8. Transforming Ways of Working
Making Everyone Smarter
A ReBoot Co. blog series that helps you & your teams discover a better way of working.
In my early 2000’s transformations I used to send a ONE PAGE EMAIL explaining what Agile was, it contained an explanation of what User Stories were, and 5 links to places where more information could be found.
In one of my favourite jobs more than a decade ago I was complaining to my boss at the time that the task to Transform to Agile ways of working was impossible. There were just too many people working in “the wrong” way, and we couldn’t possibly overcome the inertia that the current waterfall delivery approach had, that project managers and centralised control dictated how things went and that no one was willing to try something different. In my head, everything was wrong.
He pulled my defeatist attitude up abruptly “I don’t understand what you’re saying Alex, YOU know how to do it, YOU have the team, just tell them how to do it and start doing it”.
Sound familiar to anyone wanting to bring change? How could it be hard? You have some information, you communicate the information, presto - Transformation!
Why is it trickier than that?
Agile the topic has become a hot mess - divergence in thinking, difficulty in getting the conversation back to the original intention of the movement, new simplified models that can gloss over the depth and power of agile software development. You can’t boil it down to a one page email anymore.
Agile has moved out of technology and into the whole of business. The pull for more agility is positive, but agile coaches are not always experienced in working with other parts of the business, nor do they understand how those parts bring value, and are sometimes unwilling to engage with them.
Agile Coaching of whole organisations for Transformational change is still a new domain. We don’t have tried and true patterns, yet we have a lot of peddling of frameworks by consultancies that are expensive, overly prescriptive and often miss the mark.
Because of the relative youth of the field of Agile Transformation, it is often new to the executive levels of companies, or at most they have experienced a single Transformation. They have often never worked in an Agile team themselves. And they are so busy…
and Agile is an experiential learning process, you ‘get it’ by ‘doing it’ and through ‘doing it’ you get better at it. So the top levels of the organisation, that need to align and drive Transformation forward, who don’t have experience of agile, can’t really understand what they are Transforming to.
“The challenge then becomes lifting the level of capability across a lot of people all at once”
The challenge then becomes lifting the level of capability across a lot of people all at once, so that real Transformative Change can be achieved. How can we start to tilt things in a new direction and maintain our authenticity, avoiding the “Cargo Cult” of unwieldy prescriptive frameworks and embedding genuine new skills and experiences? How can we make everyone smarter?
A rising Tide lifts all boats
how to generate necessary levels of capability to support a Transformation.
Before I boil this down into a handy listicle, I want to first be clear that experience is absolutely key. If you have a compelling reason to Transform and are willing to go for it, you can’t do it without experiencing Agility yourself. So, engage with Transformation with the intention that you yourself will be experiencing Agility - that’s the exciting part! And get someone with experience to help you gain that experience, so you have a good experience while you’re on the journey.
Raising the level of knowledge and capability, can be done to support Transformation efforts, for that we see some patterns working in all kinds of organisations. You can create an environment where people can quickly educate themselves and one that allows you to reach ‘the tipping point’ - the point at which going back to redundant and old fashioned ways of working, that would slow your company's progress down, is no longer an option.
These are the patterns that we have found work in most organisations that have a compelling reason to Transform.
AGILE FUNDAMENTALS FOR EVERYONE
It’s vital that everyone or almost everyone receives basic Agile fundamentals. It’s helpful for people to get the same messages at the same time, in a consistent set of terminology from the start. Five more reasons why can be found here on our Blog about why it’s fundamental.
TRAINING AND COACHING FOR LEADERS
Leadership training and coaching is critical for certain behaviour changes that need to be encouraged for an organisation new to Agility. The executive level of the organisation needs to do more than provide permission for change, they also need to grow and change themselves, they must be engaged, trained and coached. How will a newly Transformed organisation incentivise its leaders? How will they lead in the new organisation? Failing to answer these challenges can completely undo a Transformation and is a common reason why a lot of Transformations fail. The executive must be Agile literate for it to succeed.
BE OPEN ABOUT THE LEARNING JOURNEY
A rising tide can lift all boats. Be open about the knowledge acquisition journey that everyone will be going on. These are professional development skills to attain, and ones that equip individuals for a new contemporary workplace, so frame this capability building as an opportunity for people, and boost their engagement.
SEEDING
Seeding can be an effective pattern. Seeding teams and projects with experienced people so the skills uplift can spread quicker will work.
And seeding with Ideas is strong as well: sharing links, attending conferences, reading books together, watching videos and listening to podcasts are all strategies for seeding knowledge acquisition.
REINFORCE THE RIGHT BEHAVIOURS
A culture of reinforcing the good behaviours of testing, accepting failure, learning and getting feedback, is advantageous for an organisation going through Transformation, the more of this you have the faster you will be able to move to greater performance as the people and teams are able to self correct and seek out different paths to try. The trick is for the executive team to catch failure in the moment and set the example. For this to happen, of course you must have provided Training and Coaching for leaders (see above).
COACHING WHERE YOU NEED IT
Finally reserving coaching capacity for coaching at all levels. The Exec, the Teams and for individuals where necessary. Coaches can guide, support and enable your journey and save you a whole lot of time and money in avoiding common pitfalls.
So how did it go in that early and challenging job where I thought everything was too “wrong” for working in an Agile way to be possible? Well on my boss’s advice I booked in the first conversation with the first person. In one afternoon in a small, stuffy, windowless room with some paper taped on the wall for a whiteboard, we talked through the basics of what agility was all about. This gave her enough knowledge and exposure to impact her team, and with me and my boss backing her up, the team had permission to start. It was a long journey to transform the entire delivery of that company, and it included everything in my listicle. I found once teams were able to start genuinely experiencing agility there was no turning back. Agility has to be experienced for capability to build, so at some point you have to stop talking and just start.
Next in this series: The trouble with Frameworks, how to be authentic and adaptive in your Transformation.
Get in touch if your Transformation needs a ReBoot:
ReBoot Co. is your partner in Transforming how every workplace works, so people love their job! Embed adaptive and authentic agility into your workplace with ReBoot Co.