Agile, of Agile Manifesto fame, can never survive on its own. It will forever fall victim to the forces of entropy that exist in all things throughout nature. To make matters worse, Agile succumbs to the will of authoritarian managers who lurk in the corridors of all organizations. The would-be authoritarian, the petty tyrant, the sociopath, the psychopath, those who crave power, and even those who believe (wrongly I might add) that empirical control is necessary to push a project to successful completion, will ultimately have their way and destroy Agile practices.
I also include Design Thinking into this thought process. If you thought that your artistic framework for creative empowerment was beyond tyrannical stain, you thought wrong. Design Thinking is nothing more than Agile under a different name, marketed to non-IT (Information Technology) professionals. Yes, it too will be destroyed by the forces of entropy and perverted by the will of authoritarian managers.
Let us begin by defining what we mean by an Agile organization. Ideally, an Agile organization is one where collaboration thrives. Managers bring business problems to Agile teams and ask, “Can you solve this?” The Agile team rolls up its sleeves and tackles the problem—working together to test ideas, prove and disprove assumptions, and deliver new products to customers. And while the Agile team works in such a manner, the team thinks constantly about the needs of the customer. In this ideal state, Agile team members are free to share ideas, experiment, collaborate, and solve problems that achieve the goals of the organization while overdelivering on customers’ expectations. Team members are excited to get up in the morning and head into the (virtual) office. Their fellow team mates are friends, possibly even perceived as family. The Agile team is a well-oiled, highly adaptive, creative force for customer good. And when organizational goals, industry needs, or customer demands change, this illusive Agile team responds as any special forces mission focused team responds—with gusto, certitude, efficiency, and speed.
Such a utopia can rarely, if ever, be realized. Why? Because every organization is populated with authoritarians, people who attended fancy business schools and who have fun letters like MBA at the end of their email signatures. For Agile to succeed, the authoritarians must lose.
Any project that requires collaboration, experimentation, and a willingness to explore the unknown is messy. Such an endeavor requires, no demands, that people be willing to enter into conflict with those who share opposing ideas. Conflict tempers ideas, spitting out only the best (not necessarily the correct) idea that can withstand the fires of hell that is a project requirements meeting. But because people identify with their ideas, clinging to them as if they were religious doctrine, feelings are going to get hurt in Thunderdome. Society has slowly turned soft since Agile’s inception. During the 90s, corporations were so busy deflecting human resources-related lawsuits arising from people’s feelings being hurt they looked like Dominik Hasek deflecting pucks during the NHL playoffs. Some of these lawsuits were legit, but others, not so much. The result was a world of companies doubling-down on every HR measure to avoid the unpleasantness of a court room.
The resulting fallout of HR related incidences are managers who are extremely sensitive to conflict—something they strive to avoid at all costs—unless they are the ones bringing both barrels to bear. Companies are now averse to any conflict which might occur in their hallowed halls among front-line employees. Social media only exacerbated the problem. Now phrases such as “safe spaces” and “psychological safety” dominate corporate lexicon. Employees must now suffer through diversity trainings, conflict resolution trainings, and trainings to learn how to stifle their biases and embrace inclusivity. Employees can’t tell their colleagues, “Your idea is stupid,” even if the idea is stupid. The risk of HR retribution is far too high.
So now we’ve created an environment where brutal honesty is avoided. But if you want to embrace big hairy audacious goals (BHAGs) and eat your competition for breakfast, then you need brutal honesty. Not only must you be brutally honest with your colleagues, you must be brutally honest with managers who write checks to stakeholders the teams can’t cash. However, nobody challenges the Chief Whatever Officer who doesn’t just have stupid ideas, but ideas that are so far removed from reality that everybody knows he (or she) is an absolute clown.
Yet, we have Scrum teams, or Kanban teams, and we make proclamations that illicit eye-rolls and snide remarks. Proclamations like, “We are an Agile organization!” Teams sit in requirements meetings unable or unwilling to question the status quo. Sorry, they’re not requirements meetings, they’re discovery workshop sessions (we are Agile after all). We collect half-baked user stories because stakeholders answer questions with, “I don’t know,” (which is true) or “I’ll find out” (they never do). And teams are so afraid to debate ideas that they just roll with the first idea from the tech lead or simply punt to “Whatever QA says.” And if we ever attempt to hold a backlog grooming session managers become irate because “You completed discovery 3 weeks ago!” We allow the CWO to set our goals and our deadlines all while he demands that we create a project schedule that he will never review and will never look at. And yet, he will become enraged when we fail to hit our timeline—you know, the timeline he set for us before we ever knew the full scope of the work.
The deadline rockets toward us at ludicrous speed and roars right past. The CWO loses his mind. Middle managers demand to know what happened. Project managers, like Wormtongue in business casual, whisper into the ears of management, “Trust me.” Management doesn’t trust the Agile teams (“They can’t deliver”) and so they go to that playbook they learned back in business school—command and control.
Management willfully, or ignorantly, ignore the piles of evidence showing how waterfall projects fail, and embrace the command and control techniques of waterfall project management. You see, letters like MBA, PMP, PMO, or CPM are nothing more than the calling cards of authoritarian religious ideology. Such letters inculcate into believers that metrics, rules, policies, centralization, and standardization are the answers. Freedom of thought and rationality are the enemies of authoritarians. All those rules, polices, and metrics are born from a lack of trust and are designed to abolish free thinking. Why do you think the project management office creates templates? “We can’t trust our employees to do the job so here’s a template and a procedure so they don’t have to think.”
Even if you achieve the promised land, that Nirvana of organizational agility, you did so because a select few leaders blocked and tackled so you could run the ball down the field. Unfortunately, those leaders, like any mercenary worth his (or her) salt, will soon depart the company and take their Agile authority with them. New leaders will be installed and those leaders will not trust what they did not create—so they burn it down while proclaiming, “I know all there is to know about Agile because I did it in my last organization.” Nobody has a way of knowing if that’s true (hint: it isn’t). Within 6 months your Agile kingdom will be pillaged and ravaged—scorched Earth policies are always embraced by managers looking to move up the corporate ladder.
Oh sure, the remnants of Agile will remain for quite a while. Teams will still have daily standups. But slowly Gantt charts and standard processes will come down from Mount PMO insisting that all Agile teams follow waterfall phases. New words such as “wagile” and “scrumbut” will become the norm. And like rats on a sinking ship, employees will flee the company. Managers will wear confused faces while lamenting to absolutely no one, “I have no idea why all these people are leaving.”
You see, Agile can never survive for long.