My Journey with Agile Management
This blog covers my recent experience with agile, but if you’re short on time I have bolded the key insight you can jump to!
Background
I began my journey at the British Red Cross (BRC) back at the start of 2020. To help you understand my background and why I am where I am now, I’ll give you a whistle stop tour of the roles I have had in the BRC since then. Let’s see if I can do this in one breath…
- First Aid Trainer — Red Cross Training
2. Redeployment — Emergency Response Team
3. Redeployment — Anti-Trafficking Team
4. Hardship Fund Programme Officer — Crisis Response
5. Business and Partnerships Development Manager — Health and Local Crisis Response
6. Diaspora Programme Officer — Insights and Improvement
7. Diaspora Programme Manager — Insights and Improvement
Yes, you have read that right, I have gone through about 7 different roles while at the BRC. I’d like to think that by now I am a BRC expert, yet with each new role I have gone into I have been faced with new ways of working and some not so new challenges.
One thing that to me has felt consistent has been the way I have approached these new roles. As you can see with most of these, they do not really seem to have that much in common. Yet somehow, I have managed to emerge from each role feeling that I’ve done a successful job with them. I kept saying to myself ‘how have I pulled this off?’, ‘it must be luck that’s got me where I am’, ‘they probably didn’t have much choice for candidates. I know, it’s not really a positive spin to take on things, but I couldn’t help but think it was luck or I was an anomaly. I guess I wasn’t completely wrong with that last thought.
Mentoring
Over the last few months, thanks to the Career Mentorship Programme (a BRC programme supporting staff develop their careers), I was paired up with Adam Rowlands, Director of Digital and Innovation. I remember going into the first session and when Adam asked me what I want to get out of this programme I had said ‘I want to have one skill I’m good that, that I can rely on, like a carpenter. I just want a tool on my belt that I can always go to’. To me, at that moment, I felt like this was something I had missing having spent the last two years going from one unrelated role to another. Adam’s response (which ended up changing my perspective) had been that being able to adapt to working in different roles was a skill in itself I had managed to develop (mind-blown right?!).
At this point I’m feeling chuffed that I have a skill! But also starting to wonder, what other skills do I have that I am unaware of that might not fit my expectation of ‘normal’ career development? What has been the golden thread that has led me to do well in all these roles? Maybe it hasn’t been just luck…
This is where my journey with agile management begins. At least so I thought, until I began to look back in my career and find traces of it beginning to emerge from some of my very first roles.
Realisations
As I spent the last couple of months reading literature around agile working and associated skills which Adam often referred to as ‘modern, digital age skillset’ e.g. service design, design thinking, lean start up test and learn, innovation sprints…the list goes on, the most shocking thought I kept coming to was, ‘wait a minute… this is what I already do’. Learning about Eric Ries’ ‘Build — Measure — Learn’ feedback loop was this moment. I’ve spent the last 8 months building on the Diaspora Humanitarian Partnerships Programme (DHPP) where our whole aim is to pilot activities successfully through learning, adapt, and repeating until we have a project that’s running as effectively as possible. How is it that I’m working towards an agile way without knowing that this is what I have been doing? Learning about these more formal skillsets helped augment and align my work to be able to take it to the next level.
Although our aim is to evolve and capture learning, the way we came to be was still through relatively waterfall ways of working. There were discussions held, research commissioned, concept notes designed, work plans built, all over the space of a year to develop a programme that intends to be agile. It’s like when someone plans in detail to be spontaneous.
Assumptions and Design
Adam connected me to Charlotte Wilton, a Service Designer in the innovation team. She came into our team and lead a workshop on assumptions and empathy mapping. Charlotte leveraged her design expertise to work with us to map out the various assumptions we had been making and whether the activities we had planned were appropriately testing these — critical to ensuring our effort was focussed on minimising the major unknowns — improving efficiency and reducing potential regret cost. It felt like a glass shattering moment! I’ve spent so much of my time, both in and out of work, pointing out the risks associated with making decisions based on assumptions rather than insight. I had thought this was just a pedantic quality I had (being both a woman and a person of colour I’ve seen a lot of assumptions be made) and something that has therefore fuelled me to avoid making decisions just based on intuition alone.
