Part 2: Wholeness and connection.
Part 3: Meritocracy, competition, and complacency – the death of good products.
Part 5: Product, leadership, Change
Introduction
A lot of noise has been created lately on whether agile is really over, did something go wrong, and now what?
I am going to answer this in 5 parts. Firstly, what has happened in the past, what is happening now (this article), and finally what I think will happen next, with a few mini articles long the way.
Credentials to have an opinion on Agile
I have been active in the public sphere since 2013. I started Adventures with Agile as an extension of the work I was already doing to help change organisations to be better.
In 2013, Agile for teams was already well underway, and the agile community in the UK had two meetups, a few conferences, and many books about team scope agile. There was nothing in place for whole-organisation agility.
I started Adventures with Agile (AWA), now AWA Global and Bryter Work, as the first global community for Enterprise Agility. I created a place where those involved with larger change programs could learn, support each other, and I could help move the industry forwards.
My journey has been well documented, in my book1, on the AWA website2, and in popular press 3,4.
AWA helped introduce the ‘scaling frameworks’ to the business world, including SAFe, and LeSS, DAD, and Sociocracy. We brought Sharon Bowman’s ‘training from the back of the room’ and helped establish ICAgile as a leading certification authority for Enterprise Agility.
I, and collectively at AWA, have created many of the change models that people use today, including defining the elusive Agile Mindset in real terms. Many books have covered my work, from neuroscience, through software delivery, to professional coaching. I have won numerous awards including ‘the person who has done the most globally to promote agility’ and ‘CEO of the year’. I published the book on Change. last year1.
But perhaps most importantly, over the last decade, I have trained, coached, and mentored thousands of change agents, and helped tens of organisations directly and hundreds via AWA. The focus has always been to enable change agents and their organisations to have a better working life, an iterative lower risk outcome approach, and better products and services for their customers/citizens/supporters.
I have had insights though working with everyone from the CxO board members of top 500 companies, their SLTs, HR departments, Heads of delivery, and of course the Coaches who help them.
I feel I have a unique perspective on where this industry has come from, where it is now, and where change is going.
On the history of agility
And no, I’m not going to talk about the agile manifesto!
In 2013, when I started the AWA community, we ran a workshop on where the different frameworks were in their adoption cycles. The scaling frameworks were in the early adopter and innovator stages, and Scrum and Kanban were just crossing the chasm.
Agile was a software and team-based phenomenon. There was a real pull from organisations to take this wider, but no one knew how.
The golden age of the agile movement
The next 7 years from 2013 – 2020, were the golden years of agility. In other words, it was where I felt most comfortable! Agility during this period was in the early adopter stage and that meant high quality, energetic community, and open minds and innovation. It felt like anything was possible.
The energetics of agility had that ‘change the world’ energy that brought hope to many.
If you were around in London for the AWA meetups in this pre-pandemic time, you will remember and know what I mean.
During this period, I did a fair amount of work strengthening the collective energetic field, that is to say the collective awareness and intelligence of the change movement. During this golden period, in the early adopter stage, the depth of work that each practitioner had done on themselves for their own awareness, and the hope and guidance that formed the high bar we defined through the ICAgile Enterprise Agile Coaching program, carved out what was to come in the following years. I believe this was what moved Agile from software delivery frameworks to the whole system improvements we have seen as a global phenomenon.
How change skills were introduced
During this period, the method by which agility was brought into organisations rotated on a cycle of
a) Individual practitioners hired as consultants
b) Consultancies hired
c) Internal skillsets grown
Many organisations cycled through these three approaches, often with a sudden change of direction, hiring or firing hundreds of coaches in a month, or hiring 3 or 4 consultancies at the same time.
Two schools of thought – the agile wars
People love tribes and they love to fight. That seems to be the universal truth of our current human condition. Unfortunately, the agile movement is no different.
The two schools of thought for agility are diametrically opposed and can be summed up as
1. People first
2. Process first
I have always been in the first camp and have advocated that people make up an organisation and processes are merely the expression of how people see the world. The process first camp advocate that processes are tangible and if we change those, the machine of work will change accordingly.
