Agile and Change require Consequences

A few years ago, I was brought in to be an agile leadership coach and during my time there I was responsible for coaching the Director of Architecture who after meeting me a few times, looked at me and said, ‘as long as I’m sitting in this chair and in this office, you won’t be allowed to do any of the agile things you are talking about.  We work the way I say we work, so you can cancel our remaining 1:1’s as we aren’t going to be doing anything agile while I’m here. ‘ 

I thought to myself, well at least I know where I stand.

I then went to the VP and relayed my conversations with the Director of Architecture and was not really surprised by his feedback.  He told me that she was the most important person on his team, and he relied on her to lead architecture over almost everything else. He said she was old school, but they go back many years together and frankly he trusted her more than he could trust me or the agile approaches I was suggesting as he didn’t have any experience working in agile.  And worse, he wasn’t willing to support some experiments in visualizing some wins that would help move behavior toward a new normal.

It was during this engagement that I developed what I call the three pillars of organizational change:

Transparency, Accountability, and Predictability. 

The transparency pillar is almost entirely focused on leadership and if you can’t get this pillar right no amount of focus on the other two, which are supported by the frameworks will result in real change.

We talk about the failures of agile, they are however often a result of having no consequences for not adopting agile.  That organization is still thriving in its industry, could it be doing better, delivering more value?  More than likely, but at the end of the day unless there are consequences for lack of change, no change will happen and no amount of coaching can change that.

Real change starts with establishing the transparent reasons the organization needs to move towards agile.  Explain the reasons, the challenges, and the outcomes to everyone.  Only after you have defined why you need the organization to become more ‘agile’ and the outcomes that everyone will track towards, will the organization have the support of everyone and real long-term change will happen.  These outcomes will be a key OKR for your leadership, which will support real change and this must be supported by agile coaches who have been leaders themselves.  Unfortunately, most coaches in the industry today do not have any real-world experience in development, organizational change, or leadership.  A certificate does not convey any underlying experience.

Agile transformations are sold as a waterfall project, and after 12-18 months your organization will miraculously become agile by implementing ‘x’ framework.  You won’t, organizational change is harder and long-term in nature.  If you are in the midst of trying to become more agile or just now thinking about it, talk to me.  My Soundagile Learning journey is a way for your organization to own and manage your move toward business agility.  Check out the learning journey here - Learning Journey — SoundAgile Consulting

Moving towards agility is an evolutionary step that must take into account how your organization works today.  Your business has been in a continuous state of evolution from its inception, to think that agile can be implemented any other way is just kidding ourselves.

The Neuroscience of Agile

Over the past year, my interest in neuroscience has grown and one of the interesting things that have come out of my learning is that the brain, as it turns out, spends quite a bit of energy thinking (subconsciously) about what might happen in the next moments in time. 

Historically it had been thought that the brain reacted to stimuli and then formulated a response (think fight or flight).  But the brain is much more active in its planning whether or not we will need that type of response. Our brain is constantly evaluating what we are doing at the moment and trying to predict what our response will need to be in the upcoming moments.

That implies that our brains are tuned to short-range planning, so it should not be surprising that humans are not all that good at predicting what will happen further in the future. 

That’s not to say our brain doesn’t look at what has transpired historically and provides us an ability to guess what the future of something might be, but ultimately we simply aren’t wired for success in long-term predictive planning.

So given our brain is good at predicting what will happen in the very near term, I find it interesting that software development processes evolved over the years to encourage long-term planning, asking people to say today what they will do 6 months from now, especially given all of the unknown variables that exist in complex software development work.

At best we are guessing about what we will need to do 6 months into a 12-month project.  The brain simply isn’t set up for the successful long-range planning that Waterfall requires because we can’t anticipate what might happen as it is too far out into the future.

I suppose all of the Waterfall gates and approvals are designed to provide us some level of comfort or false confidence against the unknowns we accept as a risk to our projects.

