An Essential Guide WHAT IS A GILE - The Agile Advisor · deviation from the organisation’s...

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An Essential Guide

WHAT IS AGILE

INDEX:

What is Agile?

3

What is an Agile Coach?

5

What is the Agile Mindset?

8


What is Agile?

Over the last few years, the word Agile (or agile with a small a) has taken on different meanings

and used in multiple contexts. In this section I

give my perspective on what Agile is.

I’m not going to bore you with the 2001 meeting, agile manifesto, or

an

intro to

XP,

Scrum

or

Kanban. That’s been done a gazillion times before.

Instead, I want to look at what Agile is now. And why it is hard for beginners to get their head

round it.

This diagram is still the best overview I can find.

If you were thinking

Agile is a set of different methodologies for getting software built, then you

are only

very

partially correct. That viewpoint fits well into a subset of the ‘practices’ part of the

onion. But Agile is a whole lot more than that.

The larger the onion circ le, the more powerful but less obvious it is.

‘Tools’

in the middle are

really easy to see. You can see big boards with post -its or

Jira

instances easily. But on their

own, they are pretty useless.

The

‘practices’

include:

§

Scrum

§

Kanban

§

XP


§

Story writing and

mapping

§

Prioritising

§

Roadmap creation

§

Beyond budgeting

§

agile HR practices

§

and a whole host of other things.

These practices are really easy to understand, are

really hard to make stick and get any real

value out them. Ever see a Scrum team doing all the m eetings, using Jira, and trying really hard

and not getting any value out? Chances are the team, or the organisation is missing the more

important circles of the onion.

‘Principles’

are things like, ‘we complete all the work we start in a sprint’, or ‘our highest priority

is to produce working and useful software every 2 weeks’. Having these allow the team and

organisation to optimise around their principles, cutting away crazy decisions like having a silo

database team.

Without principles, the team will op timise around other things, such as:

§

Keeping people busy §

Bowing to pressure from other sources than the PO

§

Not shaping work correctly

‘Values’ are even more important and even more intangible. We know from ‘5 Dysfunctions of a

Team’ that the first starting block for any high performing team is trust. If trust isn’t encouraged

through respect and courage to speak out, which are all values, then high performance is going

to be a distant concept, perhaps bringing up images of Formula One teams rather than teams at

work.

Finally, the hardest for all to see, the

‘Mindset’. You can’t teach this. Or at least not directly.

Some people have this naturally. Most

children probably do. Sometimes, just like Zen, the

Agile

mindset

is obtained not by learning, but by

unlearning all those layers of command and control,

Theory X, and Project Management skills.

By doing and then being agile, and having the support, skills, and knowledge of those around to

keep

being

agile,

you can finally have something that works in the organ isation.

It’s not to say that the smaller circles don’t add value, but they won’t add as much value as you

had hoped or they won’t stick. You must achieve the cultural changes in the organisation that

changing the mindset brings.

And this means:

§

the exec team

§

the finance office

§

HR

§

legal


§

procurement

§

and all the middle managers

§

as well as the delivery teams

must make that

mindset

shift

too.

That is what agile is. It is the change of an organisation’s culture from one place to another.

That means it is changing what is in people’s heads. It changes the way we think and interact.

This takes time as it’s incremental. It can’t be done all at once. This is why it takes so long. It

takes time to change the way people are.

Sometimes I think that organisations which are ‘going agile’, don’t realise what they are starting.

What is an Agile Coach?

The word ‘coach’, like the old stage coaches, can be taken to mean a vehicle by which people

are transported from one place to another.

The agile journey, of course, is not geographical, it is mental. It is a

mindset shift that allows the

organisation’s survival in a complex and adaptive marketplace and to make people’s working

lives better and for them to reach their true potential.

I don’t want to discuss what value or risk reduction is, or even people’s true potential. These are

unique to your situation. And that is where the challenge lies.

The Business Need

Why can’t an organisation just install current best processes, practices, and tools, by defining

artefacts, roles, the interactions between roles, and tell staff to get on with it?

To ask that question demonstrates the underlying problem. Without the right

mindset, it is

impossible to even see the right problem, let alone the right solution.

Agile is not just a set of tools, processes, and practices, as we saw in the

previous section . It is

an adaptive solution that requires decisions to be made on an hourly or daily basis by the

people doing the work.

The inner parts of the onion are not fixed.

Instead, the tools and p ractices are held in balance to serve the immediate need of the current

marketplace and need to be adapted continuously and relentlessly by people who understand

the underlying principles, values, and mind-set.


Without the right mind set, values, and principles, the organisation won’t understand or be able

to make the right changes. They simply won’t allow the right process and tools to be

implemented, which includes the devolution of power (trust) and allows those closest to

problems to solve those problems and to adapt the process they follow.

