Strategy is still the cornerstone of Agile and SAFe

At the end of the day, any way you organize the development of software comes down to leadership, not the tools you use. Lately I see more and more posts on my LinkedIn feed bubble claiming Agile is dead. If Agile doesn’t work, scaling it is scaling misery so SAFe is even worse. But as with any tool, success or failure is not in the tool but in the people wielding the tool. Any way of running projects is never an excuse for poor leadership. If you do not have a solid strategy, no amount of iterations will save you.

Open to learning

One of the great things about Agile to organize your product development is the ability to adapt to progressive insight. In the old days, when we we still using waterfall processes like Prince2, whenever we found that something that was designed didn’t work, we were screwed because we had to build according to specs. That hardly ever worked. The more complex the context, the more impossible it is to design everything first time right. That is why Agile works in iterations so we can see if we are still going in the right direction more often and not just at the end. That is great because as we are building and deploying, we are discovering what works and what doesn’t so we can build products that better fit the context.

The danger of this approach is that having iterations can become an excuse for not having a solid strategy. If we can figure it out while we are doing, we don’t need a strategy, right? Wrong! The strategy can be changed based on progressive insight but it all starts with having an actual strategy. Agile requires a strong strategy but for it to be held loosely so it can be changed when learnings call for it. The product vision is the foundation. If that is missing or weak, Agile quickly falls apart. Agile ways of working should be based on the Lean Startup approach of having a hypothesis and then testing and adjusting it if needed (hypothesis — build — measure — learn — adjust hypothesis). Without a solid product vision, iterations have no direction, no goal and no learning can take place.

Everyone gets a say

Another great thing about Agile is that all the people on the team get to have a say. The people on the team that actually have the knowledge and expertise get to decide instead of the people with the highest hierarchical rank. The typical downside of hierarchy is that decisions get made by people who do not know enough about the thing they are making decisions about. Agile fixes that by putting the authority as far down as possible.

This only works if there is a clear product vision. The stronger the product vision and the clearer that product vision is for everyone, the better this works. If there is no strategy, no product vision, people have no idea what is important, what the roadmap is. People cannot make decisions if they do not know where they need to go to. There is also no benchmark to measure the quality of decisions. A decision is good if it takes us closer to where we want to be. But if we do not know where we are going, the quality of decisions cannot be determined.

Powerplay and rules and tools

Then the only way to make decisions is falling back to hierarchical power patterns. Using rank, having the loudest voice, using false arguments, exaggerating, become the ways in which decisions get made. Without vision, there is chaos and people are pushed to resort to powerplay to make decisions. Or all kinds of procedures and rules have to be made up. The first rule of the Agile Manifesto states that we should value individuals and interactions over processes and tools but without a vision, teams fall back to processes and tools. And to powerplay. And that is the opposite of the Agile way of working, the Agile mindset.

Whenever more tools are introduced to control the situation, when more rules to make decisions are created, when powerplay patters emerge, the Agile mindset is dying. And I see that the lack of strategy, weakness of strategy, and unclarity about the strategy is the root cause of this. If you have a clear and strong vision of where the team needs to go, you place individuals and interactions over processes and tools. If you lack a clear and strong strategy, processes and tools will take over.

There is no literal mention of opposition to hierarchy and powerplay in the Agile Manifesto but I read that clearly between the lines. In one of the twelve principles it says that business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project. Working together. Co-creation. Hierarchical structures have processes to make decisions. And that is needed sometimes. The Agile mindset is not deny the need for hierarchy and processes and tools but to place individuals and their interactions above that. But that is only possible with a clear and strong product vision, a strong strategy that is held lightly, is refutable.

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