Software development is a complex thing, you are asking people to develop in or on top of a complex environment where everything can’t be known upfront and the human brain no matter how much you try to plan for the future, really must be focused mostly on the more current aspects of their project, eg - what am I doing today and tomorrow and at most next week.  Sound familiar?  Short incremental development cycles followed with an inspect and adapt check-in?

So if our brains have developed to be very good at short-term planning why would we not want to adopt Agile as a way to deliver our software development efforts?

Agile aligns to a natural strength, short-term planning with fast feedback loops, which provide us an ability to react and respond to what we are seeing and learning. 

Those fast feedback loops inform everyone as to what just happened and what is about to happen so that if needed, we can react and change our course.  Our brains are set up for this type of behavior. Asking us to plan tasks months in advance is asking for failure on multiple levels, be it productivity, quality, context, or value.

As you either consider adopting Agile or making your current effort more successful, spend a good amount of time redesigning your planning process top to bottom, to support a short-term planning cycle.  You will find everyone more supportive (and happy) of working this way and you will see more value being delivered.

To learn how you can be better at Agile contact me at Michael@soundagile.com

Organizational Zones of Antagonism

Recently my family and I were watching a worldwide bio-diversity seminar online and during one of the segments on Lichen’s (yes it was fascinating) the presenter talked about how Lichens grow and they formed what she called Zones of Antagonism as they looked for more food which allowed them to grow bigger.

The Zone of Antagonism formed a barrier around their space and would ward off any encroachment from another competing Lichen organism for their food source.

This concept immediately got me thinking about how organizations often operate with zones of antagonism as well.  We see and deal with them all of the time though we often refer to it as the politics of an organization.

People, due to the siloed design of their organizations' processes, often form what might look like zones of antagonism around their functional area.  These manifest themselves in many ways but are often revealed when an organization goes through any type of change management, such as an Agile Transformation.

Change forms a threat to the status quo, to the power bases built up with the current structure of the organization.  Power influences outcomes and outcomes drive behaviors.  Tell me how someone is incented and we can tell you how you are likely to behave.

We reward success, but which also means that there is a loser.  Much like the Lichen looking to compete for food, people often look to influence or consolidate power as much as they can when working within an organization.  We have been taught that to move up in an organization implies high levels of authority, influence, and compensation, so these are the drivers for what we see when we pull on the levers of change.

What we as change agents might refer to as resistance might also be called zones of antagonism instead.  It’s not that people are resisting as much as they are protecting against either something they know to be a real threat to their current state or something they fear due to a high level of unknowns.

As an Agile coach, we need to put ourselves in the place of the individuals we are coaching and ask if the organization has made clear the vision of why Agile is the way to go and what the organization and the people within it will get out of supporting the move to it?

If leadership for an organization has not made clear the game plan for engaging in change, Agile or otherwise, then people, much like Lichen will respond by establishing their zones of antagonism as a way to delay, thwart or even kill the transformation overall. 

We know resistance to change is real, however before condemning the resistance seek to understand it first.  It’s this step that starts the real work to remove the zones of antagonism in an organization that will cause the value you seek.

Too often as coaches, we are transactionally hired to come in and teach Scrum, SAFe, or any of the other myriad of frameworks used to ‘implement’ Agile. 

The problem is that the frameworks won’t make you Agile, only the mindset of change combined with the vehicle (frameworks) can move you from simply going through the motions and ‘Doing Agile’ to the place we want to be of ‘Being Agile’, where operate in a new normal.

TAP2 Change - Building an Agile Organization via the Pillars of Transparency, Accountability and Predictability

I’ve been involved with Agile for almost 15 years in all manner of roles and organizations. Some of the Agile efforts I’ve been involved with could be counted as a success, some not so much. 

