Cultural Forces in Your Business Hurting Agility

One of the principal selling points of Agile is the ability to deliver solutions quickly to the market. One of its central guides is Jeff Sutherland's seminal book "The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time." The business community embraces speed but forgets some of the other essential features of Agile, which are transparency, empiricism, continuous learning, and value delivery. Today, I want to look into why this is happening. 

My business career spans over twenty years, and I am amazed at how global corporations resemble feudal societies and how unwilling they are to change. Executives lord over divisions with minimal knowledge of the work necessary to generate profit insulated from understanding and empathy by wealth. The boyars and professionals who plan, budget and design are in the middle. Philosopher Ernest Gellner called these people doctrinal specialists or 'clerisy.' Finally, an organization has unwashed masses of people making products and providing services. It is hieriarchial and fedual. This type of culture is excellent at perpetuating itself but creates a situation where people wallow in inertia, and innovation suffers in the long run. The condition explains why Agile became such an interesting cultural movement in business. People proposed breaking through the inertia and developing new product delivery methods. 

Sadly, we encounter a few problems as we embark on this journey. First, executives lack collaboration incentives, creating political competition in large organizations. For example, a director of network services receives a bonus if the computer network is up for 99.9% of work hours. A sales division gets a bonus if they can increase sales. These incentive structures put the two groups in conflict. New products and sales methods mean website changes and alterations to the company computer network, which creates a risk of lowering the network uptime. In this scenario, it is not in the interest of the director of network services to help the sales division get new products to market. An executive with knowledge and authority needs to step in to break the impasse, but those individuals are hard to find in the corporate world. Thus, professionals check off boxes to match the bonus structure they operate under. 

The next big problem for agility in the business world is existential. The power imbalances between the people doing the work versus those making the decisions and paying the bills create a risk-averse workforce. Take this workforce and place them in sterile cubical farms while forcing them to attend conference calls with other offices. It establishes soul-crushing alienation among the people who should be leading change. 

Finally, the clerisy of business professionals and managers feel threatened—agile delegates decision-making and authority down to teams, shifting the responsibility toward more coaching roles. It isn't enjoyable for people used to giving orders and expecting compliance. It also does not help that command and control styles of management are rewarded via perverse incentives, with promotions often awarded to leaders who perpetuate those practices. Peer pressure and groupthink are potent social forces in organizations. 

The combination of poorly constructed incentives, corporate power imbalances, and the clerisy of middle management make delivering value increasingly difficult. Agile is not dead, but it struggles against these dysfunctional cultural forces in organizations. The coach and consultant in each of us must recognize these challenges and treat them like modern constraints on productivity. It is easier said than done, but if we can improve business cultures, we will enhance profitability, and profitable companies benefit workers, which is a worthy trade-off. 

Until next time.

Three Big Techniques to Improve Communication.

The global economy is an adventure. Each day the invisible hand of the market plays tricks on us. Customers make new demands, the cost of raw materials changes, and war could break out, disrupting supply chains. Each morning is a new challenge. Dealing with those challenges is the job of most business professionals and is not easy. The job's most challenging part is ensuring that others understand what needs to doing and why. Today on the blog, I point out some helpful communication techniques to make your coaching and scrum mastery more successful. 

The Big Three –

David Plotz, Emily Bazelon, and John Dickerson of the Slate Political Gabfest pointed out that Ronald Regan was successful as a leader because everyone who worked at his White House knew three big themes that made up their government mission. Those themes were cutting taxes, reducing regulations, and fighting communism. These 'big three' governed every decision people made in the Regan White House, so if you had not spoken to the president in months, as long as you were following the big three, you were helping the president. 

Today business people refer to these simple themes as Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs for short. Provide simple open-ended goals which can be measured and prioritized, and then let people figure out how to make them happen. It worked for Regan until John Poindexter and Oliver North earned positions of authority and responsibility, but that is a story for another blog. 

