The New New Contract for Exponential Agility — Part I
how fake agile relates to inflationary fake agile coaching
Motivation for this series
In this series, I will outline two different modes of adopting agility and how each of them is related to the (in)effectiveness of coaching. In part I, I will elaborate on the traits of fake agile adoptions and how fake agile coaching is related to it. In part II, I will explain my view on the essential ingredients for real agility and how the power of impactful coaching is key for an exponential transformation.
Native agile organisations
Looking at those organizations delivering on the bloody edge of innovation and closely tied to the needs of customers, most of them operate in new markets. Among them are key players of the new economy like Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, but also many mid-size companies like Uber, Ebay, Groupon, Booking, Spotify, Twitter and a countless number of startups in the liftoff phase. However, in his famous book Reinventing organizations, Frederic Laloux shares some case studies of companies that successfully established agility since decades ago. This proves that agility is not exactly a recent phenomenon, but its roots go back long before the “agile” movement has started. All of these companies are natively agile. As their culture grew out of their own organizational system, it’s in their corporate DNA. They never hired consultants to run a transformation program to “become agile”. They don’t even use any of the agile vocabulary. However, at the same time, you can clearly observe the traits of agility when you look at how they are running their business.
Agility is independent from any vocabulary, method or framework
Realizing that the level of business agility is independent from any vocabulary, methodology or framework, it becomes clear that we can assess the level of agility based on
- observations regarding structure and culture (inside perspective) and
- the level of flexibility and adaptability with respect to delivery (outside perspective).
From the business point of view, the key property of the native agile companies is the ability to exponentially explore new markets. Due to their agility, they are able to easily enter new markets and grow a product exponentially thru innovation based on a deeper connection with the needs of customers. Erich Bühler has documented this in his great book “Leading exponential change” at great detail.
Companies aspiring to “become agile”
In most of today’s markets the sense of disruption is accelerating. Even large enterprises operating in a legally regulated market are facing VUCA conditions that create a sense of urgency. Typically some executive manager decides there is a need for a change program to transform the organisation, or a unit of the organisation, to “become agile”, ideally “100 %”.
In my journey as a coach for agility, I had the opportunity to see the reality of how this is implemented in many companies from different industries including insurance, banking, automotive, energy, telecommunications and sports retailer and with different sizes ranging from 50 to over 100.000 employees. Notably, my observations are highly independent from the type of industry and the size of the organization.
Essentially, based on 15 years of experience as an independent consultant supporting companies to operate in an agile way, my observations are currently culminating in two different flavours of agile transformations.
Type A: fake agile transformations
Recently, Steve Denning, one of the most profound and seasoned thinkers on organizational innovation explained his perspective on the fake agile phenomenon. My reasoning is inspired by his thoughts, but based on my very own observations over the last decade.
Type A agile transformations make up probably around at least two third of existing transformation endeavors. First of all, the underlying pattern is characterized by a systemic resistance to reflect on the purpose dimension, which is cross-cutting thru levels like company mission, product vision and the transformation goal itself. On top of that, careful observation shows that the executive manager or board that decided to conduct the change endeavor and to provide the budget for it, hides the real motivation and that is the reason why the required clarity of purpose is not established.
The systemic dynamics between management and employees
The implicit deal between management and employees is based on the rescuer — victim pattern. From management perspective,
- its role is to rescue the employees from failure
- to confirm the bias that employees are unable to see the whole picture because it’s too complex
From employee perspective, the expectation is that
- the monthly salary will be transferred reliably to allow for a stable private life
- management takes the “overall” responsibility
- the employee status allows them to be legally protected against any potential infringement from the employer.
While both parties are not really happy with that status quo, since the launch of the industrial revolution and the rise of Scientific Management thinking patterns outlined by Frederick Taylor, over time both parties have established a deeply rooted sense of comfort with it. The systemic relationship between managers and employees is not only weakly manifested in the culture, but also politically and legally anchored, such as thru trade unions and workers’ council. Notably, the EU has just released a law that requires employees to track their working hours, which clearly indicates how the management — employee dynamics is cemented as we speak.
These insights provided, it becomes clear why the dynamics of Type A agile transformations are constrained by what seems to be chiseled into stone. The transformation endeavor is translated into anything that maintains the status quo in order to not weakening up the existing system dynamics. As a result, employees
- remain disempowered with respect to the overall responsibility for delivery
- enter the game of fake agile by increasing their sense of comfort inside the given structures of responsibility.
At the same time, managers
- translate the purpose of the transformation into keeping up with what is currently fashionable in order to polish the facade to the outside
- take responsibility to mitigate any potential risk that a common sense could establish that the status quo would need to be challenged in order to really improve the organizational capabilities and to accelerate the business
- ensure there is no need to reinvent their role.
When it comes to implementing “agile” under these conditions, the logical answer is to establish an illusion. Nailing it down, the critical success criteria for the type A agile transformation is that
- everything “looks like agile”, ideally “100 %”
- responsibility structures and rescuer — victims dynamics have been cemented.
As Gunther Verheyen points out, not only are those transformations not aligned with a corresponding purpose, conditions are set to prevent potential learning opportunities that come along with any kind of change endeavor are translated into a structured learning approach:
They look around and imitate what other organizations do. They copy-paste what others, regardless whether they operate in the same economical domain or not, claim brought them success. They enforce unified ways of working and practices in a cascaded and mass-production way. They rely on text-book models that prescribe generic pre-empted blueprints of organizational structures. The learnings and the hard work needed to acquire sustainable agility, tuned to the organization’s specific context, are conveniently ignored. (Gunther Verheyen)
The whole transformation becomes meaningless. And the meaningless itself is the implicitly desired outcome. To assume that the sense of purpose of the agile adoption, the enterprise mission and the product vision are simply neglected and that managers just need to be better educated in order to understand the tricky part of adopting agility, is frivolously naive. As a result of fake transformations, a new vocabulary is rolled out and at the same time legacy organizational structure and culture is cemented. From the employee’s perception, even when business goals metrics are tweaked to report success, a sense of benefit from the “new agile approach” will not become tangible.