The organizations that I’ve been involved with, which had successful transformations, had a few key behaviors they exhibited, which included:

1.     A willingness to be vulnerable regarding what wasn’t right about how the organization. These organizations weren't afraid to discuss what wasn't working and make decisions about what needed to be done at the Leadership level.

2.     Active engagement from the organization’s leadership and a willingness to experiment and fail along the way towards mature and effective agile processes.

3.     An ability to provide people and teams the space to become self-organizing and empowered to define how best to work within in the context of being Agile.

As I've moved through the Agile experience I've identified a way to approach an 'Agile Transformation' from a different perspective. Too often our focus is only on the frameworks that have grown up to support the implementation of Agile, such as Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, xP and a myriad of others. These frameworks focus on how teams operate and are concerned mostly about the flow of work to teams. This is only part of the equation.

Based upon my experiences I've created a framework that is holistically focused on changing the entire organization not just the software development capability.

I call the approach TAP2 Change

TAP2 Change focuses on developing three key pillars necessary for a successful Agile transformation:

1.     Transparency

2.     Accountability

3.     Predictability

Transparency –

This pillar is about defining many of the missing pieces of most Agile Transformations, most importantly identifying why the organization wants to move too Agile.

Agile shines a light on all of your organization’s inefficiencies and asks one simple question – What you are going to do about it? 

Something we don’t tell organizations trying to be Agile is that Agile doesn’t fix anything, it’s not a framework, or a process, so it can't 'deliver' anything for you. What it is, is a mindset which asks you to challenge your current belief structures held within your organization and then start the process of re-envisioning your organization.

Transparency starts at the top where we challenge Leadership to:

1.     Define a clear vision and strategy conveying to the organization why you want to do this and what you expect to have as an outcome as you transition to Agile. Tell people the important part of change - ‘What’s In It For Me’

2.     Reassess how they view their value streams or develop them if they don’t exist. This will challenge long-held beliefs about what is valuable to the organization and will result in a brand new way of thinking about your business.

3.     Redefine your products and capabilities within the context of your value streams. This again will challenge beliefs about where your organizational value resides. 

4.     Engage people from all levels of the organization as you build out your Agile Transformation strategy, ivory tower approaches need not apply. Agile is a ground game that needs input from everyone in the organization so it doesn’t appear that this is being something done to them but with them.

5.     Completely change the way you look at how you finance your software development projects, moving from Project to Team-based funding.

Your Transparency Pillar will be the most difficult and will take the most time because if you can’t be transparent about what outcomes you are seeking and the ways that your organization must change to get them, then you will not realize the full value of going Agile.

Instead, you’ll be like the myriad of organizations who reach the state of Doing Agile and never move past this state or worse regress when leadership declares they are Agile and stops supporting it.

Accountability –

Accountability is an important element in any Agile Transformation however much of our efforts in rolling out Agile to the organization avoid organizational and team accountability.

When we talk about Accountability we are talking about several elements:

1.     Organizational Accountability – Leadership is accountable for defining an Agile Transformation strategy and roadmap and ensuring that they both communicate and regularly update the organization on how they are doing. Leadership is also accountable for ensuring that they support the change and don’t simply fund the initiative and forget about their part in this significant culture change that they must lead.

2.     Team Accountability – As Product Development teams begin operating in whatever framework that they will be using, they are accountable to the organization to engage positively and seek to continually grow in the maturity and capability of that framework. Too often Leadership views Agile as a way for software development teams to not be accountable for their work and show progress in delivering on important features and functionality. This is not the case, but how we view accountability is not about hitting fixed dates and scope but rather being accountable with respect to our Transparency so that Leadership is informed with facts about how we are progressing and can then more clearly understand the issues with attempting to create features in a highly complex environment.

Leadership is accountable to teams to be engaged in assessing what value we they are delivering and making fact based decisions on what is needed not what was wanted.

Predictability –

Predictability is ultimately what Leaders are looking for, they have to make commitments to customers and shareholders with respect to value that they expect to deliver. Not all organizations have the luxury to continually develop and deliver new features and enhancements such as Amazon or Google can, the reasons are many but they are real.

