The Future of Agile in Organizations

BSS Nexus Global © 2013April 2013
The Future of Agile in Organizations
Larry Cooper
Senior Partner, BSSNexus
President, AthenaNexus

Agenda
Which Age do you live in?
What is Agile?
What’s happening now?
What does that mean to our Organizations?

WHICH AGE DO YOU LIVE IN?

The Ages
Agrarian
Industrial
Digital

Agrarian Age
Move from hunter/gatherers to farming and ranching
Focus on the land and self-sufficient farming
Some specialized roles began to develop – but no hierarchies
Attention to communication

Characteristics
Invention of writing with need to keep records of planting and
harvests, taxation and barter
Education limited to an elite
School calendar revolved around the summer harvest

Industrial Age
Mass production – machines became means of production,
replacing land
Centralization - organize large groups of workers (assembly
line of Henry Ford)
Separation of ownership and management

Creation of the bureaucracy

Focus on the 3Rs

Characteristics
Introduction of Hierarchies
It is a ‘boss-driven’ world focused on creating ‘shareholder
value’
Traditional educational institutions have monopoly on learning

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226346

HUMANS AS RESOURCES – THE
DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

The dirty little secret…
“The Messy Link Between Slave Owners and Modern Management”, http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7182.html
"From Slavery to Scientific Management: Capitalism and Control in America, 1754-1911,“, Caitlin C. Rosenthal , Hard Fellow,
and the forthcoming edited collection “Slavery's Capitalism”
Baby: $150 26 Yr old: $1500
55 Yr Old: $150 48 Yr old: $900
Resource?

Characteristics
Absentee “ownership”
Separation of Ownership & Management
Widespread adoption of accounting techniques – Asset
appreciation/depreciation
People…as assets…resources…

Intended Result of her Research
• Rosenthal says “she wants her research to inform managers and companies to become
more aware of the complicated legacy of today's business practices and the origins of
some of their day-to-day management practices.”
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/03/ideas-bank/we-need-a-new-language-for-the-collaborative-age

Digital Age
Rapid pace of change
Internet has created the mechanism for “mass collaboration”
Ascendance of Knowledge Networks
Decline of facilities and machines as critical economic assets

Characteristics
It is a ‘customer-driven’ world focused on creating ‘customer
value’
Core values – knowledge and speed & collective intelligence
over individual intelligence
Hierarchies are its antithesis
Diversified educational models

WHAT IS AGILE?

What is Agile?
Manifested
through
Practices
Guided by
Principles
Defined by
Values
Mindset

What is Agile?
A way of thinking about and
inculcating agile behaviours,
attitudes, culture, leadership
styles, etc.
Manifested
through
Practices
Guided by
Principles
Defined by
Values
Mindset
Our belief and value systems
e.g. Agile (software) Manifesto,
Agile Marketing Manifesto
e.g. The 12 Principles
e.g. Scrum, XP, Lean, DSDM,
Crystal, Lean, etc.

Agile’s Prime Directive
“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and
truly believe that everyone did the best job they
could, given what they knew at the time, their skills
and abilities, the resources available, and the situation
at hand”
Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews

1970
Dr. Winston Royce
(Incremental not Waterfall)
1959
W.L. Gore & Associates
“lattice” management

Definition
ag•ile
ædʒ əl, -aɪlShow Spelled [aj-uh l, -ahyl]
adjective
1. quick and well-coordinated in movement; lithe: an agile leap.
2. active; lively: an agile person.
3. marked by an ability to think quickly; mentally acute or aware: She's 95 and still very agile.
________________________________________
Origin:
1570–80; earlier agil < Latin agilis, equivalent to ag- (base of agere to do) + -ilis -ile
Related forms
ag•ile•ly, adverb
ag•ile•ness, noun
un•ag•ile, adjective
un•ag•ile•ly, adverb
Synonyms
1. nimble, sprightly. 2. brisk, spry.
Antonyms
1. awkward. 2. sluggish, lethargic.

True Goal of Agile Practices
“Accelerate speed to Value
by doing Less”
Pat Reed
• This is not “doing more with less” – it means to do only
those things that create value!

In practice
Characterised by Emphasizes
Self-organizing, self-managing, and
self-directing
Highest Value first
Time-boxed iterations
Continuous delivery
Transparency and truthfulness
Customers over bosses – it’s an
‘outside-in’ view
Value Management orientation
over requirements management
orientation
Simplicity over complexity
Leadership over directed
management
Roles over job titles

In practice…
“Adults enter into contracts, choose mates, raise children, and make
all sorts of important decisions. Why do we expect that those very
same adults need close supervision when they come to work?”
http://agile.dzone.com/articles/how-much-self-management-right

And…some new terms emerging
Compass Metric
Strategic Iteration
Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLE)
Connected Collaboration
“Radical Management” – Steven Denning
People Agility, Change Agility, Results Agility

WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW?