In the Agile Onion, it has always had the mindset on the outside, indicating people need to change first. Over the years, many people in the second camp, have tried to change the onion to be the opposite way around, and put tools and process on the outside.
The machine versus the garden
The cybernetics movement that worked so well in the complicated domain (see Cynefin), portrays organisations as machines, with clear inputs and outputs. It is the processes in between that change how efficiently the outputs are delivered. This mechanistic and deterministic view of organisations is what powers the second school of agile thinking – the process first camp.
I have witnessed and heard countless stories of woe of organisations that take this approach. Huge amounts of money and time have been wasted. The largest and most popular agile framework – The scaled agile framework (SAFe), has taken this approach. Thousands of organisations have attempted to deploy this inner operating system that treats people like parts of a machine. Much of our work over the years has been rescuing these expensive and time-consuming endeavours. (So, thank you for the work! but I would have preferred it if our clients hadn’t needed us and had achieved amazing places to work years earlier).
Many of our most successful clients take a different approach. They may borrow elements from SAFe or other places, but they use us to help them build a change capability that puts their people at the heart of the organisation, and not a process. A common metaphor is a garden, rather than a machine, with leaders creating exceptional environments where people can grow. Grow both themselves and their products and services.
I created the Enterprise Change Pattern that allows leaders to include the right people in an iterative, inclusive, and practical approach that has complexity and systems thinking at is heart. This has led to much higher engagement, faster delivery, and less staff attrition.
The change in leadership capability
Over the golden period, between 2013 to 2020, we have noticed a significant improvement in leadership capability. This is backed by our own experience and also by aggregate anonymous data from the 360 surveys collected by the Leadership Circle.
We know that leaders who have an Expert or Achiever mindset are not able to create the right environments for our gardens to grow and agility to thrive. The Expert and Achiever mindset in leaders results in mechanistic thinking, process led change, and output over outcome approaches. This doesn’t work in complex domains and results in high levels of burnout, crappy products, and high staff turn-over.
When a leader reaches an independent mindset, they are able to bring in agility, but it tends to still be mechanistic at worst or at best a type of agility that alienates the experts and achievers and creates decision-making by committee. This can take a lot of time to move forwards and often frustrates others.
Only when a leader reaches the transformational mindset are they able to integrate their own knowledge with those of others, meet them where they are, and create the right environment to move forwards.
There has been a noticeable move towards independent mindsets in leaders and that has resulted in agility moving from early adopter status through early majority and now into late majority in a lot of organisations. However, it has not yielded the expected results because we are still not seeing many transformational leaders in positions of power.
Where it has been going wrong
Lack of competence
In the very early days, I must admit, I tried the SAFe thing, and various other frameworks, and the same thing always resulted. It was a disempowering experience for the very product delivery people we were there to help.
This was a lack of competence and experience. I got through that, but the vast majority of coaches are still stuck in it. This is a lack of competence in both clients and in the coaches that sell it. It is really a trap that can either be entered by accident (blind leading the blind), or by unscrupulous consultancies (the agile industrial complex). This has been written about extensively. 5,6
SAFe was always optimised for ease of adoption and NOT for results. This has led to the majority of large companies at some point trying out this framework. The ease at which consultants can train to become a SAFe trainer (a 4 day course), gave the Agile Industrial Complex all the tools and people it could use and this has fuelled a whole generation of process led change that has no expertise or competence in making it work.
The is compounded even further by another lack of competence in Agile Coaches who have not actually got any coaching experience. Worse are those that berate the coaches that do, because they are in the second camp who think the problems are all process problems. See the agile wars above.
A classic case of person with hammer thinks everything is nail and at the same time berates anyone who uses anything else. The behaviour was encouraged with a lower barrier to entry created by SAFe and cheap day rates for companies.
Smoke and mirrors
The next stage of helping was bridge making. It is pretty easy to see the limitations of most people’s knowledge and vision when it came to what was possible. Many agile change agents saw what was needed to make an organisation truly amazing but were continually met with a leadership group who didn’t understand it, didn’t want it, and didn’t want to pay for it. They wanted agile, only they didn’t really.