This pillar however, just as with the Accountability Pillar, is not about a team marching towards a fixed date/fixed scope effort. Rather Predictability is about understanding the capacity of individual teams and the entire organization and identifying the minimal amount of work that will deliver the most value in the shortest time.

We view Predictability not within the context of scope but with cadence, be it story points, # of stories, or whatever metric you use to identify how much work can be completed within a specified amount of time.

To ignore our need to show progress, even if the progress shows that we are hitting challenges, provides important fast feedback to Leadership so that they can make informed decisions and manage expectations of customers earlier than waterfall would ever allow.

You can build out one or more of the Pillars, but it is the strength of all three that will provide you with a strong foundation for building a successful Agile Transformation.

To learn more about our process you can reach me at michael@soundagile.com or go to www.soundagile.com

Also - Coming Soon - Look for my book - TAP2 Change Building an Agile Organization via the Pillars of Transparency, Accountability, and Predictability.

Currency for Change – Transformation Needs and Roadblocks

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Business leaders, those who run our organizations, continually look for strategies that deliver growth, synergy, profit and increased market share, to name a few.  They are judged and compensated based upon their ability to deliver results around financial or operational focal points.  Those leaders who manage a publicly traded company take on the added burden of providing predictable quarterly results year after year in order ensure a stable and growing stock price.

Many times new strategies require changes to your organization.  When attempting transformative organizational change, our focus is on changing the way that an organization operates at an organic level.  However our Leadership is rarely focused at this level, rather their focus is on the expected benefits of the desired change. They often fail to address the real organic element necessary for change, which are the very people who help manage and run their organization.  People will determine the final success or failure of any particular change management effort.

Change, the type that transforms an organization is often done so out of perceived need or stress event, such as new competitor or competitive products or disruptive technology.  Though the stress/threat may be very real to the survival of the organization.  Though the threat may be real the people working for the organization may not necessarily be motivated by changing how they work in order to respond to the perceived threat.  The reasons for this can be:

• We may not be connected to the threat in a real way, we don’t see how the threat impacts our job.

• We may not agree that the threat is real.

• We may not agree with or believe that the requested changes are the right approach or strategy.

• We simply may not care.

We are ultimately are creatures of habit, what worked in the past should work for us in the future, we come to expect outcomes based upon these past experiences.

Our natural world provides us with examples of how change is handled when stress is applied.  In nature change is a natural state and happens without negotiation, let me repeat that:

Change happens without negotiation.

Trees don’t talk to hills to see if they are ok that more trees are grown, the change happens naturally based upon the need of the environment not the want of the trees.  Organic change happens in reaction to a stress event and then the system responds by initiating change that provides the appropriate reaction in order to bring the system back into a steady state.  In this example there is no currency for change between actors in the system as the system operates in a manner which brings the system back into a static or healthy state without applying change management techniques to encourage adoption of the change.

Large human systems are unlike our natural counterpart on multiple levels, primarily due to the people who are the actors of the system.  Natural systems form a comprehensive whole were all of the sub systems work in synergy on a grand scale.  Human systems however don’t share this synergistic behavior and as such operate independently of each other and the stress of one organization may not have any association or perceived dependency with another organization.

When human organizations inject change into their system in response to a perceived threat they trigger a broad set of activities at impact people in that system.  Change in both our natural world and our organizational world has the primary goal of keeping the system healthy and strong, but whereas the natural system accepts change without negotiation the human system involves potentially significant negotiation which has the negative effect of diluting the positive impacts the desired changes are expected to deliver.

Why is this?  Much of it surrounds not taking the time to communicate WHY the change is necessary and understanding the currency of our organization to accept the change.

What is Currency for Change?  It is the perceived value that an individual will derive by participating in change.

