🚨 Agile is dead because... 🪦
Mishkin Berteig
I'm a business leader, technology practitioner and people-inspirer - I fix productivity/efficiency problems in your organization. I do speaking, training, consulting and coaching on Agility, Innovation and AI.
I've been involved with Agile methods, frameworks and transformations since the late 90's 🕰️ and I've seen the same pattern over and over 🔄: Agile transformations fail to work* ❌ because there is a Nash equilibrium that no one is talking about 🤐....
Some people focus on the methods, processes and frameworks 📚 like Scrum 🌀 or Kanban 🛠️. These people believe that if it doesn't work, it's cause the organization wasn't managing their people/system correctly. Agile is dead because of these people 🙅 (and I was one of these a long time ago 🕒).
Some people focus on executive leadership mindset 💼 and decision-making 🧠. These people believe that if Agile doesn't work, it's because the leaders are not properly supporting the culture 🌱 and strategy 🗺️ of agility. Agile is dead because of these people too 🤦 (I was briefly on this bandwagon 🛣️).
And some people focus on the skills and practices of technical agility 💻 such as building quality in 🏗️ or designing for change 🔄. These people believe that if the staff doing the actual work 🛠️ of product development or service delivery could only be allowed to apply these techniques then Agile would work ✅. These people killed Agile too ⚔️ (and this is where I started but moved past early in my career 🚀).
A Nash Equilibrium ⚖️ occurs when no one can improve their outcome 📊 by unilaterally changing their strategy 🔀, given the strategies of others. For everyone in an organization 👩💻👨💻, this concept is crucial in understanding why your organization often reverts to equilibrium states 🔄 despite attempts at transformation 🚧.
An Agile transformation is the hardest kind of transformation 💪 because it requires getting three powerful groups out of an equilibrium state 🌀: executives 👔, managers 🤝 and staff 👩🏭. They are each powerful for different reasons 💥, but they all wield incredible power 🛡️ when it comes to resisting change 🚫.
Executives fail to allocate the necessary resources 💰 to change the corporate structure 🏗️, strategy 🗺️ and culture 🌱. Managers, the “frozen middle” ❄️, fail to create a new stable state of measurable continuous improvement 📈. And staff are constantly working harder 🥵, not smarter 🤯, and fail to discover/adopt the Agile engineering practices ⚙️. And everyone fails because when only one or two groups attempt to change 🔄, they realize their jeopardy if others resist 🙅 and they see their new strategy failing 🛑. And no one wants to fail 😢.
If your organization wants the purported benefits of an Agile transformation ✨, then it MUST leap out of the Nash equilibrium state 🚀, it MUST change executive, managerial and staff strategies simultaneously 🤝, and it MUST reach a new equilibrium state ⚖️.
I’ve seen this done! 👀
Unfortunately, it is most common in two scenarios 😬, neither of which is easily accessible 🚪:
1️⃣ Extreme corporate crisis ⚠️. An organization undergoing an existential business threat 🕳️ might be able to create the necessary awareness 🧠, motivation 💪, incentives 💵 and behaviour 🔄 for all three levels of the organization to change simultaneously 🌟. But organizations don’t usually want to get to a point of extreme crisis 🌀.
2️⃣ “Born that way.” 🎵 (shout out to Lady Gaga! 🎤) An organization that starts out Agile 🐣 tends to stay Agile 🏋️. It’s built in to every aspect of the organization as it grows 🌳. It might adopt some aspects of corporate governance 🏛️ in line with other larger organizations, but the fundamental structures 🛠️, expectations 📋 and processes 🌀... the strategies of executives 👔, managers 🤝 and staff 👩💻, are all aligned around Agility 💨.
For most organizations, getting from non-Agile to Agile is harder than any other change initiative ever undertaken 🏔️. And that begs the question 🤔: is it worth it? 💭
[I personally wrote the entirety of this article and I take responsibility for it. ChatGPT added the emojis.]
Programmer
1moI've seen situation #2 (born that way) in a couple of different manifestations. The obvious one is a startup where the founders brought an agile mindset to the table from the outset. The other is the only model I've seen for a large, established organization to introduce agility. They would spin off a subsidiary located in a different city from the main company, staff it entirely with new people who were already predisposed to work in the desired way, and shift the workload of one department to the subsidiary (maybe not all at once) before shutting down the original department. They ended up with the core part of the company still operating as before, augmented by small subsidiaries that handles key aspects of business operations in a more agile way. Unrelated: The addition of emojis strikes me as a good reason to avoid using ChatGPT.
Director ViAGO International Limited
2moUmmmm. If a system is a flow, then there are dependencies. If statistical fluctuation (variation) exists in that flow, then we need aligned ways to manage that flow. It doesn’t matter if it is Lean, TOC or some other method. There are basic rules of flow. Rule no 1. Don’t shove it in! Rule no 2. See rule no 1. If the system is not aligned with this rule, you have no show of greatness. Think about it. If we measure performance on output measures like units/time unit, we are doomed. If the Board chases performance through KPIs and they are based on things other than ROI, sales, expenses, inventory, cashflow and lead time, we are doomed. If managers are measured and managed through such measures we are doomed. If we have transfer pricing between departments and divisions, we are doomed. If we just did this one rule , oh and followed up with, “one out, one in” thinking, we would resolve a lot of management effort in managing workflows! And by default, output would rise! Which is what we wanted to start with! Agile uses time boxes to control work releases. TOC uses time buffers to control work releases. So improvement is increasing the discipline of Rule no 1! Don’t break the flow! Align this throughout the system.
Sustainable Value Expert | Product Delivery Coach | More Efficient | More Effective | Certified Scrum Trainer | Passionate about making the world a better place
2moI like the content and agree on that equilibrium. You could do with a lot less emoji though. ChatGPT went crazy and made the post he’s to read.
This Nash equilibrium thing sounds nice. I bet it's related to the notion of "incremental change" (as opposed to "interruptive change"), because everyone of those three groups only wants to change one little wet toe at a time. So the stabilizing forces push back. There was something similar in the idea of evolution, where if each generation only took the best properties from its parents from the previous generation, then things very quickly stagnate around a certain set of "best properties", and then improvements start happening very slowly. So the evolution's answer to this phenomenon, was the introduction of mutation, where a next generation iteration doesn't guaranteed take "the best" from its parents, but there is some randomness thrown into it. And this changes things dramatically in terms of "improvement" with future iterations. I bet in practical terms, if we let go of the insane drive to monitor and measure everything, have everyone prove with an OKR the rationale of every action they do, etc. that we might be able to loosen the grip of this Nash equilibrium a little
Co-Founder and CEO @ Umbrella Tech AI Solutions | Building AI Solutions | Former Fortune 100 Consultant | M.Eng | MBA
2moMishkin I recall you came to Telus back in early 2010's for SM Scrum certification for our team. Ironically we chatted about this exact topic back then. I have always speculated as to why Agile is dead or is dying and I've had numerous conversations about it. Most of us focus only on one of the 3 failures you mentioned. Reflecting back you are quite accurate in your analysis it takes the entire organization to be aligned for the transformation to be successful. Which is why most Agile transformations fail or become extremely painful.