This is why your organisation won’t change
The false expectations of agile transformations
If your organisation is on a mission to change their ways of working, it is most likely an agile transformation. If that is the case you have probably invested in some agile coaches too. I wonder how that is working out for you? If you are not sure if you are gaining any success on a strategic and/or organisational level, I don’t blame you. Whether you call them agile coaches, lean consultants, Kaizen coaches or scrum masters, often the results stay the same: some teams change their way of working but overall processes stay the same and show the same outcome it always has.
Roles, processes and ways of working
Many organisations focus on these three things. As they should. Nowadays there are a lot of frameworks and best practices to find on the internet and therefore it is easy to go on a never-ending implementation journey. If Scrum does not give you the results, here is Nexus, Kanban, Kaizen, SAFe or Lean. There is a lot to try out and a lot to use or experiment with. The same goes for processes and roles. If the current ones are holding you back in performing, delivering and moving you try something else.
It seems sometimes that it is more important to have ‘agile’ in your title and on your LinkedIn profile than actually understanding what it is. It is okay to say you have no clue what it actually means, even though you worked at a company that had ‘scrum masters’ and ‘sprints’.
Roles, processes and ways of working are key for change, I totally admit to that. I believe most organisations stop there and seem to miss a key ingredient to either keep changing and change on a bigger scale than just the ‘software teams’.
People
If organisational change would be successful by changing roles, processes and ways of working, wouldn’t we know more success stories? There is a reason why it is so damn hard to achieve. And also why startups are more often successful in it, but most of the time crumble as soon as they grow: people.
Sometimes we get so invested with changing processes, tools, roles and ways of working that we go blind that people create most of the complexity. And if you invest in your people, that complexity will ‘fix’ itself by using communication and logical thinking. I hope you can agree that your employees or your team members are not dumb people. Why do we often act and communicate like we hire people that don’t understand how to do their work?
The change is in people. Your employees, your colleagues. It is in you. It has nothing to do with having a well-paid consultant or agile coaches in your company. What you believe is what you will show to your outside world. Our brain is simply not capable to act differently from what we believe. If you invest in helping people believe they can be a better version for themselves, as a partner, a parent or a coworker, that is where change starts to show. That is where your organisation will start to change, your culture becomes DNA.