Human systems require people to participate in change.  However in order to get them to fully engage in the change process we need to communicate WIIFME or What’s In It For ME?

Change requires that the people in your organization do some of the following:

1. Learn new things (software, processes, tools, etc..)

2. Take on new roles (Project Manager to Scrum Master)

3. Report to new people

4. Change the way that they manage

5. Change the way that the project manage

6. Change the way that you plan

7. Change the way they are compensated

Currency then is what an organization is willing to ‘pay’ people in their currency in order get them to actively engage in change.  Currency is individual and ultimately relates to how an individual perceives their place, influence and power within the organization, this will drive what their specific currency will be.

Currency for change relates closely with the motivational needs of employees.  For example, though we may understand why we need to exercise and eat better for a longer life we may not be motivated sufficiently to do this consistently long term unless we identify the real currency we require to make the necessary changes.

There are many different needs based theories that can help define individual currency for change:

1. Maslows’ hierarchy of needs:

   1. Physiological

   2. Safety

   3. Social

   4. Esteem

   5. Self-Actualization

   6. ERG Theory:

      1. Existence

      2. Relatedness

      3. Growth

      4. Acquired Needs Theory

         1. Need for Achievement

         2. Need for Affiliation

         3. Need for Power

         4. Three-Factor Theory for Employee Motivation

            1. Equity/Fairness

            2. Achievement

            3. Camaraderie

Parsing these different theories we come up with a few general themes:

1. People need to feel safe

2. People need to feel achievement

3. People need to be acknowledged

4. People need to feel connected to others

5. People need to learn or challenged

When we begin to craft a change management plan for our organization we need to engage in conversation that explores the currency of the people who will be engaged in the change.

When beginning the process of change we must clearly identify the Why as part of understanding and leveraging an individuals’ currency for change.  If you can’t clearly identify the why people need to change you won’t be able to develop the What and the How in order to sufficiently engage people at their motivational level which we translate into currency.

Understanding what people require in order to be incented to change, translates into currency because change doesn’t come without investment and that relates to WIIFE, what am I going to receive if I change?  And unfortunately simply staying employed may not be enough, especially with highly skilled and sought after knowledge workers, you must engage them in a much different manner and their currency won’t be continued employment or more money (typically).

What does currency look like?

1. Enagagement–

   1. Allow more control and input with respect to the change to your entire organization, don’t make it a one way street with no negotiation. Unlike our natural world where change happens without negotiation, people in your organization are the source of successful change management.

   2. Benefit – It’s doubtful that your change management team has thought of everything that is required to make the change successful. Engaging your organization to participate in building the strategic direction of the change will create strong ownership of the change.

   3. Needs Met –

      1. Need for Affiliation

      2. Social

      3. Esteem

      4. Camaraderie

1. Failure –

   1. We must understand that when we change our organization, the model by which we manage our organization also changes. Leaders and managers who have been successful in the organization are now faced with potentially dramatic changes with respect how they will manage and how they are perceived as successful.  Their very power base is threatened.  Encouraging a culture of failure as part of your change management efforts is essential for successful change.  Failure is not the goal, rather the mechanism that we use to encourage learning, because at its heart change is about learning and we all learn differently and we have different currency with respect to how we learn.

      1. Needs Met:

         1. Need to learn or be challenged.

         2. Safety

         3. Recognition –

            1. There are people in your organization who have vast experience and domain knowledge which has been vital to the success of the organization. Though these people may be the most resistant to change, they can conversely be your biggest proponents for change if approached the correct way.  These individuals often want more recognition than material things such as more money.  They fall more along the needs matrix identified by Maslow, they are looking more for Social and Physiological needs to be met but also need to feel safe during the change.

               1. Needs Met:

                  1. Safety

                  2. Acknowledgement

As you think of taking on transformational change you need to start the conversation around the needs and currencies of the people who are going to make your change management successful.

Change is hard and when not engaged properly is destined to under deliver or worse fail completely.