Changing Organisations for Agile
In the previous post, I defined of culture from a number of perspectives. From the definitions, I drew four lessons from an analysis of culture for the agile coach: understanding the importance of culture as a dynamic process, focusing on language and symbols, attending to the different levels of culture, and accepting the fragmentary nature of culture. To implement agile requires a change in the organisation’s culture. Changing culture is hard. Culture consists of a mixture of objective (behaviour and artefacts), subjective (norms, beliefs, and values), and things in between (espoused values). To successfully direct a culture, you need to change all these things which means you need to change people’s thinking and behaviour. Changing people’s thinking is hard: failure rates of change programmes are high with around one third being successful, another third being partially successful, and the remainder being unsuccessful.
Saying change is hard is not an excuse: there are well-established models of organisational change that help inform how to approach changing thinking in organisations, such as McKinsey’s 7S Framework or Kotter’s 8-Step Process. One thing these models have in common is putting culture at the centre, recognising that you can’t achieve strategic change without shifting the culture. A cultural transformation programme is necessarily about changing the way people think and act in the organisation. To elaborate this view and draw insight for agile transformation, I’m going to briefly introduce three models for organisational change: Tichy’s three cycles, Lewin’s change process, and Argyris’ double loop learning.
Three Cycles
Noel Tichy developed an analytical model of strategic change, based on interviewing change agents. His underlying model of the organisation was that of a dynamic social network: organisations are sets of connections between individuals, both formal structures and other relationships. Within this context he identified three component cycles that created the social network of the organisation:
- Technical Cycle is the ‘knowledge of how’ or a methodology; it solves the production problems of how to be efficient and effective. In the context of agile, the agile approach is a technology: a way of efficiently and effectively producing solutions to complex problems.
- Political Cycle refers to issues of power and control within an organisation; it solves the allocation problem of deciding who gets what: both resources and rewards. An obvious example within agile is to empower self-managing teams; but it more broadly encompasses political shifts, such as the introduction of product owners.
- Cultural Cycle is the underlying norms and value system; it solves the ideological problem of defining what is good and what is right. Tichy identifies culture as, “both the most pervasive and most ambiguous” of the three systems.
The Change Process
To implement a change, Tichy describes a three-stage process change that echoes one of the earliest models of the change process developed by Kurt Lewin. Lewin was a psychologist who focused particularly on group dynamics and argued that a person’s behaviour was an interaction between the individual and their environment. Informed by this theory, Lewin’s work inspired a three-step model for change that underpins more modern concepts of change processes.
Within this model, we start with an established organisational process and individual mindset. Change involves:
- Unfreezing to dismantle the existing mindset
- Changing to set the new behaviour, typically involving psychological discomfort to create a new mindset
- Freezing where the new mindset is is locked in and psychological comfort returns
Double Loop Learning
A third approach to organisational change is to focus on how individual learn and adapt to producing organisational change. One of the best-known models for learning in organisations is Chris Argyris’s single and double-loop learning.
Argyris focuses learning as part of Action Science; he contrasts single-loop and double-loop learning. Single loop learning looks a lot like a Plan, Do, Check, Adjust (PDCA) cycle, starting with assumptions about what is desirable or rules for making decisions. Double Loop Learning adds to this process mental models containing beliefs, norms, and values. By assessing the consequences of action against the mental models, the models themselves and the assumptions they drive are changed. Changing individual mental models leads to changes in individual behaviour, which produces changes in the organisation.
Applications for Agile Transformation
In this post, I’ve briefly introduced three models of organisational change: organisational cycles, a three-step process for change from psychology, and individual learning as the engine for organisational change. Each of these approaches focuses on an approach for change and on how to overcome the inevitable resistance to change. Based on these approaches, and the rich context surrounding them for managing change, we can identify some guidance for agile transformation.
Cognitive Change
The first, and most important point, is that changing culture is fundamentally, but not exclusively, a psychological process. Changing beliefs, values, and norms is, to borrow a phrase, changing hearts and minds. Changing behaviour requires a shift in the mental models that guide and interpret behaviour. Consistency between thoughts, words, and behaviour is important; so important that Leon Festinger, a student of Lewin’s, developed the theory of cognitive dissonance to explain how we cope with cognitive inconsistency.
