Why Agile Transformations ‘struggle’
Part 1 — Resistance to Change
Over the last year or two, I have been reflecting on some interesting statistics, some from the latest State of Agile report. Here is some information from that report worth looking into in more detail:
- From 2022 to 2023, satisfaction with agile dropped from 71% to 60%, and only 18% are “very satisfied”.
- The top three reasons why Agile apparently “struggles” are, in order: general resistance to change / culture clash; insufficient leadership participation; and inadequate management support and/or sponsorship. Every respondent ticked at least one of these causes.
Why are organisations not satisfied with Agile? Simply put, what they ended up with did not meet their expectations.
In my career as someone advocating agile methods and practices since 2008, I have seen many organisations undertaking initiatives like this. Interestingly though, the vast majority of the people I worked directly with, from development and QA teams, to Product Managers, Department heads and C-suite executives, cannot explain why the organisation decided to invest millions in attempting to transform the way the company works.
Many don’t really understand business agility or its benefits and some have no interest in doing so.
They are almost all, however, directly affected by the change. They are asked to change their roles, fundamentally changing the way they do their jobs. Some are even made redundant in the process (ahem, project managers) while others are asked to attend additional meetings, use new tools and techniques and behave and lead their teams very differently.
All of these proposed changes are well-intentioned, but we who advise our clients to make these sometimes drastic changes forget why we are doing it.
And no, it is not to make the organisation adopt your favourite agile framework.
Passion for agility has led us to focus on the how and forget about the why. We advise our clients to make their work and processes transparent, we ask them to regularly inspect and improve, we ask them to be more collaborative, to plan in shorter timeframes and release more frequently… and we ask them to do all of these things with the best of intentions.
And when they ask why, we tell them because the framework demands it, the ‘playbook’ says so.
Change requires Purpose
At the heart of every transformation there must be a purpose. A business reason that justifies the time, energy, focus and money being invested in the initiative. Why would we change so much unless there is a compelling reason to do so? If all we want to do is adopt new ways of working, then Agile has done a great job — people change a lot. But is it really better? And how would we know?
In my experience, the people I engage with have no clue what the end goal is. Either there never was a clear purpose or objective, or it has somehow got lost along the way, and the initiative becomes all about implementing the chosen framework.
In other words, it becomes solution-driven. Counting how many teams have received training and how many have adopted the new toolset become the KPIs for the transformation initiative. Not how well the business is doing.
Now, if I asked you to change your job title, your role, give you new tools and techniques, and insist you attend new meetings, wouldn’t you want to know why?
And if all I told you was “this is more agile”, wouldn’t you also be sceptical? Would you not also resist the change, because you chose the role you were in before, you had got pretty good at it, comfortable even? You had your career path planned out and everything. And then some consultant comes in and tells you everything has to change. Yes, I would resist that too.
I might play along if I was personally incentivised to do so, or I believed that the new role might make me more employable or more likely to be promoted. If not, I might ask for a different role internally, or even leave the company. Or I might bide my time, secure in the knowledge that the company has tried a few of these fads before and they also fell by the wayside.
Now, I am not for one second saying you should not adopt Lean/Agile principles in order to improve the way your organisation works. Most companies could benefit hugely. And many have. Agile, in one form or another, has become mainstream all over the world.
But all too often, no-one had ever communicated with them the benefits of the initiative, and without that, the status quo was more valuable. Change for its own sake is disruptive. Why embark on radical change unless there is a compelling reason to do so? My recent LinkedIn poll revealed that 100% of respondents said “Few” of the transformations they had been involved in had clear business objectives.
Remember those top three reasons why agile adoption struggles? General resistance to change / culture clash, insufficient leadership participation, and inadequate management support and/or sponsorship.
If you think about it, all three of them are related. And they could all be mitigated, at least in part, by ensuring that, at the centre of the initiative is a clear and compelling business purpose to align everyone’s actions and help them understand why change is necessary, thereby overcoming a lot of the resistance. It helps management support the change if their (quarterly or annual) goals are tied to these organisational objectives. Further, it helps everyone make only the changes that are needed to achieve one or more of the objectives. If some habit or tool or meeting or practice doesn't contribute to the objectives, then ditch it.
If you believe that the way to achieve organisational agility is to make everyone adopt Scrum or SAFe, or any of the other frameworks, you are wrong. In the next article, I will explore this issue of agile frameworks further. Please subscribe if you don’t want to miss it.
If you would like to know more about making agile adoption or transformation work in your organisation, or if you are a change agent wanting to be more effective in your change initiatives, feel free to message me directly.
