I had an awesome time at Agile 2022 here in Nashville (and that’s before the awesome BBQ at Peg-Leg Porker and being blown away at the Opry). I didn’t get to go to enough presentations – I’ll watch the videos and read the decks as they are posted. But I got to meet and talk with a bunch of fascinating folks – most over breakfast and lunch and in the hallways (and yes, men’s rooms) and some formally as a part of the ‘TEG Talks’ (go ahead and groan) we put on at The Eliassen Group booth.
I’ll do a commentary on each of them in the coming week, but I wanted to anchor on one topic that came up at least four times in talks with people with widely divergent approaches to agility.
The foundational topic was “Agile is here. Where is it going?” and my questioning was really about what skills and practices we need to be adding to all of our toolboxes in the coming years.
Now before the reveal, I want to point out that it aligns alarmingly closely to stuff I’ve been talking about here. Close enough that I will rewatch the videos to see if I loaded the conversations (and when they are posted, I’ll ask you all to do the same), and if I did, the crow is gonna be very, very chewy.
Here’s the skill.
Thinking like we are signing the front of the paychecks, not the back.
What?
We need to start thinking like the business in order to think about the business.
To many agilists (and tech folks, and a host of other folks), thinking about the business is done from the seat of someone who assumes the business will always have the resources to do whatever we want. And that the barriers to change and to doing the things we want to do are the annoying executives and managers.
I’ll add that one of the characteristics of too many businesses involves the professional executive management team who also take that view. There is research that highlights the inverse relationship between the size of CEO’s homes and company stock performance.
(The Link Between CEO Mansions and Stock Prices - WSJ)
None of this is good.
And I’m not recommending that agilists become finance majors, or go all Gordon Gekko on us (if you know that reference, welcome to my generation).
But I am saying that – as I’ve mentioned before – agile organizations is not the primary goal. Organizational fitness is the goal, and agility / adaptability is one of the key enablers of that goal.
And for us to play on the broader playing field outside cyberphysical systems (as they say), we need to understand the game we’re asking to be a part of. So ask yourself – not what you’d advise the CEO to do if you got her ear for 15 minutes – ask yourself what you’d do if you were in her seat, and the livelihood of every company employee and the savings of every investor depended on your decisions.