“Business Agility is the future of management.”
Steve Denning
I met Michael Sahota, a good friend, and the leading CAL, Certified Agile Leadership, trainer for the Scrum Alliance, and his girlfriend Audree last night for dinner here in Chicago, and we had an AMAZING conversation. No, TRULY AMAZING!!! We talked about a lot of things but mainly about what stops people and companies achieving Agility.
The main problems with Agile Transformations are that, 1) we the people doing these transformations are not really changing our values, our hearts. So we want to do Agile without changing ourselves. That stops us from both doing and leading Agile. 2) We are not really opening up and expressing our thoughts and feelings. So true cooperation or even understanding is always compromised. And, 3) we don’t really understand people or systems to the point where we feel confident to do these Agile Transformations in any predictable way. We have no way to envision, let alone, reach a “better future”.
However, today, more than ever, I believe we are getting closer to positively transform the Agile Transformation space.
The world of business and the global agile community have a very difficult problem to solve:
most ATs (Agile Transformations) fail.
And they fail because of a variety of reasons:
- lack of purpose: you can’t motivate people into doing things they don’t believe in
- not truly changing values of leaders or employees
- lack of true leadership: you have to lead by example; you can’t expect people “underneath” you to be Agile, if you are not
- lack of openness to state what you truly believe
- ignorance: of new ways to manage, organize, measure
- ignorance: of understanding and motivating people
- politics
- conformity
- inertia
Etc.
However, the combination of Agile Leadership, Open Space, Open Space Agility, Scrum and Enterprise Scrum is very powerful to overcome these problems, shall we say even. … magical. Each one contributes with a very special ingredient and combines into a very powerful “change contextual formula”, leading to a state of being, Agility, not to a final destination.
So, given the right context — companies willing to take our invitation into Agility, which include GREATNESS, PURPOSE, and RESPECT for other people; I strongly believe we can make a significant difference in the Agile Transformation space.
I am sure that once we get some of these companies to feel the positive energy, the passion, the ownership, the good attitude, and make Agile a fun, learning experience for everyone … the miracle of positive “Agile Transformation” is possible.
So … let me plea with you: let’s invite companies into Agility. Let’s contribute to the world by helping companies do more Agile “Agile Transformations”.
We have started pitching some selected companies our help as a “more Agile way to do Agile Transformations” ….and it’s WORKING!!!.
We are feeling very excited about it because you can sense this “more Agile” way of doing Agile Transformations will be very successful, specially in the way people feel about them, which in the end is what matters most: PEOPLE!
- Mike Beedle
Business Owner
Enterprise Scrum Inc.