Even if the right processes and tools were somehow magically

installed, the ‘current best

practices’ would immediately become old and any adaptation and self -improvement can only

be

as good at the collective a gile mind-set of those making the corrective changes.

Given where most organisations are right now, without coaches, the

mindset

adoption is

quite

likely to be low, resulting in a large gap between the potential value possible and the actual

value realised. In other words, an organisation’s tools and processes need to adapt at least as

fast as the demands placed on them by the rapidly changing market place. Without help, that

lack of agile mind-set will not allow the right improvements to be continually made, and a gap

will appear between what is needed and what exists.

That gap is exactly the size of the deficit of the aggregate

agile

mindset

of all the people

involved compared to where they could be with the right coaching. In other words, it is the

deviation from the organisation’s optimal process due to the lack of agile

mindset,

values, and

principles of those making the optimisation decisions.


The Role of the Coach

It is the role of Agile / Lean Coaches to fill that gap, by guiding the organisation cont inuously to

make the right decisions until the principles, values and mind -set are transferred to everyone in

the entire company. When this has been achieved, the coaches should not be needed.

Coaches do this by:

§ training groups of people,

§

coaching indiv iduals,

§

mentoring staff,

§

facilitating workshops,

§

building and maintaining relationships with everyone involved.

A coach’s must haves

Coaches must have a deep understanding of the Agile / Lean landscape .

All coaches are different, having different specialisms, such as technical, business, or

transformation mastery. They vary by their own understanding and experience.

An organisation needs to balance its group of coaches so that all the coaching specialisations

are covered by the group. It is unlikely to find a single coach that can cover all aspects of

organisational change.

Coaches need to have deep emotional intelligence.

This allows them to perceive and remove roadblocks that appear in a person’s ability to change.

They need to be able to open people’s minds to new possibilities. This requires courage, trust,

and patience.

Coaches need to be free from hierarchal and political constraints.

To be able to open people’s mind to new possibilities, coaches need to be free from

hierarchical constraints and the political restrictions this brings. They need to have access to

everyone. They need to have a wide scope. Without that, the right conversations will not

happen; the mind -set will not change, and the tools, practices, and processes will deviate fro m

what is required, and the agile journey (or worse, the organisation) will fail.

Conclusion

Agile Coaches are the vehicle by which individuals learn to be

agile. Coaches

open people’s

minds to new possibilities which changes the way they make decisions a nd interact with each

other. Over time, those being coached will change their organisation’s culture. Agile Coaches


give the organisation the ability to adapt to new challenges and to become a learning

organisation. This is a multi -year adventure for most organisations, although many do not

realise it when they begin.

Eventually, the Coaches can leave because the organisation has transparency, ability to adapt,

and learning in its DNA. The organisation through its staff, embody the agile minds et, values,

and principles, allowing adaptation in processes and tools.

What is the Agile Mindset?

The agile mindset seems to be a mythical abstract quality that is hard to define and often

glossed over in agile discussions. It is the outermost ring in the popular metaphor

agile

onion.

The model tells us the mindset is the most powerful of the layers that make up agile. It is where

‘being agile’ comes from, rather than ‘doing agile’, which is the domain of the inner rings of the

onion. But what does this really mean?

My experience has led to the

Powers’

definition of

the

agile

mindset.

The mindset is defined by

just three beliefs:

§ The complexity belief

§ The people belief

§ The proactive belief

There are no more, just these three things.

The Complexity Belief

Many of the challenges we face are complex adaptive problems, meaning that by

trying to solve these problems we change the nature of the problem itself.

As acorollary to the complexity belief, an attribute of complex adaptive problems is

that the end solution is not predictable at the outset.


Cynefin

is a useful sense making model for problem solving by categorising problems into types

of complexity and then determining what approach we should take to generate solutions. We

can use Cynefin to categorise

problems into 5 types, with each type called a separate

domain .

Three of these domains are of particular interest when discussing agility.

If the problem sits in the Complicated domain, this means it will require the help of specialists

(domain experts) to derive a solution rather than a lay person. The solution can be known in

advance through planning and analysis, and the result can be predicted with reasonable

accuracy at the outset. Solving large problems of this nature is achieved efficiently by grouping

specialists together to optimise for knowledge and consistency.

An example of a problem in the Complicated domain is building a house. The house can be

planned up front, the environment analysed, materials purchased, built, and tested, with the end

result hardly deviating from the original plans.

If a problem sits in the Complex domain, the solution can not be predicted in advance because

the act of solving the problem changes the problem itself. Often volatility, uncertainty,

ambiguity, and an increas ing rate of change, play a critical part in defining the challenge of

solving problems in the Complex domain. Often there are multiple right options to try when

trying to define and solve Complex problems.

