Why extinction will save “agile”…
… if you like it or not.
When advocating for agile Work, MVP thinking, breaking and rearranging hierarchies in companies I always try to appeal to what most of us would call common sense and reason.
Explaining common sense in a way that it is understandable trough the lens of an agile mindset is somewhat my long term goal. It really isn’t easy because when you mention it, everybody seems to have a notion what it could mean but it’s hard to grasp from a conceptual perspective. I think the values and practices agile work has to offer could be a practical and explainable common ground to fill the vague topic of common sense with substance.
I’m always driven by thinking what I tell these people in front of me sounds revolutionary, somewhat abstract and hard to imagine in practice. Because basically it is. Many would argue that working agile is a necessary evolution in a globalized world where, especially in IT, the needs and demands seem to change almost on a weekly basis. You have to inspect, adapt and then change according to what the market wants. And when it comes to producer and costumer interaction a huge amount of transparency is needed in order to establish productive and ongoing communication.
So far, so good. Every time I try to make my point in front of an audience everyone nods. Nobody stands up and yells: “Well that seems like outlandish, utopian BS!”
From student to senior project manager, everyone gets why we all should shift to agile values in order to keep up with demands that we, as working individuals, and the costumers have.
But there are roadblocks, huge ones:
- I often underline this: What happens right now is more a workplace and workflow revolution than it is an evolution. And I’m amazed that it’s even happening to some degree. In Germany, hierarchies in working places and working ethics are deeply cultural rooted. The mantra is: “Work hard, do your job, don’t complain or ask too much.” This has to do with the aftermath of World War II where, trough what was later called Wirtschaftswunder, a mindset was developed that suggested that if you just work enough without challenging what you actually do, you can (re)build anything. This was certainly true for a time when the whole country was in ashes and you had really no option but to work with what you have, which wasn’t much. With it came layers of bureaucracy and strong institutional hierarchies, that were adopted by large corporations at that time. That worked, until now. The biggest roadblock agile work is facing at least in Germany are the people in high positions that grew up in these times. For them everything in relation to agile must sound like esoteric, unionized chaos. This huge skepticism paired with a deeply rooted hierarchical thinking is certainly a roadblock agile practices have to overcome.
- I wrote about the next roadblock in this article: https://medium.com/agile-punks/its-a-bubble-and-it-will-burst-78b72238df64. Almost more dangerously than the “old structures” is the danger of agile becoming a marketing strategy, a buzzword tornado with no substance or content. Right now my notion is that many middle class corporations are very carefully and small scaled when it comes to trying out agile practices. And they’re right: because what sounds nice in theory will hit your economic reality. Here, agile has to convict first on a small scale level and then on a corporate wide level. And that’s were all the consultants are hired, money is spent, investments are made. And if these don’t add up into measurable economic and cultural benefits all across the landscape visible for all, agile may be extinct faster than we thought…
… at least that’s what I thought until recently.
While the bullet points are still true in my opinion, I came to the conclusion that there is a force that may ignore these roadblocks. Our generation. And the one that comes after us. The so called Millenials as pioneers and Generation Y.
Every workshop I attend, every class I teach, each team I work with, the common voice is the same: we want to work the way agile suggests.
Everyone I met, who has worked in an “agile space”, even if it was far from perfect can complain for hours about what is still not working, what is still annoying and so on. But when asked if they want to go back to their old structures or working habits the all say: “Never again.”
Thus, I’m convinced that, unless the odds become absurdly high, with demographic change agile will break trough. Maybe in 20 years, we will have the first generation of young professionals that have natively grown into an agile working world.
