Agile teams are being tangled, forced, and petrified

My calling is to shift, build and sustain team agility wellness, and that ultimately leads to greater agility wellness in other parts of the workplace.

When I start to look around, I see burning platform in different places. I believe the agile movement right now is complicated by multiple frameworks, practices, mindsets (tangled), most team are being cornered into doing things that may not make senses to them (forced), and team being in a state of shocked and overly dependent on coach or change manager to guide them (petrified).

First, let me call out tangled. We have reached a point where common sense is no longer common. There are multiple agile frameworks, mindsets, and practices being sold by coaches, consultants, and change managers. Some organisations are implementing a few agile frameworks — for example, picking up virtual team concept from Nexus Scrum, pulling WIP using Kanban, pair programming from extreme programming, etc. In this case, there is no longer a reference point, the team is in a tangled mesh.

Being an individual in an agile team, you will feel a sense of directional loss. There will be conflicting decisions and options because there is no baseline understanding of what is sufficient and reasonable.

There is a need for a better way of doing things to untangled the mess that we are in.

Second, is about being forced to adopt certain practices or frameworks. A new and shiny new initiative or method by a coach or consultant is always perceived as a silver bullet — a solve-all. This is usually not the case. It is just a tool, it has not been tested against team context and constraint. More often, teams are being bombarded with silver bullets without being consulted fully.

There is a need for a better way to let agile way of doing things flow naturally.

Third, is the accumulation of being tangled and forced. Agile teams are effectively afraid to move forward until being instructed or guided with the “correct” way of doing things. You are probably guessing this right — there is little self-organising or team retrospective. The teams are being petrified by the fact that it is dangerous to get out of the comfort zone.

There is a need for a better way to ensure teams have psychological safety to experiment and fail.

That’s my very short observation of the current state of agile teams that I boiled down to three words: “tangled, forced, petrified”. There must be a better, and that’s what I am actively working on right now to bring back team wellness.