Repeat yourself – 

If you repeat yourself enough, even the most dense people you work with will understand. Being redundant is not tiresome in business or leadership; it is a necessary tool for success. According to Time magazine, repetition is one of the key ways to develop long-term memory of skills. Sometimes you must recall memory up to thirty times to remain in your long-term memory. It means you must repeatedly say the same things when you talk with others. 

When I was serving on a team as a scrum master, we were struggling with production errors. Soon, I began using the word 'quality' in each conversation with developers, product owners, and managers. I would ask during retrospectives about how we could improve quality. During stand-ups, I would stress unit testing to improve quality. Even during product demos, I pointed out quality improvements no matter how small. After six months, the developers teased me during a stand-up meeting, saying they were having a quality day and had metrics to prove it. Everyone had a good laugh at my expense, and it was clear that the team normalized my message. The technique must have worked because the number of production defects declined significantly. 

Start and End with Why –

For years business leaders have instructed others how to work. Today, we must communicate what to work on in an information economy and why. Remember Ronald Regan's big three, and everyone understood why the themes were essential and were allowed to figure out how to accomplish those goals. 

Tell people why something needs to doing and what is in it for them. You will see if they understand what you need to do at that point. Giving a reason why something has to happen is the best way to achieve buy-in for creative professionals. 

Create a big three, repeat yourself, and start with why are the three communication techniques that will make you more successful as a coach and scrum master. 

I will be away for a week on vacation, and I will see everyone after July 24th. 

Until next time. 

Cash, Control and the Agile Coach

The business world is a rough and amoral place. The only judgment is the invisible hand of the marketplace. It explains why corporate work feels so dysfunctional. When the only means of value is the amount of profit you generate for shareholders, things like quality of work, personal integrity, and generating value for customers look like afterthoughts. Plenty of mediocre people exist in the business world, so it is understandable why this lack of vision exists. Increasing interest rates and low unemployment figures pull business leaders in opposite directions. As an agile coach or scrum master, we need to discuss what that tug of these forces means for your agile practice. 

William H. Janeway wrote one of the most important books I have read about business. An economist and venture capitalist, Janeway, says that cash and control become critical to a company when time gets tough. Together they help ensure the success of a business and investment. 

Any business person understands the importance of cash. The use of cash provides employee wages, purchases supplies, and offers collateral for loans if they are necessary. During times of crisis, the reflex to cut back on spending is natural because the easiest way to get out of a hole is to stop digging and take stock of the situation. Businesses are cutting back on travel, moving holiday parties to potlucks in the breakroom, and canceling projects for nice-to-have improvements. No matter how pound foolish, each penny saved looks suitable to investors and the CFO. 

Control increases during difficult times. When things are good, the business runs on a form of auto-pilot. Projects continue without question, and managers hire more staff to accommodate the growing to-do list at the company. When a crisis hits, leaders ask uncomfortable questions, and everything is subject to review. It explains the wave of layoffs which hit the tech industry as CEOs and investors realized that they over-hired during the COVID-19 pandemic and could no longer print money thanks to low-interest rates. They discarded anything that was not driving value to the business, like a used piece of facial tissue.

As a coach or scrum master, it is your responsibility to show leadership you are providing cash and control to the organization. For instance, sprint reviews and demonstrations give business leaders a sense of control. In each iteration, you are showing progress on work, and the team can pivot if the market conditions change to meet those changing conditions. The units are still getting the job done, but now the product owner and business feel they have some control over the process. 

Next, if a team understands how much money they are burning to get work done, they can decide what will save cash for the business. For instance, conversations can focus more on dollars and cents than on who has power. When a designer demands that a textbox get moved two pixels right, you can have a conversation that it will take two weeks and require a developer, quality assurance person, and push to production after hours. The change has a dollar cost, so someone from the business can decide whether the designers' demands will provide value to the company. People are less likely to ask for frivolous changes if they know it will cost them money. 

Providing cash and control to business leaders is essential when times are tough. It also shows that you are just as invested in the business as the decision-makers. Investing in the company increases trust and will pay huge dividends when the situation improves. 

Until next time.