When Agility goes pear-shaped

10 November 2023

Do you feel stuck in Groundhog Day repeating an hour-long mandatory daily meeting with 12 people? Have you noticed the heavy use of sticky notes as a general practice within your workplace? Do you recognise yourself as spending more time in meetings than doing your actual job? You may be a victim of a Wannabe Agile Organisation (WAO). They can wreck any collaborative work with an enforced 80’s songs quiz, compulsory fun time and no-limit BS culture while WAO proselytes have no shame in hacking any meaningful exchange between colleagues to impose a sticky notes game involving musical chairs, mime and a time-boxed kinder eggs hunt; and if you protest, you may end up in the HR office with a warning, if not worse. Real paper sticky notes are now invading any available surface, while those same WAOs are preaching we shouldn’t print anything unless our lives are at stake. What went so awfully wrong with Agility? And how come such a great idea was turned into a nightmare by WAOs?

The situation

Since 2010, all the WAOs I have worked for proudly exhibit their “Agility”, from just dropping the word into their Mission Statement, pointing out their awesomeness, to imposing Agile made-up interpretations of the worst kind, triggering unhappiness, discomfort and even suffering in the workplace. All organisations want to be at the top of the trends; the ones I worked for wanted to be “customer-centric” in 2008, “Cloud-native” in 2009, “ISO compliant” in 2010, “automated” in 2011, “IoT ready” in 2012, but also “virtual”, “Mobile-friendly”, “GDPR certified”, “Startup-like” even when they had dozens of hundreds of employees on 4 continents and existed since 1976, and above all, they wanted to be “Agile”. I have wondered for a long time why companies placed so much pride in being labelled as Agile. Working in Marketing, I thought that the catchiness of the name, or shall I rather say "the brand” was the main reason for its success. Who doesn’t want to be agile? Who’d rather be seen as arthritic or ungraceful? Thus, some companies used the name and stamped it everywhere on their website, merch, taglines and more, and they became WAOs. I work in Marketing, I contribute to creating those trends – most of the time unwillingly, but who doesn’t have a boss? Yet for Agility like for anything else, the robe doesn’t make the monk and if some WAOs went “the extra mile” from watching a YouTube video to training 3 people who would spread the gospel around for the 297 employees remaining, the efforts vary. What is rather constant, in my experience, is what’s left of Agility, and it is usually comprised of 3 things: heavy use of sticky notes, small unplanned iterations and enforced games. I would arrive in a new WAO where someone would tell me “We’re Agile here, so grab some sticky notes, one-word max on each sticky note, we do small iterations, with Star Wars masks on, our teams have a pseudo from Dragon Ball (so that we ensure no one has a clue what a team does when joining the company) and meeting closes with a best Chewbacca sound contest with a goody for the taking [LOL Wink Thumb-up icons]

I thought Marketing was the all-time champion of shallow gimmicky trends, but it turns out many companies upped their game on idiocy and use Agility as an alibi for totalitarianism, infantilisation, and micro-management.

Debunking the myth

It took me a long time to decide on training and starting my journey to become a certified SCRUM Master. I’ve always worked in Market Development so I would watch the stirring of what WAOs called Agility from a distance, but got more and more involved with Product Marketing until I was proclaimed SCRUM Master without any prior training. Needless to say, this was an absolute disaster and so, I thought I’d get to the bottom of this Agile thingummy and understand what was the hoo-ha about a disruptive thing that, from my poor experience with WAOs, did not convince me in the slightest. But before I start, let me re-establish a hard fact: all the so-called novelties that companies get so excited about are old news. Most of the things WAOs are so eager to embrace were created during the second part of the 20th century. Some improved usability and user-friendliness, some became mainstream, and some only gained exposure but very few things are genuine novelty. Agility is the same. The use of the term scrum in software development came from a 1986 Harvard Business Review paper titled "The New Product Development Game" by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. That’s 37 years ago. As for the SCRUM framework, it was co-created by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber in the early 90’s.

