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.
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