Gunther Verheyen observed that in illusional transformations, the level of agility is translated into more teams, while the rest of the organization essentially stays untouched and Steve Denning comes up with pretty much the same observation. Once a high number of teams have been established, “success” is reported upwards from middle management. As the transformation on company level is not keeping up, the sense of agility and the benefits on team level is collapsing. A point of deflation of reality has been reached.
Frameworks delivering fake agile (type A)
While obviously no framework would explicitly dedicate to deliver fake agile, from what can be observed in the industry, many companies that have established illusionary agile adoptions officially have launched either a SAFe transformation, or they applied the so called “Spotify model”.
“Spotify model”
The “Spotify model” is an organizational structure that evolved at Spotify and presented by Henrik Kniberg in 2014 as the “Spotify Engineering Culture”.
The one thing that characterizes the “Spotify model” is that it naturally evolved and reflected Spotify’s organizational DNA at a given point in time. Hence, there are two reasons why it’s pointless to adopt the “Spotify model”:
- the real and actual “Spotify model” is to build your own model
- what people call “Spotify model” was only a temporary state of evolution and in the meantime it has naturally grown to another model.
In 2016, Ben Linders collected a complete reasoning why the idea of copy-pasting the “Spotify model” is not only violating the ideas of ownership and purpose, but Spotify’s very own approach towards agility.
SAFe
SAFe is presented as a “framework” maintained by a company called Scaled Agile Inc. It represents a conglomerate of components and concepts from lean and agile as well as from management.
While you can see the agile vocabulary represented, its overall systemic goal is incongruent with the systems optimization goal of business agility, which is adaptiveness and flexibility thru informal collaboration. Although SAFe consultants (SPC’s) emphasize that SAFe is not required to be implemented entirely, the typical success criterion for a SAFe transformation is to be compliant with what is defined by SAFe. Being essentially a fancy bureaucratic model, SAFe is implicitly optimized to serve the biases and fallacies that come along a fake agile adoption. It satisfies both of the success criteria from executive management:
- everything looks like agile
- not only are legacy responsibility structures not challenged, but in fact they are deepened.
Voilá — the illusion of agility is perfect. Unfortunately, the result is worse than before. Not only was the legacy bureaucracy not challenged, the new bureaucracy now looks like something fancy and “modern”. Eventually employees will realize that the benefits of this “agile” approach is not really solving the key problems:
No more than an illusion of agility is created as a result. This is painfully revealed when the deflation by reality hits hard, often after several years. (Gunther Verheyen)
But, and now it becomes tricky: based on what would you be able to name an alternative approach? There are no names available anymore, because existing ones have been occupied and associated with meaninglessness.
The reality of the “agile coaching” industry
For a decade, until around 2015, the “Agile Coach” role was related to a very seasoned expert with a multi-dimensional skill profile including
- technical excellence and experience applying XP engineering practices,
- deep organizational development knowledge,
- facilitation and psychological skill, and
- strong adoption of the systemic and solution-focused coaching stance.
It is that syntheses that qualified the original “Agile Coach” as a powerful role who frequently provoked substantial impact. To distinguish his authenticity by name, I will call him coach for agility onwards.
Doomed to not create any impact towards agility
Along with fake agile becoming the predominant pattern, a landslide towards inflationary usage of the “agile coach” role has happened. As agile transformations are associated with
a) something that needs to be done and, at the same time,
b) being impact-less with regard to its declared outcome,
the very same has happened to the agile coach role. Today, it can mean anything and nothing. Hence, it is meaningless and arbitrary.
What’s “fake” about fake agile coaching ?
In summary, alongside the proliferation of implementing “agile” as an illusion, the corresponding implementation of the “agile coach” role has become extremely fashionable. Hundreds and thousands of people have entered the bandwagon and renamed their title to become an “Agile Coach”. Given that, the problems is, coaches who miss the required depth of experience and knowledge as well as the insights into the deeper dynamics tend to not realize that their actual role is to act as an internal or external stakeholder waving the flag of illusion.
Question: what would you pay for somebody who’s sole responsibility is to act as a stakeholder for maintaining the game of illusionary agility ?
What’s next ?
In part II of this series, I will confront fake agile and fake agile coaching with type B transformations into real agility. I will elaborate how impactful coaching is key to pave the path for any transformation towards exponential agility.
About the author
Marc is a Certified Team Coach (CTC) with Scrum Alliance and he has 17 years of experience as an external consultant in a wide range of industries including insurance, automotive, energy, telecommunications, financial services and banking. Since 2008 he helps organizations adopting agility as a coach and trainer.
If you are courageous enough to ignite a transformation towards purposeful agility, Marc offers you to
- help you to understand what agility is all about (and what not)
- support you to make your enterprise mission explicit and your product vision better tangible
- be an impulse provider in your journey to introduce informal leadership, support managers to reinvent their role and to create the organizational environment that allows high performing teams that are driven by a clear sense of purpose to arise
- advice how to create transparency on the progress of your journey and how it relates to your business goals.
You can contact him at ml@marclustig.com.
