How They Hijacked the Agility and Why I don’t Trust to Agile Hippies.
Perhaps, you saw it, too. A picture, with a group of adults, at various ages, sitting around the table. Playing with colorful small bricks. A scene often accompanied by titles such as Scrum, Agile, Agile Coaching Camp and many similar, you name it. A group of people submerged and focused into the “cool” activity under the command of a supervisor who barely finished secondary education.
This scene, however bizarre, can actually be spotted also in organizations. Under the flag of Agile. Because playing with something “cool” is a sign of “good agile”. And “good agile” is more than that. Especially happiness. Happiness and leisure at work is an ultimate goal. And Scrum Master, as a messenger of happiness should embrace a duty — make his teams happy.
In an era of Lean, I often wonder why. Why organizations are paying for such activities? Why is so much time wasted playing childish games? Is this indeed necessary to somehow motivate people to do work they are paid for? And what is the value gain to offset so many man days lost in this activity? I am trainer of agile approaches for more than 9 years now. Nearly always I have adult people in the class capable of problem solving. Unless.
One day at your company your dissatisfied customer just did escalate his complain about his delayed project or service. He is terribly upset, and if you do not fix problem shortly, he threats to leave or execute heavy penalty. And you know you can’t afford it. A precarious situation. In this sudden misery you called your technical director — who informs you he has no time and willingness to solve this anymore. He is now “agile coach” and through his private web site just sold 2–3 consulting MD’s to some external company. Or he feels the salary you pay him makes him an investor now, just leaving for another start-up meetup somewhere to hear pitches for his new investment. So you talk to your Scrum Master. And you are perplexed he can’t help you because he has to protect the team. Next week he will bring it to the team’s retrospective but he warns you that only team can decide if they will do the job. Team can’t be overloaded and working beyond working hours. So staying longer to fix it is not an option. Then you contact your team members directly. You know to fix this requires some new learning, but resolution can improve relation with customer dramatically. However, they value more leaving from work at 3pm rather than to stay longer and eventually get bonus for extra urgency.* You sweat, and have to sit down into the chair, your heart is beating, ready for double Scotch. What has happened? Your organization might be contaminated by hippies evil. All agility has been hijacked. Unless.
How you cannot be motivated if everything around is red?
Being organizer of Agilia Conference for almost as long as being the trainer, I brought many examples of agility to display — be it for a team, or for the project, or for an organization — where agile mindset, engagement and collaboration addressed a problem in a new and innovative way for delivery. Anytime I hear or witness agile horror stories, some of these presentations comes into my mind. It may be story by Enrico Lombardo, who discussed the issues that Ferrari faced in their project management. How he struggled to get people from various departments and various interests back to the common ground. What they did to focus the effort of few hundreds of people on the single one red goal that matter — to win the race. Or story by Janos Kocsany, who shared with us how they involved customers into the solution design, translated their real needs to requirements and radically reinvented how the facility operation should be carried. They invented the whole new idea how to radically differentiate from the competition in otherwise very ordinary service and how to deliver unique value. Or how Rory Mackenzie in his unbelievable story about teamwork, where he as veteran in the British Army after recovery from a serious injury in a combat mission became part of the team to participate in another mission impossible — to row across the Atlantic. A mission which can’t be aborted midway, a mission of absolute interdependence and radical ownership, a mission where team is in danger of life doe anyone’s mistake without chance for rescue. And finally story by Václav Muchna, a story of inspiration. On the finest example of one of the most successful companies in the Czech Republic, he has founded, Vaclav illustrates how they align various departments of the organization in a unique way to deliver value consistently to a customer and with regular cadence.
A missing element
What motivates our presenters to deliver such extraordinary results? Who begged them to do so? And who engaged them? Do they need pile of colorful Lego bricks to play childish games prior gaining some motivation toward action? I do not think so. So what prevents others to take similar action? There must be some missing element there.
This missing element is their intrinsic motivation. Probably stronger than other people have and which no Lego will uncover.
What do I suggest?
It is not too late. It is still possible to stop creating waste and return back to modernity of agile business. It is not easy to change adult person. However we still can play with organizational culture and organizational design. We can carefully define the elements of culture, that represents us, represents our believes and attitudes toward business, continuous improvement and value delivery. We can design culture that invites people and enables empowerment, help them be proactive and demands action. Not with color bricks, but in real. We can teach managers to act differently, shifting from command and control to building environment of empowerment. We can teach all in organization their new duty — guarding the new culture.
We can also design structures and processes, that reflect the newly design culture. Instead of vertical bureaucracy toward cells or network or dynamically changing structures that embed customer into their center. There is many options here, too.
And how about your organization? What do you do to build or maintain the culture of empowerment? How do you prevent it from being hijacked and what do you use instead?
* I wish I could say that these examples are fiction and any similarity to the actual event is just pure coincidence. However, that paragraph describes real situations I came across several times in past few months.