An example of a problem in the Complex domain is innovative product design, where feedback

and market reaction from initial model releases drive the features of later product models.

Building software products is another example that nearly always falls into the Complex

domain.

Agile is for solving proble ms in the Complex domain.


“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to

treat everything as if it were a nail.” – Abraham Maslow

The third area of interest is the Disorder domain which is represented as a ?

in the diagram. This

is the default domain for situations where we do not know what type of problem we are facing.

In this domain, the solver of problems uses the tools they are most familiar with. In most

organisations today, leaders default to industria l management styles and process because that

is what they are most familiar with. The effect of not understanding complexity, and as a result,

not having the Complexity Belief, is that many leaders are using tools optimised for problems in

the Complicated domain to solve problems in the Complex domain.

Enterprise agility is the result of using the right tools for the right problems.

An example of using the wrong tool, i.e. a tool designed for the predictable nature of the

Complicated domain for problems that are really in the Complex domain, is the yearly budget

cycle.

Doing months of planning to reduce risk and secure funding for the next whole year

doesn’t

make sense when the problems you are solving are complex adaptive, because the plans are

out of date extremely quickly, and this process actually increases the risk of

failure significantly.

Another example of using the wrong type of approach for complex adaptive pr oblems is

splitting the organisation into ‘the business’ and ‘technology’, or within technology, forming

teams around architectural components, services, and skill sets.

These are examples of optimisations for problems we are no longer solving.

Instead, agile teams are optimised around cross -functional teams comprising of ‘business

people’ as well as different technology specialisms, so that all the skills that are needed are

easy accessible. This is an optimisation to reduce the time it takes to deliver and get feedback.

A critical component of success when solving complex adaptive problems.

“Cash is not king , it is the number of attempts youget

before the cash runs out that drives success” – EricRies –

The lean startup


Organisations, that embrace agil e through the

complexity belief, find that the resulting values,

principles, practices, and tools, are aligned to solve the problems they face.

The People Belief

Every person is intrinsically good, meaning they are well intentioned, they

are motivated by higher purpose,meaning they are motivated to be part of

something bigger than just themselves.That they operate in service toothers.

Everyone has the potential, given that their basic needs are met,to be more than

they are currently.

Michael Sahota gives us one view that the agile

manifesto

can

be

simplified

to

people

over

process. This set of people beliefs, enable us to make decisions that optimise our people to

succeed in solving complex adaptive problems.

If we examine leadership models in a growing company, as Ralph Stacey and Chris Mowles did

in their book ‘Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics’, we can see that the

management style for bringing the optimal outcome in a complex adaptive environment is for

managers to stand outside of the system, manage context, and let the people self-organise.

They go further to say that it is best not to have a solid blueprint of centralised control that

defines culture and behaviours, but to let leaders and managers stand outside of the process

and identify the minimum constraints and create the context to produce self-organisation.

Self-organisation

is the process whereby order arises from local interactions without external

control.


From Google’s work on

creating

the

perfect

team

and from work such as the

5

dysfunctions

of

a

team

we know that an essential ingredient in creating self-organisation is psychological safety

through a high trust environment.

Alistair Cockburn, a signatory to the agile manifesto,

identified this need in 2004 in his

book

Crystal

Clear, he called it personal safety, and that this was an early step towards trust,

and a ‘critical property to attain’.

The Scrum Guide also details autonomy, the ability to choose how you complete your work, as

part of the

role

descriptions

in

Scrum. Extreme Programming has

Respect

and

Courage

as

core

values, which are there to facilitate honest feedback and the ability to improve.

The conditions for self -organisation and autonomy, which is a critical attribute of teams that are

successful in solving complex adaptive problems, only occur when managers and leadership

engage in the

positive

upward

spiral

of

appropriate delegation

and

empowerment

and teams

step up to the challenge with full awareness of what t hey are trying to achieve.

Peter Senge in his book ‘ The

Fifth

Discipline’ details that the optimal way to motivate people is

through purpose. He states that vision without purpose is just a good idea. This is backed up by

data in Dan Pink’s book ‘Drive’ an d in his

popular video

on

motivation . Dan Pink also give

Autonomy as another key motivator for those solving complex adaptive problems.

If we are to succeed in solving large complex problems we need to create teams that

self-organising, motivated, and empowered to make local decisions.

This requires leaders and managers to have the appropriate behaviours and agile governance in

place that is based around trust, transparency, and the belief that people are trying to do the

right thing.

I propose this is not possible, unless we have a positive

belief system around people that allows

us to respond in a mature and beneficial way. This was detailed in the poorly named ‘Theory X

and Theory Y’ model from Douglas McGregor in the 1960s

If you are a Theory X manager who believes people are only motivated by their own self interest

and are lazy if not motivated by carrot and stick behaviour, then how will you put in place the

necessary trust model to allow people to self-organise?