Some of the Realities
The new normal is that there is no normal
Business issues have shifted from discrete problems to holistic
messes - requiring holistic, networked, collaborative
approaches to resolve
We cannot use the past to predict the future (Moore’s Law
now applies to our business environment)
Creative disruption is becoming a constant: E.g. 3D/4D printing…

Effects of Social Media
2009 US DoE: On average, online students out-performed those
receiving face-to-face instruction
Groupon reached $1 billion in sales faster than any company in
history
Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
90% of consumers trust peer recommendations - only 14% trust
advertisements
What “happens in Vegas” stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter,
Facebook…
In 10 years over 40% of the Fortune 500 will no longer be here
(some put it as high as 70% of the Fortune 1000!)

PUBLIC SECTOR

UK Government
“The Government intends to use agile in information and
communications technology (ICT) procurement and delivery to
reduce the risk of project failure. At a hearing of the Committee
of Public Accounts in May 2011, it became clear that the
Government did not consider agile solely as a method for
improving software development. It is also a technique for
successful ICT-enabled business change. The then Cabinet Office
Permanent Secretary stated that “there is no such thing as an IT
project; there are only business projects that involve IT”. He also
said that trying “to change the whole system nationally on a
single day – the so-called ‘big bang’ implementation – is doomed
to failure in almost every situation.”

UK Government - Agile Governance
Only do a task if it brings value to the business
Teams should decide performance metrics they will use and
self-monitor
Collaborative approach requires an essential change in mindset
External assessment or reviews of Agile delivery should focus on the
teams’ behaviours and not just processes and documentation

US Government

Government of Canada
Consolidate web-presence
Organized by User needs not by how government is
organized
Engage Canadians through social media
Accelerate deployments

PRIVATE SECTOR

W.L. Gore and Associates
“There are neither chains of command nor predetermined channels of communication.
Leaders replace the idea of “bosses.
Associates choose to follow leaders rather than have bosses assigned to them.
Associate contribution reviews are based on a peer-level rating system.”
Introduced “lattice management” in 1959 because the “real
conversations happen in the car pools”
Terri Kelly earned the title of president and CEO in 2005
(one of the few titles at Gore) following a peer-driven
selection process.

Cloud in Private Sector

Intel
At $10k – small number of PCs shipped
At $1k – 100m units/year
At $600-700 – 300m units/year
At $10 – 1b units/year (means $100
machines)
From 2005 to 2011 to get company to
understand consequences

Local Company: Shopify

Old and New
Ford: Weekly Strategic Iteration meetings
Blue-Cross Blue-Shield FEIP: Leaders as facilitators of
strategy execution and performance
SalesForce: Work on the most important thing first, then the
second, then the third…

Canada’s Best Managed Companies
http://www.slideshare.net/DeloitteCanada/deloitte-8-simpleq6full1bpptx-1
Simplicity leads to clarity
Clarity leads to focus
Focus leads to success

EDUCATION

Schools
• “School in the cloud” – Sugata Mitra
• 400+ “grannies from the UK” – simple encouragement is as good
as classroom instruction…they taught themselves about DNA
replication…
TED Talks: http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html
Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs)
(India, UK, Australia, NZ…)

Universities/Colleges
Connected Collaboration to foster more innovation between
specializations across universities – they should be collaborators
not competitors
Competency-based evaluation of university/college programs
(Badges)
Outcomes-based learning focused on job markets
Universities (US, Middle East, Europe, India) wanting to have
students graduate with ICAgile accreditation (Badges)
“Degrees, certificates...Badges?”, TVO, April 13, 2013

Massive Open Online Courses
(MOOC)
Large scale interactive participation
Distance education that builds communities of students,
professors, and TAs
Early days but gaining in popularity

Training/Education Providers
Adjust offerings away from teaching traditional management and
its methods
Blended-learning formats
Greater emphasis on experiential learning
Participants in defining the content and context of offerings

Agile is everywhere…
Executive Leadership – Ford, Blue Cross-Blue Shield, SalesForce
Healthcare – Kanban to cut wait times and lab work queues
Self-organized Learning Environments (SOLEs) – NZ, Australia, UK,
India
“The school system isn’t broken.
It’s functioning exactly the way it was intended.
It is simply that it is obsolete”
– Sugta Mitra

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO AN
ORGANIZATION?

