Agility is a rapid whole body movement with change of velocity or direction in response to a stimulus. — Image Credit: Chris Nicoll-USA TODAY Sports Source HSC PDHPE

Adopting Agile will not make you agile

Tim Stroh
Tim Stroh
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

Adopting Agile methodologies, its artefacts and rituals, no matter how well done, will not alone make your organisation agile.

The Agile label, its story, and its implicit promises are inherently appealing. Every leader wants their organisation to be agile, to be capable of both responding rapidly to evolving customer needs, changes to technology, and changes to market conditions as well as to lead those change through rapid and effective innovation.

But there is a problem:

  1. There is little evidence that Agile as a methodology is any more effective than other structured methodologies for iterative development. There are plenty of anecdotes, but these are generally absent a consistent analysis of what the critical success factors of a project or execution really are. (Agile Software Development Methods: Review and Analysis Cornell University 2017 / A decade of agile methodologies: Towards explaining agile software development Journal of Systems and Software 2012 / What Do We Know about Agile Software Development.pdf IEEE Computer Society 2009)
  2. There is a great deal of evidence that shows adoption of Agile methodologies produces poor results and further research that specifically suggests factors other than the methodology used as the true key drivers of software project success. (While case studies often lack sufficient clarity to conclude if a failure was because of a poor adoption of Agile methodologies or the result of Agile being the wrong tool for the job, some material is more useful than other. See The Drawbacks of Agility — McKinsey & Company, The Game Outcomes Project part 1 to 5, and High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety, HBR and What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team NYTimes.)
  3. Agile is definitely not a silver bullet for ensuring faster and more successful projects or a more agile organisation. No level of Agile methodology adoption can make your organisation effective at responding to significant technology changes or effective at leading game changing innovation.

At present, Agile is a belief system (see James Coplien). It is a management fad rather than a new standard. Used properly, Agile methodologies may be a useful for specific jobs or functions. But like all specialised tools, it is ideal for some jobs and absolutely useless for all others.

Proven tools for achieving organisational agility, however, do exist and can be found by looking to the U.S. military. Specifically, its quest to operate at a tempo faster than the decision cycle of its opponents, to become a learning organisation that constantly improves and adapts, and to operate effectively in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous arenas. The U.S. Military has achieved extraordinary success in these efforts and now uses proven tools and methodologies to produce unprecedented organisational agility, consistent innovation, and perpetual improvements to its effectiveness. (See The U.S. Army is the smartest organisation in the world. Don’t believe it? Read on., Learning in the thick of it HBR, Innovation: How DARPA Attacks Problems HBR, VUCA pt1, pt2, pt3, pt4 HBR, Joint Rapid Acquisition program, Team of Teams, and shortly look for articles entitled The Exclusive Path to Organisational Agility (and it’s not Agile) parts 1 to 5.)

Happily, for those that have already adopted or started to adopt Agile within their organisations, even a passing examination will reveal substantial similarities between the tenants of the Agile manifesto and its associated tools and the doctrines and tools created years earlier by the U.S. military. The process of achieving superior results simply requires the learning of additional tools, the critical success factors for their effective use, and why these factors have a critical impact on success.

The best advice for any CEO or business leader who wants an agile unit or organisation, is to recruit ex U.S. or Australian military personnel who are well versed in the approaches and tools used by the services to further organisational learning, innovation, adaptation of procedure, and command structures that are accompanied by rapid action cycles.

For more details on useful tools and methods, a better understanding of consumer decision making, innovation success, how to remove bias from internal decision processes, craft more effective and safer incentive programs and strategies, or for more details on the science of Motivational Drive Theory, (1) read A Deeper Truth: The new science of innovation, human choice, and societal scale behaviour (2) sign up and read other instalments of Tim Stroh’s Value In 60 Seconds or Under 3 Minutes email and blog, or (3) if you would like assistance make contact to arrange a discussion, workshops, keynote presentation, or services engagement via LinkedIn (http://linkedin.com/in/timstroh) or tim@strohinternational.com.

The next instalment of Tim Stroh’s Value in Under 60 Seconds or Under 3 Minutes is entitled The Exclusive Path to Organisational Agility.

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