From day 1 of my training I realized that the SCRUM framework was a radical vision that challenged the organisational consensus, yet let us not be fooled, the first thing to grasp is that SCRUM is easy to understand but hard to master [1]. It is intentionally a light framework which is altogether the genius and the potential pitfall. I also got carried away when I discovered the concept of self-organisational and cross-functional teams. I must confess, it felt like a liberation; as if some heavy weight had been lifted from the workplace, or maybe some dream had come true. “Responsibility is freedom”, to quote Sadhguru, and with the SCRUM concept of autonomy and accountability, all my libertarian tendencies were granted. Finally, there was an understanding in the SCRUM community that the Heads, VPs and CxO-of-all-kind layer had to disappear and that we could all live happily ever after in a workplace that would abide by the “no gods, no masters” philosophy. What a relief! I intended to confirm this with my teacher Stuart, who’s been an Agile advocate and a teacher for over 20 years [2]. I believe he’s probably heard every possible misunderstanding about Agility and deals with it with perfect composure and common sense. He told me that “rather than think of hierarchy or flat organisations as either-or, perhaps [I should] think of them as being one or more spectrums. Neither a rigid hierarchy nor a completely flat organisation is realistic. We are somewhere between the extremes”. He also stressed that “CxO specialist roles may disappear but achieving that shouldn't be an objective as internal structure and behaviour should be allowed to evolve.”

Aha. What a shame. I also had in mind an idea where ex-CxOs had a shift with the cleaning team, just to break silos and create connections between departments. Stuart’s reply was non-negotiable: “Everyone doing everything and everyone doing one thing are also extremes”. So, I realised one of the cornerstones of the framework is the concept of free-emerging structure but one size doesn't fit all and Stuart concluded by reminding me that “we all bring our existing values, assumptions, experiences, etc. from the past, and they’re often the main limiting factors in what’s possible”. Well, I plead guilty as charged for twisting it through my own paradigm. The very principle of SCRUM is self-management, accountability and the trust that optimum work is performed when teams are left to decide by themselves who does what and how, and, this is above all, what makes SCRUM so disruptive, if not revolutionary and so counter-intuitive for management. It means that Agility invites organisations to trust people, to empower them to accomplish their greatest potential at work, to feel accountable, therefore involved, and that their opinions matter - pretty much the opposite of enforcing endless so-called “dailies” with Management and infantilizing games in a sectarian environment. I think it is difficult to understand how subversive this is in our pyramidal and siloed world. We think binary: Board members versus the rest of the workers, leaders and followers, VIPs and commoners, thinkers and doers, antagonising people and positions. We struggle to accept that humans are far more complex and multifaceted beings and that this is not a 2-dimensional world. Agility acknowledges that co-workers have far more resources when empowered, to self-organise, and to trust the group that it will self-regulate and maybe seek advice if needed, but that there is no need for external management, let alone micro-management . Could we, at least, really give it a real try?

This year, the Harvard Business School published an article highlighting that between 30% to 60% of employees, depending on countries,  actively sabotage the company they work for when they consider not having the place they should have in their team [3], proving it is in everyone’s interest to start taking Agility seriously.

Stuart suggested that HR workers can make excellent SCRUM Masters because they are generally well-versed in human sciences and interested in people. I have never known of a company that’d take such a bet and I think this would be a great idea. Probably better and more helpful than my plan with CxOs scrubbing the toilets.

The future could be bright

I hope WAOs will eventually bring true Agility to the workplace but it will take training and Stuart added “external help”, which is a proper Agile coach. First, because I truly think that Agility goes in the sense of History and that clinging to past models will carry on achieving very little. Second, stripping all gimmicks and fake dogma about Agility would relieve many people of their workload and allow organisations to start a collective reflection on how to become an Agile entity together, leading to all team members fulfilling their true potential at work, finding a place of quality in their work group and taking accountability within the organisation, with or without a Star Trek quiz on Klaxoon.

Notes

[1 ]“TheSCRUM Guide” by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland

[2] Learn more about Stuart and his course with Holistic Agility https://holisticagility.com/courses/certified-scrum-master/

[3] “Comment en finir avec le sabotage au travail”, Harvard Business Review, August 2023