Why Companies Resist the "Agile Mindset"

Bad leadership creates a mindset which is not agile.

It is difficult explaining agile to others outside my profession.  The Agile Manifesto outlines four values and twelve principles which govern how people should approach work.  It is up to people like myself to make sure the manifesto and principles are not abused.  To be successful, it is not enough to have talented professionals doing the work and following a successful formula.  Those professionals need to collaborate as a team willing to take risks and innovate.  Scrum masters and agile coaches call this the “Agile Mindset.”

I have been working in the orbit of agile for nearly ten years.  It is a rewarding and challenging line of work.  Plenty of business leaders like the results agile brings to software development teams.  Research from the Standish Group has shown projects done in an agile manner are more successful and have fewer budget overruns.  Business leaders should be falling all over themselves to implement agile based on this knowledge.

In reality, agile faces serious organizational and cultural hurdles. I say this because agile places a strong emphasis on continuous improvement and corporate transparency.  For managers who are incompetent, absent, micromanaging, or power hungry agile is a threat.  Ken Scheweber says agile holds a mirror up to the organization.  Resistance to agile happens when an organization does not like what it sees and attempts to smash the mirror.

I have experienced this resistance first hand.  A manager was reduced to spasms of rage when I said he could not poach a developer for another project until a sprint ended.  A network administrator deliberately denied technical support for continuous integration and continuous builds because they did not want developers, “…touching my servers.”  Finally, I remember someone from governance say they had been doing production rollouts the same way for ten years.  It was puzzling to them why anyone would change a system which was working correctly for them.  I have seen and heard almost every alibi and excuse NOT to be agile.  Why is it happening?

The answer is the fear and uncertainty built into each corporation.  It is not enough to be profitable.  A corporation must be profitable according to the expectations of shareholders if not share prices can fall precipitously.  Years of retirement savings can vanish in an afternoon.  The focus on this shareholder value forces companies to squeeze profit out of anything.  For instance, employees are expensive, so layoffs, “right-sizing” and automation improve profits without doing the messy work of developing the product or increasing sales.  A Keurig machine where employees bring their coffee replaces a coffee pot with free coffee.  Employees are expected to do janitorial work, or empty trash cans less frequently.  Failure to maintain these profit figures or increase them leads to unemployment which is a pathway to financial ruin.

The power-hungry pursue leadership so they can inflict harm on others rather than suffer the everyday indignities of office work.  The absent hope invisibility will protect them from accountability.  The incompetent bluff their way in the organization and pin their failures on others.   The micromanager lacks trust that people can do their job, and it is a threat to their livelihood. Each of these poor leaders is anti-agile.  Poor leadership drives away good employees and slowly choke the organization.  These individuals survive because the pace of business at a large organization makes it easy for these individuals to hide in plain sight.

With lousy leadership, the only people that stick around are bad employees.  It becomes a feedback loop of awfulness.  It is why an agile coach spends plenty of time struggling against the organization, and it can be lonely.  It is sobering because you will face it often in your career.  So be prepared for resistance to the “agile mindset.”  It is not because people do not want to be successful.  Instead, the fear and uncertainty of a modern corporation discourage the mindset from happening.

Until next time.