What Agilists can learn from Amanda Nunes
I want to suggest a possible frame for thinking about the future of agility and the place in it of traditional Agile. It’s a sketch – some thoughts that came to me as I spent three hours in the car yesterday.
The tl;dr is that I think we’re bumping against the problems of success with what we’ve done – in the domains where Agile practices and methods work, we’re adopting and improving them. Where we get in trouble is the areas where we’re looking to replicate that success in other domains without adapting enough. We’re learning that the thing that works here may not be the thing that works there. Being the best wrestler in the world doesn’t help when you opponent can hit you with an elbow. I’m not sure that the patterns that will result in agility in operations or in decisionmaking will look much like the patterns that result in agility in delivery.
I come from a background of technical delivery using Agile (Scrum and Kanban, with a bit of “XP lite”). My universe was bounded by the scope of a defined project where agile practices dramatically improved our delivery toward defined goals by supporting the development of high-performing teams, clarifying what wasn’t really clear, removing obstacles, and engaging customers to make the handoff to production use go more smoothly. These projects ranged from the trivial (build an API that allowed a customer from one company’s website to move to another company’s website with customer and purchase information intact) to the moderately complex (stand up two data centers) to the highly complex (rebuild an enterprise wide customer-data management system for a global company). On that playing field, Agile just plain works.
I migrated into improving the performance of technical delivery organizations, using agile practices (i.e. if every delivery group in the organization acted like the high-performing groups I’d supported, we believed the whole group would be high-performing). I’d say here the experience was more mixed – we eliminated the worst Dilbertisms, lowered the level of friction, moved the best teams upward a lot and moved the medium performing ones up as well. But we ran into organizational and institutional barriers. This started me thinking about what agile organizing principles past the team level would look like and led me to SAFe.
Finally, I became involved in enterprise-wide transformations, where either we were changing all of a business unit within a large enterprise or all of a smaller or medium-sized one. One of the key changes is that we were starting to get engaged with strategic decisionmaking. Here the record is a lot more mixed. Looking across the universe of transformations I know of, I’d say the overall record is the same or worse.
I’d comfortably say all these efforts had immediate ROI in the form of improved delivery. They sometimes – but not always – had improvement in the form of cracking open the organization to broader systemic change and building a cadre of people in the organization who were interested, involved, and committed to the change. But they bogged down – and what I see across organizations that are on their third or fourth wave of Agile transformation – is that they always bog down. There are a lot of specific reasons why, in my view, but what I want to suggest here is a sketch of a systematic explanation.
Let’s imagine that the ecology of any organization (and I do think of them as ecologies…) has three main roles (manifested throughout the organization in all kinds of specialties).
They deliver (they _create_ things – build cars, install machines to build cars, write code in support of the building and installing, etc. etc.)
They operate (they run the things necessary to build cars – ranging from keeping the bathrooms working to maintaining the machines to collecting the money to paying the people who work there)
They decide (they make decisions about what to deliver and how to operate at levels from the highly strategic – what kind of cars? – to deeply tactical – what brush do I use on this toilet?)
Now all three activities interpenetrate at every level of the organization (or they _should_ - that’s one of the points of Agile). But as the ecologies grow, they develop more and more specialized niches, and we wind up with niches where the primary focus is delivery, or operation, or decisionmaking.
And what we see in organizations is increasing isolation not only in the traditional functional silos but between these three functions within silos.
Decisonmaking has increasingly become divorced from execution; delivery from operations.
We’re working in the technical space to solve the delivery – operations gap with DevOps (Which works a treat!). But we’re left with similar gaps in other, equally critical parts of our organizations.
But I don’t think we’re there yet for the rest of the organization.
And I think what thwarts us is that we work on one leg of the stool at a time; we work to make delivery more responsive using Agile methods, but we’re limited by inflexible operations (not just technical operations, but HR and finance and facilities, as examples) and by strategies that are measured more through measuring accomplishment (did we do the thing we’re paying for?) and through success (did it accomplish its’ desired outcome?). And I’m not sure that we – yet – have recipes as good for dealing with operations or with decisionmaking as we do for delivery.
Agile practices as we know them grew up in a subsection of one of these specialized niches – in the delivery of software. We’re like a boxer who – having won in their weight class – decides to step into the ring at a UFC fight.
We need to build libraries of skills to address operations and decisonmaking to help organizations make them as responsive as we’ve been able to make software delivery. I’d caution folks about simply copying and adapting the patterns that work in one domain.
We need to work on all three to get past local success. A successful UFC fighter must be able to box, to strike, and to grapple – there are very few successful one-skill fighters.
In the Agile community, we need to be more like Amanda Nunes and less like Floyd Mayweather.