It is not enough to pretend to have a p ositive belief system, this would be unauthentic and

during times of stress, the true beliefs will surface. Given many people spend their working lives

under some form of stress, this does not bode well for pretenders who are trying to lead people

solving complex adaptive problems with beliefs that contradict the agile mindset.

This is backed up by

medical

science. Stress causes us to create cortisol which changes the

way our body functions to the fight or flight responses. For a short period, this elevates

our


physical abilities. However, production of cortisol and adrenalin changes the way the Reticular

Activating System gives us choice of our responses. We effectively only see options available

from the ‘survival brain’ of the brain stem or ‘emotional bra in’ of the limbic system and not the

options usually available to us when relaxed, from the ‘thinking brain’ of the neo -cortex. How

we re-act in stressful situations is not what we think, that is not available, but what underlying

beliefs we have.

In a recent workshop, we discussed the participant’s behaviours when in a stressed state. The

responses were that they saw decisions as binary options. Attendees reported that they were

right and the other person was wrong, and that they would expect the absolute best

performance out of everyone around them and would react badly if the other person’s

performance did not meet expectations.

These behaviours are what you need when fighting bears, or putting out fires, but exactly the

wrong behaviours when trying to le ad people who are solving complex problems.

From cognitive behavioural therapy, we can borrow the ABC model which describes the

creative mode or as Steven Covey puts it, the pro-active and ‘response able’ mode (meaning

capable of choosing your response ). We can see that actions do not create human responses.

Instead, actions are perceived by a person, and that person responds based upon their belief

system. Being aware or ‘having

emotional

intelligence’ is the ability to change one’s belief

system such that the response to any action is conscious, positive, and beneficial, and not

reactive, impulsive and potentially destructive.

In other words, it is

not

the external environment and the challenges of work that cause stress

and negative behaviours. It is

the translating underlying belief that creates behavioural

consequence.

Building

positive

belief systems that allow us to respond in a mature and beneficial way is vital

for leaders who are trying to create the right environment for others to solve complex adaptive

problems.

To enable the best outcome, leaders can take on a coaching role, often called ‘servant

leadership’. From John Whitmore, in his book on ‘ Coaching

for

Performance’, we find that the

optimal belief to enable empowerment is one of ‘empathy, unconditional positive regard for


those being coached, and congruence’. This is based on work done by Carl Rogers and his

work on person centred therapy.

By congruence, he means acting naturally and consistently with one’s own beliefs.

These specific beliefs result in compassion and the desire to help others be the best that they

can be.

It changes one’s desires and resulting actions from selfishness to service. This is

exactly what is needed to allow autonomy and self-organisation.

This is what Einstein meant when he said:

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

The problems we face now require a new way of thinking. Agile and Lean are frameworks for

surviving, growing, and stabilising

our organisations in rapidly changing complex adaptive

systems. New leadership and management styles are needed in the new social and business

situations we are facing. These can only be achieved with a different belief model or in other

words, the agile mindset, as defined here.

The Proactive Belief

Proactivity in the relentless pursuit of improvement.

This belief is derived from and a consequence of the other two beliefs. I nearly didn’t include

this belief, but without it, it may leave one without a direction in which to travel to solve complex

problems.

The problem statement changes as we interact with it. It is necessary to learn as much as we

can and as often as we can, so that we are able to determine how the problem has changed

and what we need t o do next.

This process is built into the various Agile frameworks, and is encapsulated in the empirical

process, however, it is surprising how many product teams do not collect feedback on whether

their output created the right outcome.

To enable the othe r beliefs to actually deliver success, there needs to be a pro-active effort to

collect feedback on what works and what does not, both with the deliverable and the process

which delivers it.


The key point here, is that you must improve the process you are using as well as the product.

This means agile and lean processes are

dynamic

in their nature. The Cynefin framework

defines these processes as emergent. That is the process emerges as you learn more. You

can’t emerge a process without solid understanding of process design and the underlying

understanding of people as defined here.

This is why you need people who have the agile mindset at all levels of the continuous process

creation otherwise the decisions made to change the process

will

deviate

from

the

optimum.

Demming created the

Plan,

Do,

Check,

Act cycle, often referred to as the Demming cycle. The

3

pillars

of

Scrum

are Transparency, Inspection, Adaption, that like the Demming cycle are

implementations of the relentless pursuit of improvement.

From Lean we have the Japanese work Kaizen, which in process design means ‘Continuous

Improvement’. This is the same idea.

Putting it all together

These three beliefs define the agile mindset. If you understand the true nature of the problems

you are trying to solve, engage people in the right way, and proactively and iteratively work

towards the outcome you need, you have the agile mindset, and a fighting chance of success!

From this mindset,

you can derive all the agile values, principles, practices, and tools, in the

agile onion.


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