So sure, great, “hardcore agile” is an interesting idea. What…ever.
How does the rubber meet the road? What should we as agilists do, specifically?
In the immortal words of Jack Benny (ask your grandparents who he was) – I’m thinking it over!
I have a few starting points I’d like to toss out.
We want to make organizations better at working in agile ways with the explicit goal that doing this helps the organization as whole be healthier.
What does it mean for an organization to be ‘healthier’? In short, it means the organization is more capable of thriving in its context – in the competitive ecology where it is located. Let’s look at four generic organizations:
Large F500 corporation;
A small or mid-tier business;
Government agency;
Nonprofit.
Thriving, in the context of each of these, means something completely different.
In part, because each is constrained in different ways. The ultimate constraint on an organization is failure. Failure can come in a variety of ways – but the two most common are a) financial – you run out of money and can’t pay your people, rent, or vendors; and b) legal/regulatory – you lose the right for the organization to operate. Most typically, organizations fail when they either run out of money (i.e. can’t meet payroll and expenses) or are foreseen to run out of money. Bookmark this point, because I want to come back in a bit to the notion of what “thriving” means to each of these.
So let’s talk about money first. Think of money as the oxygen the organization needs to live.
· A large company can be likened to a submarine. It has systems in place to generate oxygen and purify the air. There is a large volume of air inside it. So it can survive for quite a while without coming to the surface.
· A medium company is like a scuba diver – it is somewhat isolated from the need for fresh air but has much narrower limits.
· And a small company is like a snorkeler – typically can go under the surface for a bit but needs to surface pretty regularly.
Note – I am NOT saying the only purpose of an organization is to make money, any more than I am saying that the only purpose of a human being is to breathe. But as breathing is necessary to a person, solvency is necessary to an organization.
Part of the challenge I think non-hardcore agilists face is that we tend to ignore this. In large part, because we live and work in the ‘workosphere’ (I brought up the notion a while ago that there are two domains in most organizations, the ‘workosphere’ where value is actually created, and the ‘managesphere’ which is the domain of money and power) and so money just appears every year as a part of our budget or every two weeks in out paycheck.
This suggests the key question - how do organizations stay solvent? And how can agile help them stay solvent?
Well, organizations have a role in the economy – they do something that is perceived as valuable and sell it - receive value for it. The goal is for the value received to be somewhat less than the value given (i.e. the transaction is valuable to the counterparty) and for the value given to be greater than the total value of the inputs that made it up (it’s profitable so valuable to the organization).
OK, let’s examine that cycle and ask what we, as agilists can do to help.
First and foremost, let’s center the question.
“What, exactly, can agile contribute to the survival of the organization?”
Well, agile was originally about discovering and making. So ideally, we can better discover what the ‘thing’ is that the organization will sell and we can better build whatever it is.
That’s a key element of what organizations need, and a place of strength for agile – that’s kind of where it came from. So how should we change agile to help it work better in this context?
Well, for one, we can embrace the context within which we need to be good at discovering and making –the context of organizational success. That means – since we’re talking about money – that we need to maximize the odds that the investment in discovering and making and in getting better at discovering and making through system improvements including getting better at doing agile. I’ll point out that very very (very) few agilists, product discovery folks, and product delivery folks maintain ongoing awareness of the financial impacts and context of the work they are doing.
I’m working on adding some finance to typical product and agile practice (following in the lead of Jason Tanner and Luke Hohmann) – watch this space next week.