momentarily dulled by how Psychological Safety is suffering because we’re human and tired and scared and that makes us insular and defensive and un-team-y at times. So it may be hard to really show that initial “why” that excited us back in the day just now to the new guys, but, as this thing shows signs of loosening its grip on us, we’ll find them once again. 

I’ve said this before but any Agile team should spare a sprint to design and establish their own People Practice. The “deliverable” - a team code of conduct, a contract or a promise or just a defined set of beliefs around how much we know about each other’s feelings and what we can do to make each other’s lives better and how we will hold each other accountable to ask and pry and probe and care. An injection of EQ. A shift in focus. Permission and encouragement to be human and spend time and energy on human things. An exercise in defining human epics. It’s when we do this that we’ll be compassionate to the unAgile-er ones of the team and we’ll extend hands and grow together. 

It’s dangerous to plough ahead without this compassion to the unAgile-ers where we have them, without the EQ, and most importantly, it’s dangerous not to have spent time on this people practice that holds the team sacred and its members “seen” and “heard”. Soon it will be dire. We’ll see productivity drop. We’ll see projects struggling if we haven’t seen people struggling first and changed it. We will see Psychological Safety hurting, with teams feeling less tight and people impression managing and being unwilling to speak up. An underlying current of fear and lack of being Agile at heart is not ignorable - it will translate into bad results. Choose your KPI, it will suffer. 

If we were to take all the energy we spend on politics, on distracting memes and unexamined work priorities and undisputed backlogs and all the heart lost in being fearful or mad and put it all into creating a practice that’s all about the people and our teams, we’d emerge out of this reprehensible VUCA fire having been forged not cracked, bent or broken. 

Stay safe, stay sane, stay Agile!

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Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

As a tech company passionately working on ways to create psychologically safe teams whatever their location, we at PeopleNotTech have been considering the role we can play in supporting teams in light of COVID-19. We all have to keep thinking of the work-family aka the team and the ways to redefine work in the digital playing field with an emphasis on EQ and we rapidly have to find ways to turn that into a comfortable and efficient reality for all of us.

If you’re preparing a team for remote working and want to kit them with the right tools to manage this, we are offering:

1. An extended trial of the Psychological Safety software i.e. we have opened up accounts to your teams for a period for free so your people can express how they are feeling (in particular in these anxious times) and so that team leaders can quickly assess their team on topics such as Morale, Resilience, Courage, Flexibility, Learning, Openness, Empathy and more;

2. A “Stay Connected” questions pack designed specifically for teams who are transitioning to remote working; 

3. A free 1-on-1 online EQ crash course for your team leaders to help them support their now remote team confidently.

It is painless to get anyone up on the software - there is no implementation, set-up, extensive training or data needed, teams can be using the work tool within hours. Reach out to us at [email protected] and tell us more about your working-from-home efforts and readiness in light of COVID-19 and we’ll do our best to help.

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