Do not go Agile!
By: Marcella Koopman
Tags: Organizational Culture, Change, Agile, Scrum, Journey

Photo by Clemens van Lay on Unsplash

Do not go Agile!

Just don’t do it. Spend your dollars on something way more valuable like a cool team activity or some new conference tool for all the teams to use in this remote working environment. See this tip I suggest as the ‘money maker’ of 2020. It’s been a tough year, so don’t overcomplicate it with this agile thing.

We are successful… right?

Recently I had a very interesting conversation with the Chief Transformation Officer at a large corporate organisation here in New Zealand. This organisation has started its agile transformation over a year ago. This same organisation is now questioning if the change has actually created any organisational value compared to the way they worked before.

A similar commend was echoed during a meetup that I attended a few weeks ago. The organisation that hosted the meetup was sharing the success story of its agile transformation. When someone asked how they were measuring their success of the actual transformation, their response was that they were not measuring outcomes (a.k.a. value). That was part of ‘phase two’ of the transformation.

In both situations, I wondered how organisations spend lots of time and effort, let alone the investment of thousands of dollars on a transformation, without being sure there will be benefits. Isn’t it the purpose of being agile, that you collect feedback to check if you are doing the right thing? If so, why is this lack of visibility on value and/or benefits happening?

‘Agile way of working’

I am currently writing a book (together with my colleague) about why so often organisations fail so often when implementing any sort of change initiative. For this book, we have spent many hours researching and analysing transformations. During that research, we have found that many unsuccessful change initiatives come from a disbalance (or unbalance) in a driver, actions and belief. When we look specifically at change initiatives that are connected to ‘agile’, there is another reason: the agile way of working implementation.

Many organisations look at agile as a way of working. They pick a framework, get the roles in place (like a Product Owner and Tribe Lead) and work via iterations. Often, they measure indicators like employee satisfaction and delivery outputs. This is not a problem per se as these elements can be important to measure.

The risk is, that it tells us how well we are executing a plan but not if the plan is actually the right plan to execute. We need to measure the why, what and the how.

Your future proof organisation

This brings me back to my suggestion, that you shouldn’t ‘go agile’. If you believe that ‘agile’ is a way of working and it will be successful by implementing Scrum or Kanban (or any other framework), don’t go there. Agile has never been a ‘way of working’. It is always about mindset; a way of thinking and being. The frameworks within agile are designed to support people and teams to adopt the mindset. Agile changes behaviour, thinking, responsibilities and collaboration. The magic and benefits come from realizing this and supporting the culture change in your organisation.

What has been seen cannot be unseen, what has been learned cannot be unknown. — C.A. Woolf

For now, it is called agile and maybe in a few months it will be called ‘Human-Centred Design’. Tomorrow will be the future and the past. Adapting to the future is therefore a never-ending thing. Changing towards an agile organisation is not something you can start and then go back from. It is a way of thinking and we cannot say to our employees ‘thanks for joining the pilot but now go back to the way you were thinking before this.’ Agile is a journey, as with any journey, you don’t reach your destination immediately by pressing ‘GO’.