The more I started to delve into design-led agile working, the more I started to see that I had been applying this mindset in how I worked but not as efficiently as I could. I had not been able to harness these ways of working because I did not know they even existed let alone good practice.
In the DHPP, an attitude we have developed is that there’s no failure, as long as we are learning and adapting. If we’re able to change our activities based on what we are learning each step of the way then in my eyes, we’re succeeding (apparently this is also pivoting, a lean method and good practice, who knew!).
Service Design and Co-Production
Our golden thread has been co-production; to build our activities together with our users based on their need. This also taps into that agile way of working which puts the user voice in the centre of the work we do. But through my journey, I’ve continued to think about how we can effectively make sure that voice is embedded in our programme.
Charlotte had contributed to another lightbulb moment when she shared Henry Ford’s famous quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. This led me down a rabbit hole, so we need to ask people what they want but at the same time not take it at face value? How do we even start to do this? There’s a confusion that comes from the assumption that individuals are the ones that can tell us what they want, while simultaneously knowing that most people don’t know what they want. Charlotte had given me the example of the ‘5 whys’ to explain this, to get to the root cause that we can solve.
This is where I think the skills of our service designers can come in to provide a wraparound support. The way I see it is that through co-production we are gathering insight around ‘who’ to speak to, ‘what’ about, and ‘when/ where’ to do this, and service design can pull out the ‘how’ and embed this feedback appropriately into our services.
We risk missing out on crucial insight when we have user research as a tick box activity, and more so we risk developing a service that does not successfully meet the need of the user. A misconception people have is that co-production and service design should be done only when designing and activity rather than something that needs to be visible throughout a projects lifecycle. This should not be a one-off activity but something that is constantly revisited and embedded into the decisions we make. People’s needs and situations are constantly changing and we risk working in a way that made sense in one moment but might not make sense in this new one.
It’s not all plain sailing
A challenge we have faced from the inception of this programme (and one which feels much clearer now) is that not all teams are currently set up for this agile way of working. Our programme activities are owned by different teams which already exist in the BRC, which provides many advantages as these teams are experts in their field.
However, one of the blockers is that these teams have a rigid way of working, which can often involve drawn-out steps and bureaucratic decision-making structures that inevitably fails to capitalise on innovation and momentum. The greatest risk we are seeing to our programme is the discrepancy between the pace we want to work compared to the pace we are having to work. For a programme that has a deadline of two years, we’re having to find ways of not only designing and implementing activities with diasporas, but also changing the mindset of our organisations around why working in this agile way will ultimately minimise risk and waste.
A key realisation was how we perceive risk. It’s tempting to think leaning into uncertainty early is risky, but in effect acknowledging assumptions, testing them up front and leaning into the complexity of the world (which exists whether we like it or not) can save a lot of time (and money) in the long run. The results from this leads to us being able to deliver better outcomes for those we serve.
Next Steps
I’m glad to see the BRC investing more to develop agile leadership and promote these ways on thinking across the organisation. There is still a long way to go but just having access to the co-production and service design team is a huge step to support our internal teams find answers that they might not even know they were looking for.
As I keep taking a deep dive into these (what feels like) new ways of working, my biggest take away for teams and leaders who are sceptical is to just try it. There’s so much potential to be unlocked and if successful, and if not then you’ve got the safety of continuing with the way you have been working. What you have to gain by far outweighs what you might have to lose.
A huge shout out to the Career Mentorship Programme (which started off as a pilot!) for being here to support my development. Massive thanks my co-production colleagues (here’s looking at you Rosie, Gemma and Zafer) for your valuable insight and steer into developing our programme. And of course, thank you to Charlotte and Adam for opening these new doors of thinking that have added immense value to the way I work. Finally, thank you to Cat for empowering me to take my own initiatives on this programme.