We’ve all experienced organisations that “talk a good game” with mission and value statements that are at odds with the behaviour we see in the organisation or with what we think is true. My experience is that the value statements quickly loose credibility.
The lesson for the agile coach is to recognise that for an agile transformation you need to shift the way people think: essentially a process of individual learning. The agile coach is, therefore, a teacher. The transformation will be much more successful if there is consistency between how you behave as a coach, how you want the agile teams to behave, and how you talk about agile. Any inconsistency will undermine the change process.
Narrative
Making sure that the organisation understands the “why” of change is critical. If people in the organisation understand and buy in to why the organisation are changing, then they are more likely to help that process. One of the most powerful tools for capturing why is narrative: quite literally telling stories. These narratives connect events, they tie the current situation with risks for the operation and they tie the changes to success; strong narratives plot the journey, both explaining what has happened and guiding what will happen. Our brains are hardwired process stories so that stories tend to trigger responses across the brain in the way facts and reason don’t. Tapping into this wiring is a proven technique to change thinking.
For the Agile Coach, it is essential to pay close attention to language, to consistency, to the message is essential for framing change and supporting individuals through the stress of changing. To successfully change the culture, you need to create the story of change.
Narrative plots the course from where we were to where we want to be. It provides a set of cognitive tools to disrupt the current approach and to help explain and overcome obstacles along the way, for both the coach and the rest of the organisation. Perhaps most importantly, a clear narrative helps people connect the things they do, say, and think on a day to day basis with the overall direction and success of the organisation and thereby drive a change in mental models.
Analysis
Effective change is driven by analysis that finds facts and details to diagnose the organisation and inform the change process. Defining and measuring progress is a critical part of the direction of travel. An agile coach has a wide range of actions that can move forward agile transformation; directing these action on the basis of analysis will make the agile coach more effective.
Agile transformation does not rest on a one-off analysis performed at the start of the transformation, but an on-going analytical approach to diagnose and inform the change process.
An agile transformation is attempting to change both tangible behaviours and artefacts and intangible beliefs, norms, and values that are inherently subjective. Culture can be measured through scales that (literally) objectify the subjective: these are useful tools but should be supplemented by qualitative techniques, such as interviews, direct observation, and triangulation. An important aspect of this analysis is to surface the deeper beliefs and norms; by making these often tacit concepts explicit we make them changeable.
The agile coach needs to draw on a wide range of analytical resources to support the change process. Hard, quantified measures capture some aspects of the change process and are critically important; but do not measure the entire process and must be supplemented with qualitative methods. The key, when using qualitative methods, is to use them as consistently and rigorously as quantitative methods. The final point on analysis is to link the analysis to the narrative: to help focus the stories by illustrating success, identifying challenges, and plotting the course for success.
Multi-faceted Change
A successful agile transformation will require shifts in technical practices, in power relationships, and in core beliefs and values; these shifts will effect changes in both formal and informal social networks across the organisation.
Implementing agile is a multi-faceted transformation. A successful transformation will address all these facets and bring them into alignment; change is more likely to fail the different facets are not addressed or if substantial change across all three at once is attempted.
Each facet of change, be it cultural, political, or technical, will require a different approach. Each is likely to be at a different point of its own cycle of uncertainty and therefore have a different amenability for change and require different approaches to unfreezing behaviour. The most suitable tools and techniques for analysing and implementing change will differ; each cycle will generate different forms of resistance to change. Failing to align the most appropriate tools and techniques with the organisational cycles will substantially reduce their effectiveness.
The agile coach needs to be acutely aware of the different facets of change. This final point is that agile transformation requires chance across cultural, political, and technical cycles in the organisation. An agile coach needs to be able to work across all three cycles to affect change. Each cycle should be analysed separately, using different tools. Each cycle will generate different forms of resistance, which will be best addressed by different techniques.
I began this series with the idea that agile is fundamentally a cultural transformation rather than introducing a new methodology. In the previous post, I presented a detailed analysis of culture and how that can be used by the agile coach. In this post has focused on three change theories and the implications of these theories for change. This analysis identified four themes: change is cognitive, the importance of narrative, the role of analysis, and that change is multi-faceted. Each of these topics is large, meaning I’ve only had the chance to scratch the surface. In the next post, I’ll turn my attention to leadership as part of Agile transformation.