Where are the enlightened executives?
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Where are the enlightened executives?

Agility has been around for a while, in some cases decades, so why is it that we don’t have more executives behaving in an agile way? Surely, they should have come through by now.

Design thinking has been around since the 50s and 60s and has been popularized in the past 10-20 years. Scrum has been around since the mid-90s, and Kanban (as we know it today) since the mid-2000s. DevOps and Product management have also been around for some time.?

Millions of people have taken formal agility training, and many more are self-taught. Undoubtedly these folks should have influenced others. Many would have moved on to the executive level by this point. Enlightened executives exist, but they are scarce. Why?

Here are some potential reasons:


“Agility’ failures left a bad taste due to, for example:

  • The combination of “waterfall” and “Scrum, also known as “WAgile” or “Water-Scrum-Fall”
  • Poorly skilled Scrum Masters and Product Owners?
  • Lack of optimized flow through visual management alone
  • “One and done” design thinking
  • Service designers handing off to delivery teams
  • DevOps with many, many code branches
  • The conflation of the short-term and the long-term, e.g., project management dressed up as product management
  • Keeping everyone busy at the expense of effectiveness or adaptiveness
  • A lack of appreciation for product management concerns, e.g., the customer, problem space, discovery, checking for outcomes
  • Agile in a box
  • Agile industrial complex
  • Mismatch of approach to context?
  • Delayed integration over integrating continuously
  • More focus on the process than the customer


Ill-suited expectations and behavior of executive management, for example:

  • Outsourcing change to a single vendor, e.g., get in a large consulting firm with an overall stellar record but a poor record in agility
  • The tolerance or promotion of “lip service
  • Cost-cutting without a focus on improved effectiveness
  • Excessive focus on the speed of outputs
  • Insufficient focus on the improvement of capability
  • Change delegated to a “transformation officer”
  • Promoting dependency on a transformation team
  • Waiting to see what the transformation team rolls out,” disempowering change where the work takes place


A lack of openness by executive management to:

  • seeing the reality with teams and customers
  • taking the required action to improve employee engagement?
  • using agile approaches to become agile?
  • doing discovery, experimentation, or regular reassessment of the most important opportunities
  • changing organization design to minimize/eliminate inter-team dependencies?
  • tackling tough organizational issues?
  • tackling workflows, processes, and systems that are unsuited to agility
  • changing the culture of the organization


Change is neutralized by culture, for example:

  • The expectation of traditional, predictable plans for rolling out agility
  • The joy of agility gets lost in prescriptions, recipes, and a need for certainty
  • Perceiving training as change
  • Only superficial change is tolerated
  • A lack of psychological safety to admit that there are problems
  • The more things change, the more they stay the same, e.g., Larman’s Laws , Craig Larman’s AgileByExample2022 talk


Mediocrity in organizational design, for example:

  • The organizational matrix means no one has sufficient influence as a change agent
  • Focusing on ease of management (silos) over ease of delivery and learning (cross-functional)?
  • Focus on individual over team performance


Insufficiently skilled change agents in the following areas:

  • Consideration and understanding of the domain, including organizational compliance
  • Re-syncing with the evolving organizational expectations
  • Professional preparation for workshops
  • People and change dynamics
  • Venturing into psychology without psychological skills?
  • Giving unwanted advice
  • Change agents who promote measurement comparisons between teams


Agility in a transactional world:

  • Taxation laws and cost accounting drive annual budgeting
  • Quarterly/annual results drive short-term thinking?
  • Use of a one-size-fits-all “playbook” for how to “do” agility
  • The weaponization of objectives and key results (OKRs)
  • Trainers with no, obsolete, or long-in-the-past experience
  • An addiction to certification/badge collection by people with no passion for agility – “bandwagon” change agents


Universities churning out executive MBAs with out-of-date curriculums, with insufficient attention to:

  • executive agility
  • product agility
  • customer jobs
  • technical agility
  • complexity
  • the flow


Conflict across communities:

  • One right-way attitude
  • Echo-chamber infighting
  • Arguments about X not being Agile when not many care
  • Agile being dated, hunger for the next big thing


So it’s a bit of a bad show all around, and not surprising that there are few enlightened executives.


Key leverage points for improvement might include:

  • Executives and board members joining communities of peers to learn more about authentic agility and continuous changeability
  • Large consulting firms relying less on “playbooks,” embracing uncertainty with clients, and leveraging independent authentic agility professionals.?
  • University leadership and MBA programs that embrace authentic agility approaches
  • Exploration of Hexi-kits and eLearning inspired by Cynefin
  • Reducing “X is crap” talk and giving more airtime to what value the alternatives offer


If you want to take care of some of these leverage points without needing permission from anyone:


Please let me know what your thoughts are. Thank you.

Malcolm Lisle

Agility Coach/Change Agent/Scrum Master - Enabling self organised, high productivity teams

1 年

I have thought about this a lot myself and have no answer. What I can say is that what we are wanting is a monumental change in the way we work today. A way of working formulated in Taylorism in the late 1800's. With the Taylorism way of working you had an easy way of measuring the before and after so could see the benefits and $$gains$$ for the company straight away. It is not so easy with Agile because the gains come through improving the lot of the people doing the work which eventually leads to gains for the organisation. It is like the electric car industry in some ways. By now we know a lot of the benefits to the planet and our own personal finances of using electric vehicles but as soon as a negative is identified like lithium mining, it is heralded (by those with a vested interest in keeping Internal combustion engine vehicles going) as a reason not to change. Rather than an opportunity to improve the conditions of lithium mining. That would take too long and cost a lot of money.

While I feel the last 20 years have brought a lot of change, the ability to have this type of discussion, for example. In some ways i couldn't gripe enough at the rate of change john . I am trying to keep tending to the positive and being pleased with any change achieved and as such, always looking for new ways to phrase a debate or a way to look at innovation. At present my thoughts are to look more at what an org measures "good" by and then investigating what they are good at and further understanding why. Perhaps by looking at this we can then relate it to the headlines in your list? It would seem that theoretical optimised flow theory does not fully work in practice due to outliers, disrupters, value opportunities and human knowledge worker variables. Thus , we still need to look at the whole org but not just the whole system.

John Anthony Coleman

Executive guide, product leader, creator of Kanplexity? & Xagility?, co-author of Kanban Guide (also a Flight Levels Coach, ProKanban trainer, Scrum.org trainer, LeSS-Friendly Scrum Trainer, Agile Kata trainer etc. )

1 年

Thank you David Spinks for the inspiration

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