This is where the bridge came in, or smoke and mirrors. By seeing what the organisation needed and that was different than what they wanted or asked for, it was pretty easy to deliver both at the same time. This usually meant a scope change pretty early on, as the client realised in fact that you were right and that what they needed would be far more effective than what they thought they wanted.
What we are asked for, is very rarely what the real issue is. I believe this is because the client is so stuck in their own context, they can’t see what needs to be done or what the real problem is. If they could, they could probably fix it themselves. The art of good agility has been mostly trying to give the client what they think they want, whilst at the same time uncovering what the real problem is, and solving that, so the client gets what they really need, and you have to make sure you tick off the contractual items at the same time.
The challenge comes if clients think agility is in camp 2 (that the problems are all process problems), then they get very frustrated that you can’t just give them what they want. They have the Expert or Achiever mind and want to know when it will all be done. Any hidden problems are out of scope, and that of course doesn’t work.
This is generally the difference between a great client who you can really help, and a difficult client that tries to put you on the back foot because they don’t understand you or that their problems are really people problems.
This leads to smoke and mirrors if you are not careful. And that is bad for everyone.
Where it has gone right
Agile has largely been adopted at a superficial level bringing improvements to many organisations in delivery, collaboration, and better places to work. As agility has progressed beyond software, organisations are incorporating agile skills into other roles.
Agility has permeated many of the roles and now specific agile roles are being phased out as the skills are absorbed.
This is still at a very superficial level, but many agile coaches did not achieve much more than a superficial level anyway. This has led to less agile roles and more agile as part of other roles.
So in part, agility has been successful in helping organisations deal with a certain depth of complexity.
The decline of the agile movement
When the pandemic arrived and the lockdowns began, everything moved online. This not only meant in a shift in the way individuals worked, but it also meant a very big shift in the way the work flowed through the teams that produce value. Whole organisational cultures changed overnight. Collaboration changed, both with tooling but also with the way people interact. This led to different results.
As agility is about helping people to make better working lives, it meant that agility itself had to shift and change.
Previously, organisations with trained agile coaches with multiple years of experience across multiple clients helped organisations. During the pandemic, everyone with a computer pushed the absolute lower limits the certification agencies would allow to run a training course in agility and coach from their bedroom.
This led a huge proliferation of unexperienced coaches training organisations to work in a way that no one had ever worked in before. The faith in agility, coaches, and certification declined rapidly, as did its effectiveness.
It led to a huge price drop in courses which is partly good for the consumer but also bad because inexperienced coaches can undercut the experienced ones offering the same certification and that lowers the bar for everyone, and the experienced coaches go on and do something else more lucrative. It undermined the ‘giving back’ culture of the agile community.
The response from organisations has been to stop hiring all agile coaches and stop paying for agile training, and instead trying to build capability in-house.
The heralds of doom – and a ray of light
As we hear more about the end of agile on LinkedIn, we are left wondering how on earth are organisations going to deal with the complexity that is not going away. With product lifecycles getting shorter and shorter, the speed at which customers expect updates getting faster, and the cost of delivery getting higher, and finally with staff being burnt out, turnover at its highest level ever: how can organisations continue to make a profit?
Surely we need agility more then ever?
Well if anything can adapt. Its agility!
So what comes next? A new focus on capability. I will cover what this looks like shortly.
Part 2 is here:
https://deeperchange.substack.com/p/is-agile-dead-and-if-so-what-is-next-1c8
References
1. Change. A practitioners guide: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Change-practitioners-guide-Enterprise-Coaching-ebook/dp/B0B2M1CR22/
2. AWA Website - https://www.adventureswithagile.com/simon-powers/
3. CEO of the year 2022 - Read more here
4. Unstoppable Business leaders in 2023 - Read more here
6. My article on Weaponised Agile from 2018.
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My book
In August 2023, I published my first book. It is called Change. It is a practical guide that helps you change not only organisations, but also yourself.
You can buy my book on any Amazon site. Here is the link to Change. on the UK Amazon site, and you can change the Amazon domain and the link still works in any region.