Rod Collins, Upcoming book commissioned by American Management Association
“leaders are feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change and
they believe there must be a better way of leading and managing”
Emerging Practice
Serendipity over planning
Self-organization over central organization
Emergence over directed
Simple rules over detailed coordination
Transparency over control

In a Networked/Connected World…
The drivers of people motivation are different – employees,
customers/clients, partners, etc.
Leaders have to rely on collective over individual intelligence
The leader steers the culture – the culture steers the organization
Delighting the customer/client is the imperative
There are many possible right answers from which to choose – emergent
discovery over decision-making

Traditional Thinking Limits Options
Trying to apply traditional management tools to new problems
(Risk: unknown-unknowns)
Knowledge management: expertise can no longer be leveraged
through codification (if it ever could…)
Adherence to formal job descriptions limits agility and promotes
dysfunction

Which Mindset?
http://ewsatc.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/why-so-few/

Culture
http://www.infoq.com/articles/organizational-culture-and-agile

Beliefs and Value Systems
Disciplines and roles over job descriptions and titles
Adapting multiple methods over adopting individual methods
(emergent discovery)
Education and “learning how to learn” over just training in
particular methods
Innovative thinking over just content expertise

“Well look, I already told you.
I deal with customers so the engineers don’t have to.
I have people skills.
I’m a people person, dammit!
Don't you see that?”
Tom from movie “Office Space”

Shift in Power and Balance
Shift from being in charge to being connected
Shift from knowing to learning
Shift from leveraging individual intelligence to empowering collective
intelligence
Shift from planning to adapting
The leader is no longer expected to be the single source of wisdom

Tolerance for Ambiguity
Iterate so you can learn and manage through uncertainty
Failing fast is a good thing
Tolerate ambiguity in the presence of a clear vision
Embrace creative disruption

Core Business
Outside-in focus negates the “bosses” in favour of customers/clients
Lean and Agile principles and practices are and will continue to
infiltrate everyday work
Learning will be part of daily work and work teams will be more
common across the organization
Ideation and innovation will occur at all levels
Leaders will need to be facilitators and coaches

IT
Fewer traditional pure technical roles
Greater emphasis on business skills over technical skills (e.g.
Outside-in Service Management)
Interpersonal and team collaboration skills
Agile Operations (e.g. DevOps)
Realization that Agile is a lot more than just a set of methods and
practices

Marketing

Human Relations
Focus on people, as…people…and not as resources and not be an
extension of the legal department
Need to hire people who are used to ambiguity and have mastered
“learning how to learn”
Job descriptions will be replaced by a focus on roles and disciplines
Designing performance and compensation systems that support the
new motivators and drivers
Leaders and managers will be expected to handle their own “people
issues”
Adjust to changing workplace demographics

Learning and Development
Agile approaches getting applied to training/educational content
development
“Learning-in-context” of doing work
In-person learning will be experiential focused; methods and
practice will move on-line
Teaching “learning how to learn” becomes a bigger issue
Self-organized learning and other learning practices will become part
of everyday work environments

Unlearning our old ways…
“How is education supposed to make me feel smarter?
Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain.
Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?”
Homer Simpson

Finance
Procurement needs to be simpler, faster, and be driven by value
delivery goals; this can still be done by following transparency,
compliance, and cost parameters
Capitalizing asset investment based on the new ways of working
can improve the bottom line (Citrix On-line saved $10M in taxes)
Partner/vendor selection based on intangibles such as culture
and adoption of similar agile thinking and practices
Too much focus on shareholder value can destroy customer value

Leadership
Leaders expected to communicate and live the vision and to design the
work environment (the container) and let their teams define the content
Networked Leader will be valued as will leader as facilitator
Many suitable management models from which to adapt
Decision-making models will give way to discovery models that
focus on learning and adapting over knowing
Teams will form to solve a problem or approach a new opportunity –
without direction to do so

How do we define Success?

It’s just a matter of time before all of us will be asking the question that
is causing so many twenty-somethings to turn their backs on traditional
companies today: “Why, when we are able to quickly collaborate in
cyberspace with all kinds of people from all over the globe, is it so hard to
get anything done whenever we get together in the same room?”
Rod Collins

We need to be dogmatic about our goals,
not our methods...

For more information
(and to sign up for e-book)
Larry.Cooper@BSSNexus.com
Larry.Cooper@AthenaNexus.com
ca.linkedin.com/lawrencekcooper
Twitter: @coopelk99
Skype Id: Larry.Cooper
+1 (613) 868-0982 (cell)
+1 (888) 316-2745
BSSNexus Global Inc.
AthenaNexus Inc.

The Future of Agile in Organizations

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