Week 48, 2020
Full-Stack Agile: Command & Control, Delivery Agile, and Sense & Respond
Each week I share three ideas for better ways of working. And this week, that means exploring the notion of “full-stack” agility.
Why am I writing about this? I’ve had plenty of reasons to revisit Felipe Castro’s writings on business agility and OKRs recently. Let’s dig in.
1. Command & Control
Most organizations are steeped in a culture of command and control. Here, leadership is charged with predicting the future on a 12/18/36 month timeframe. Their forecasts are pushed down the hierarchy as prophecies etched on stone tablets. And it’s the organization’s job to fill quotas and make said prophesies come true. Bets are big, feedback is slow, and words like “self-management” have yet to enter the organizational vocabulary.
2. Delivery Agile
According to OKR coach Felipe Castro, “Delivery Agile” is what we get when we insert Agile Methods in a command-and-control culture. Here, the output is delivered in 2-week iterations, but apart from that everything remains pretty much the same. Bets are still big, and feedback is still slow. And while the vocabulary might now include words like “self-management” etc., they carry little actual meaning for people on the ground.
3. Sense & Respond
Full-Stack Agile is not about Agile Methods per se. It’s about instilling an Agile mindset and culture throughout the organization; emphasis on throughout. It’s not enough for the IT dept. to adopt Scrum. Agility, in the true sense of the word, means focusing on outcomes rather than output. And to do that, we must replace a-few-big-bets with many-small-bets which, in turn, requires that we decentralize and push decision-making to the front line.
Full-Stack Agility is where it’s at. But getting there is hard. Because while it does require that we change the way we work. It also requires that we change the way we think. And that takes time. And lots of it.
For more on this, I highly recommend Castro’s Stop Waterfall Goals.
That’s all for this week.
Until next time: make it matter.
/Andreas
