The Agile Hoax: Exposing the Flaws!
- group Admin
- event_available 06-Jan-2025
The problem isn’t what the agile talking heads are telling you.
Over the last few weeks, we have seen a number of agile talking heads provide their reasons why agile has stumbled so badly. One claimed the problem was all of the project managers who had jumped into agile, while another claimed it was because Scrum and other frameworks had sold out. Another claimed it’s because agile had strayed from its origins of being about software craftmanship. And now we have the merger of Agile Alliance and PMI, which is sure to be sold as solving all of agile’s ills. The truth is that the agile community and organizations trying to implement it have ignored fundamental business concepts from the very beginning. Let’s explore this in more detail below.
The truth is that there have been mistakes made on all sides and the unwillingness of everyone involved to take a step back and try something different has led to today’s current state of agile. The truth is that when we look at the success rate of agile it’s somewhere in the range of 10 to 20%, historically across any type of transformation the success rate is 30%. So, agile is even underperforming historic transformation success rates. You would think this would be enough for many agile practitioners to step back and re-evaluate and try something different. Instead, we see many members of the agile community still standing on the bridge of the Titanic trying to reassure everyone that everything is fine, even after they hit the iceberg. What they don’t understand is that many organizations have already jumped into the lifeboats and the others are looking for them.
The first missed fundamental business concept we clearly see is the confusion between what constitutes “change” versus “transformation.” We see few practitioners or organizations who understand that the two are not the same. Over the years practitioners and organizations have come a long way in learning how to manage change, but they still continue to struggle mightily with transformations. So that we all understand, change is about implementing a set of finite initiatives, which may or may not cut across the entire organization. So, the focus of change is on executing a well-defined shift in the way something works. It’s not easy, but there is a much clearer understanding today about what to do during a change.
When we look at Transformations, they are an altogether different animal. Transformations, unlike change, don’t focus on a couple of discrete, well-defined shifts, instead it looks at a large portfolio of initiatives, which can be interdependent or intersecting. More importantly, the overall goal of a transformation is not just to execute a defined change — but to reinvent the organization and discover a new or revised business model based on a vision for the future. A transformation is much more unpredictable, iterative, and experimental. Transformations entail a much higher risk. And this is critical to understand, even if a successful change leads to the execution of certain initiatives within the transformation portfolio, the overall transformation could still fail.
So, what does this have to do with agile. A mistake we have seen being made by the agile community for years is the conflating of frameworks like Scrum, Kanban or SAFe with agile. To be clear, frameworks like Scrum, Kanban or SAFe are “change”, while agile is a transformation. To be successful in a transformation like agile, it involves many additional initiatives in the portfolio beyond any of these frameworks. The difference between change and transformation is critical, because almost all of the value and benefits organizations desire live at the transformation level.
Another missed fundamental business concept we have seen during agile transformations is the true lack of understanding around the concept of organizational alignment. When we talk with practitioners about organizational alignment, what we hear is a discussion about OKR’s, Epics, Features and Story’s. This is not what we are talking about when we discuss organizational alignment! Organizational alignment means that when executive leadership sets a vision, strategies and goals at the highest level, (Research shows most leaders don’t know how to do this correctly) these then cascade down to the lowest levels of the organization and then cascade all the way back up. Yes, OKR’s, Epics, Features and Stories can be part of the alignment in the form of the work cascading back up, but they themselves are not organizational alignment. In order to have organizational alignment you also have to have members of leadership who are willing to take ownership of this alignment and ensure that the cascading down and up is truly occurring.
Think that organizational alignment doesn’t matter or that you have alignment? Ask yourself these questions, are you overwhelmed with meetings and emails, do you hear individuals making comments like we were told we have to do Scrum/agile, or use this tool, can individuals at the lowest levels of the organization succinctly explain the organizations strategy? These are all classic signs of misalignment and if you aren’t aligned then you have little to no chance of succeeding in your agile transformation.
Let’s next discuss another large missed fundamental concept we continue to see ignored in agile, even though many of the thought leaders in agile, DevOps and agility have been preaching about its importance for years. The subject is organizational culture and behaviors. One thing we want to get out of the way before we dive into this subject is clarifying that organizational culture and organizational behaviors are not the same thing, so please practitioners stop conflating the two. As we discussed in the section on change vs transformation, we pointed out that a transformation is made up of a portfolio of initiatives and one of those initiatives that must be executed early in the transformation is baselining the organizational culture and behaviors, understanding the organizations culture profile, determining what you want your culture and behaviors to be and then having a change management plan to start shifting the culture and behaviors. To be clear, this initiative needs to occur before you start implementing a framework like Scrum or installing DevOps tooling. And lastly to dispel another misnomer, doing Scrum, Kanban, SAFe or installing tooling is not going to magically change the organizational culture or behaviors. You must confront this head on!
Let’s briefly discuss a couple of other missed concepts that we continue to see and also get completely ignored. During any agile transformation you need to re-design roles to align with the new vision of the organization, and you need to change how you incentivize your employees. Why is this critical? The truth is that in almost every transformation we see two things, roles that aren’t well defined and don’t align with what you’re trying to accomplish and worst of all you are incentivizing your employees to resist the changes and transformation. Yes, we said most organizations are incentivizing employees to resist the agile transformation!
Let’s also have a quick discussion on learning during a transformation. We continue to see incorrect content being given to various roles, the wrong type of learning and a complete lack of understanding, the need to focus on unlearning first. To further explain, we still see Scrum/Kanban training being given to senior leaders, this is not what they need. Senior leaders need to focus on strategy, alignment, organizational design and their role in the agile transformation. Also, please stop the death by PowerPoint training, 70 – 80% of all organizational learning comes through hands on learning. So, you need to shift from traditional training to more immersive cohort-based learning. Another common mistake we see is practitioners not understanding that in order to instill new ways of working, mindsets and philosophies you need to first get individuals and the organization to unlearn how they have done things in the past, only then can you have any chance to get them to learn new ways. This incorporates critical concepts like Active Inertia.
Lastly, we have to mention the issue we see with many of the agile practitioners themselves. Let’s discuss just a couple of examples we have witnessed. In one example we witnessed an agile coach at a fortune 50 company telling a Scrum team that the key to business agility was ensuring that they hold all of their Scrum ceremonies. In another fortune 50 company we talked with another agile coach who explained that they had received their agile certification a couple years earlier and were in their first agile coaching role after working as a dietician their whole career. The intent here is not to disparage anyone, but to point out the lack of qualified skills by many in the community to understand, let alone lead an agile transformation.
We encourage you to visit us at The Helix Group, even if it’s just to take a look at our ADAPT Learning Paths to gauge what type of learning is needed to survive in today’s world of agile. https://thehelixgroup.net