Agilists, check your egos
What if agility is just really useful, and not actually the center of all things?
To be an Agile coach requires a certain lack of humility – we walk into organizations that have and are succeeding (companies in crisis seldom have the change capacity to do an agile transformation) – and assume that we can tell them how (in a domain that we may know little or nothing about) they can do better.
That’s not a bad thing, entirely. No one can successfully make change happen by being timorous.
But it occurs to me that we may need a healthy dose of humility about the centrality of Agile. Most agilists I know come out of software development or implementation (and, sadly, too few have deep skills there), and we tend to assume that something that works well in that limited domain is a magic elixir for everything else. We believe that ‘being an agile organization’ is the central and only path to success.
Mmmmm. Really? More than making the right strategic decisions about what markets to enter? More than making the right product decisions about what we will sell there? More than financial management to make sure we match our plans to our resources and can meet payroll? More than good HR decisions that ensure we hire the right people with the skills and temperament we need? More than good software craft?
Agility has become this kind of contentless ‘excellence’ within our community, and I am starting to think we need to wake up and look around us. We need to realize that it is one of a list of things that organizations need to thrive, not the answer in and of itself. We need to put agile in it’s place … as one of several core things organizations need to get right. Yes, it’s one that can support and assist many of the others.
But it is not a replacement for them.
When we deal with executives who are responsible for overall organizational outcomes, I see too many agilists who get frustrated that the executives won’t center their energy on improving process or agility or culture – because they are “bogged down” in people management, financial management, product management, marketing, sales, quality, and customer engagement.
I don’t see us spending enough time explaining how improving agility can help those functions be better – not replace them, not supplant them – but by supporting them.
And I think more and more that’s what agility is meant to be. A supportive skill that can help organizations do the things the organization is for better. I see agilists on a level with the people who keep the books, hire the teams, and yes, sweep the floors and clean the bathrooms. We need all those to have a well-functioning organization; we need as agilists to embrace our role as being a part of the team and not the center of it.