(2016-09-08) Denning Explaining Agile

Steve Denning: Explaining Agile. Organizations that have embraced Agile have three core characteristics.

1. The Law Of The Small Team (two-pizza team)

most teams in 20th century organizations were teams in name only

It was Agile that figured out how to generate high-performance teams on a consistent basis. If there was a Nobel prize for management, which there isn’t, and if there was any justice in the world, which there isn’t, the creators of Agile would be awarded the Nobel prize for management.

2. The Law Of The Customer

The primary importance of the customer is recognized in the first principle of the Agile Manifesto.

One reason why it’s difficult to understand is that 20th century managers had learned to parrot phrases like “the customer is number one,” while continuing to run the organization as an internally-focused top-down bureaucracy focused on delivering value to shareholders.

In the Agile organization, “customer focus” means something very different. In truly Agile organizations, everyone is passionately obsessed with delivering more value to customers. (customer-driven, Peter Drucker)

3. The Law Of The Network

when Agile teams are housed within a bureaucracy, collaboration between teams can be just as much a problem as it is between silos in a pure bureaucracy.

In surveys that we conducted at Scrum Alliance, we found that some 80-90% of Agile teams perceived tension between the way the Agile team is run and the way the whole organization is run. In half of those cases, the tension was rated as "serious.

Over many decades, multiple fixes were explored to alleviate the static nature of the organization, including task forces, special project groups, strategy departments, tiger teams, skunk works, R&D, dual operating systems, knowledge funnels, design thinking and so on. But these were still fixes to the same concept of the corporation as a static machine with a vertical reporting dynamic. (command and control)

when the whole organization truly embraces Agile, the organization is less like a giant warship, and more like a flotilla of tiny speedboats. Instead of a steady state machine, the organization is an organic living network of high-performance teams.

In Agile organizations, the top management still has the important function of setting direction for the organization (strategic context). People still get fired if they don’t get their job done.

In the Agile organization, radical transparency enables peer-to-peer accountability.

It’s a hierarchy of competence, not a hierarchy of authority. The performance question is not whether you have pleased your boss: the question is whether you have added value to your customer.

In the early years of Agile, critics said that small teams would never be able to handle big complex problems. It turns out that once the teams are housed in a network driven by horizontal conversations focused on a common goal, and operating in a common cadence, then networks of small teams can handle large complex problems with the same agility as small teams—and much better than a bureaucracy. (Agility, Context, and Team Agency)

Ultimately Agile is about embracing a different mindset. The importance of the Agile mindset was striking in the site visits of the Learning Consortium. When people in the organization had the right mindset, it hardly mattered what tools, processes and practices they were using, the Agile mindset made things come out right.