10 Blind Spots in Agile Transformation

‘’If the pace of the change inside of your company is slower than the pace of the change outside, then the end is in sight’’ — Jack Welch

Constantly developing technological advancements, rapid changes in customer needs and transforming employee expectations are making our lives much more complex and complicated to have the right decision making and execution. To survive and thrive in competition, companies must transform how they act, react and interact with their ecosystem (employees, customers, shareholders…) in the new era of the competition.

Agile by itself is a popular and a fancy recipe for those who want to become much more adaptive and flexible to stay in the game. It proposes achieving faster time to market, better innovation and higher customer satisfaction while empowering your employees on decision making and action taking. But a significant amount of transformation attempts do not achieve these outcomes and turn into a struggling transformation story that causes bigger conflicts and disengagements for the company. When the story goes in this way, then people, process or management culture of the company become a root cause of failure. However the underlying problem is that, large companies are not built to operate in agile. Because efficiency and revenue oriented thinking requires standardization, risk aversion, command and control management, common thinking and execution to keep the execution on track. In contrast customer and innovation oriented companies seeks for diverse thinking, continuous feedback, empowerment, self-organization and ability to rapidly configure strategy, process and structures. Because they believe efficiency and revenue are not the goals of the company, they are the results of customer centricity empowerment.

So, implementing a successful Agile Transformation not only requires an intense execution, but also requires a consistent shared ownership and openness to experiment new things.

Here are 10 major blind spots you need to consider while driving your Agile Transformation:

1. Lack of alignment on the purpose and the definition of agile: Purpose by itself is the answer of a single question: ‘Why am I doing this’. And ‘WHY’ is the only question that derives other questions. So setting a clear definition of WHY will help people to understand ‘why are they doing this’ and ‘what is expected from them’. This common base will answer most of the questions and demystify your transformation ambition and goals.

2. Focusing on doing agile rather than being agile: Contradicting to the common view, Agile is not only about principles and practices or Scrum, Kanban…etc. It’s also about leadership, culture and customer centricity. So for sure, you should consider the right tools and practices for your organizational dynamics but also should show a big attention on the role of leadership and mind-set growth. According to the Annual State of Agile Survey, being agile offers a significant amount of better (15x) business results comparing to doing agile.

3. Driving change without changing the existing operating model: Driving a massive change without changing your organization feel people like a rat in a maze. Consider the difference between a car on a road and a train on a train track. The car and the road are loosely coupled, so the car is capable of independent action. It’s more agile. It can do more complex things. The train and track are tightly coupled, highly optimized for a particular purpose and very efficient at moving stuff from here to there-as long as you want to get on and off where the train wants to stop. But the train has fewer options: forward and back. If something is blocking the track, the train can’t just go around it. It’s efficient but not very flexible. So breaking your organization into small pieces must be implemented. Such as:

• Setting the innovation and customer satisfaction oriented fully empowered small business units in the front line,
• Efficiency and excellence oriented platform organizations as an enabler of business units
• Delivering constantly flowing strategy, prioritization and purpose for both business units and platforms will enable a continuous flow of agile mind-set in an organization.

4. Ignoring cultural paradigms: Agile transformation also means transforming your culture. And culture means the way you act, react and interact with other. So if you ignore your culture then failure is obvious. As Roger Connor- the author of Change the Culture Change the Game said ‘culture lives in our experiences and beliefs’. So if you want to change the results of your company then you need to change the experiences that creates the beliefs of the people. Otherwise pushing actions may create short term outcomes but will never provide sustainable long term changes.

5. Not having a shared ownership for the change management strategy: Commitment is the only thing that creates an action. So having committed people on boarded and providing a clear strategy is one of the critical enablers of execution. Transformation is not about transition, it is not a state change by keeping your traditional habits. It is a change like riding a bicycle with a new steer which makes you going left while steering right. So keeping the right balance with your commitments and making people fully engaged is important to achieve a shared success. Also constantly sensing or probing the stakeholders’ perception and setting up the right engagement approach will help you to seize what is going well and what’s going wrong.

6. Building the competencies on time, on place: Competency is the ability to do something successfully or efficiently. So you should make sure that right competencies are involved or ready to be grown. Identifying the needs at front, building the theoretical and practical knowledge at front, being clear about the roles, expectations from them and providing an overarching coaching service for the whole stakeholder will make it easy and will create a pace of execution. Otherwise you will need lots of pit stops to regulate yourself that may cause disengagement, skepticism and lack of commitment of your stakeholders.

7. Lack of transparency and common definition of success: Definition of Done concept is one of the core artefacts of Scrum. So if you want to make sure that transformation is proceeding on the right path and pace then you should define a common definition of success with your stakeholders for all of your transformation deliverables. And then making the outcomes fully transparent with successes and learning will increase the credibility of change management and also provide a dedicated support from the organization.

8. Setting the right governance for making it stick: Leading a Business Agility transformation takes planning, time and effort and often represents a large investment. For the change to provide lasting value, it is important to “make it stick” and avoid falling back into old patterns and behaviours. So setting up the right governance for keeping the new mind-set alive, incentivizing the desired culture, empowering teams to own it and also supporting the change with the new management approach will make it stick.

9. Not having a capable technological infrastructure to support transformation: Technology Agility evolves the technical culture, processes and tools toward quality and efficiency. Building trust and collaboration, minimizing waste and creating effective feedback loops are key aspects in meeting the overall goal of delivering business value more quickly. You should consider the technological needs and capabilities to enable an effectively working agile mind-set.

10. Missing the customer feedback while making your decisions: Being a customer-focused organization where decisions about the products are made based on aligning customer needs and wants with the overall goals of the organization. To achieve this, users and customers are engaged early and often, the “voice of the customer” is made real and is used throughout the product development process, and feedback from users and customers is incorporated and helps drive product decisions. To get the customer a seat at the table, the organization should use various techniques including user personas, journey maps, product experiments (minimum viable products and prototypes), customer interviews and focus groups.

Finally, agile companies are adaptive, innovative and flexible to restructure each and every piece of their way of working. And this power comes from awareness and influence, not command nor control. Leaders should focus on creating an environment of clarity, trust, and common purpose so members know what the company stands for and how it intends to fulfil its promise to customers. And then leaders should get out of the way.

‘The general rule seems to be that the level of consciousness of an organization cannot exceed the level of consciousness of its leader.’ — Frederic Laloux

What do you think about these blind spots? What are your thoughts about other possible blind spots that need to be considered while leading agile transformation?

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.