Agile Slowing Down the Corporate Merry-go-round

The business world is a merry-go-round

The business world is cruel.  It is a perverse merry-go-round of glittering success and spectacular failure.  Billions of dollars are created and lost with a handshake.  Someone in the finance department has the power to destroy the livelihood of thousands with a spreadsheet. It is a world filled with fear and uncertainty.  I belong to this world.  I am an agile coach and scrum master.  Each day, I get on the merry-go-round to make sure others do not get hurt.  It is because the ride does not stop and spins faster each day.  As part of the agile reformation, I have a responsibility to make business better.

The three main pillars of agile are inspection, adaptation, and transparency.  Each day we should be able to understand what is happening around us.  Once we know what is going on around us, we should be able to adjust to the current conditions.  Finally, we should be transparent with information with no agendas or secrets so that we can start the process anew.  For those used to playing political games or hiding in plain sight, these values are dangerous.  Transparency means information flows freely in an organization.  Inspection demands we look at that information with healthy skepticism.  Adaptation means we take action and hold others and ourselves accountable.

Agile is not hard to explain to others, but it is challenging to execute.  People need to be vulnerable and trust each other.  The Harvard Business Review calls this psychological safety.  In cutthroat business cultures, this safety is absent; it is up to the coach to create these pockets of safety.  Once these pockets form, they must grow within the organization.  To borrow from the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, agile becomes a rhizome which rises through the organization and inspires change.

Business people have been comfortable with how they ran large organizations since the 1980s.  Shareholders were more important than customers, and as long as they had priority, everything would be fine.  The digital revolution of the last twenty-five years has upset that equation.  Businesses are being created and crushed at an increasingly fast rate.  Bureaucracy once designed to increase corporate value is now interfering with the customer experience.  Poor customer experience hurts the organization.  The realization is creating anxiety among workers and executives.  A coach needs to step in and point out the importance of customers, and speed to market.  The corporate headquarters lose sight of these simple truths.

Each day, I see good people working in dysfunctional situations, and they inspect and adapt.  As a coach, you have to point this out to people who can make a difference and get them to inspect and adapt.  It is this process which makes the organization more transparent and effective.  If employees can respond to change, then business leaders can do the same.  It takes a coach to make this message clear.

The merry-go-round of business keeps spinning.  It is a relentless machine, but the agile reformation makes the ride less scary.  Using inspection, adaptation, and transparency, you can improve the business culture and leadership.  It is not an easy job, but it is mine.

Until next time.