How do executives progress with implementing authentic, sustainable and organisational agility to achieve their goals?

How do they evolve from where they are to where they go next?

Often, organisations use agility to help them get some sense of direction for the organisation; but John Coleman, Agile and Kanban Trainer, discusses that in order to make progress, alongside executive agility, there needs to be authenticity as well.

Hit delete.

In order to improve organisational agility, we actually need to stop doing some things. This could mean simplifying and making things better for organisations.

When it comes to authentic, sustainable organisational agility, there are lots of solutions out there for teams, product managers and product leaders, for agility coaches and trainers, yet despite there being plenty of content for leaders, there is a considerable lack of solutions for executives, and executive agility.

The Path to Executive Agility

Who is an executive?

A person or group appointed and given the responsibility to manage the affairs of an organisation and the authority to make decisions within specified boundaries.

A person who:

Owns the strategy or sets the direction of travel
Justifies investment

The Big Lie

Charles Leopold says that “agility is not a team sport, it’s a company sport”, or as John would say an ‘organisational sport’.

A lot of the time senior leaders say we just need the teams to perform. But often the executives and the leaders who are saying that are the people who might need to help them to cultivate a better environment so teams can make more progress. And John believes that the big lie is ‘you’re empowered’.

It's almost like a command and control expression.

But empowerment isn’t something you switch on and off. It’s all very well to be empowered when the sun is shining, and the traffic lights are green. But when things aren't going so well, how empowered is the team, really?

So, when we talk about deletion – the context does not mean completely remove (although that would be nice!), it means ‘far less of’ to an extent.

This is not a linear approach by any means, but instead a set of patterns that executives can observe to move forward towards their intended direction of travel.

Deletions required to get to authentic, sustainable, organisational agility

There isn’t a limit to the number of deletions that you should work through. In his talk with Lithe, John discussed the key deletions and their impact that he thinks can improve executive and organisational agility. Of course, these deletions need to come much earlier in the course of an organisation’s lifetime, but for now it is less about looking at what to remove completely, and what stories that we can have less of.

What stories can we have less of?

Fewer demands: less fixed price scope and delayed minutes. This reliance on focusing on the minutes and not trusting what has been agreed in meetings can lead to an inauthentic and toxic environment. The solution: immediate minutes; send them out straight after meetings

Unpicking decisions: it is right to turn over decisions that are wrong, but it is important to note a pattern where the majority of decisions get picked apart. The solution: probabilistic forecasts with deadlines to when tasks could be completed by.

Lack of prioritisation: if the amount of work that is prioritised for one year, and that is more than the entire capacity for the year before, means that there is stuff that is being added that can’t possibly be delivered. We need this to focus on outcomes as well as what new ideas do we need to make room for. The solution: Review Flow Analytics – assess how much work can be actioned within specific timeframes and model accordingly.

Decisions with perfect information and complacency to improvement: As important as it is to have comprehensive research and fact-checking in place, an organisation cannot be built on decisions with perfect information where there is no room for improvement and learning. The solution: 9 minutes learning at 9 am – don’t have meetings that start at 9 am. Get them in the diary for 9.15 and encourage members to watch a video, read an article that adds to their knowledge and information.

What would be the one deletion John himself would focus on? Lack of prioritisation, as in terms of quality, it doesn’t allow the organisation to make space for what could come in during the course of the year.

Why are these deletions important?

Because without these deletions, teams won’t see the point in agility. John argues the case of laying down the bricks to make some progress, albeit not glacial progress as often ends up being the case.

At the executive level, we need to move a bit faster so that people don't start losing hope that this is really going to work; when people start losing hope, we are likely to end up with the Agile Industrial Complex – which perpetuates and then monetises a culture of coercion and force.

Other deletions required to improve organisational agility

Promoting the ‘old guard’ – some organisations undergoing an agile change, focus on promoting the ‘old guard’ into teams where they are making good progress but then get impacted by the ‘new leader in the room’

‘Inflicting help’ and passive risk management: Giving advice where it isn’t solicited can cause teams to stop responding; similarly, passive risk management where risk is assigned on the basis of potential risks but not actively listening and responding to teams.

Leader broadcasts – growth constraint blindness: Leaders not focusing on one-to-one interaction with teams and not actually listening to their teams. This also contributes to a blindness towards the constraints of the organisation.

Focus on ‘star performers’: Instead of focusing on ‘star performers’, the focus needs to be on team performance rather than individual players.

Delusions of predictability: Being able to deliver everything based on a specific date, can lead to a lack of the agility discipline, where changes might need to be made last minute.

Really good organisations with agility have zero tolerance for Command or Control behaviour at the executive and senior leadership level.

“Without these deletions, it’s one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas!”

In order to start chipping away at these deletions, John proposes that organisations could start recruiting or promoting with agility in mind; this agility is important to encourage behaviours that we expect from agile leaders within organisations.

How can we get executives to notice and make deletions?

It’s important for executives to know how much work is going out versus what is coming in. It is important for them to see that the prioritisation that they think is happening, isn’t effective.

John wants executives to focus on effectiveness. Are the organisations even doing the right thing?

In order to get execs to notice and make deletions, we need to focus on simplification. How can we make things more simple? How can we show that there is enough work already there versus what is going out.

Now let's imagine that we've managed to get rid of a lot of these proposed deletions.

This can feel a bit like a stressful situation – a halfway house – and there will still be problems that can potentially persist.

Local optimisation – pressuring teams to be more efficient
Short-term suppliers – bringing in suppliers for short term projects to deal with more work going out
Push System – trying to push all the time rather than just critical moments
Short-lived teams – project-based teams
Lack of goal orientation – lack of focus on outcomes
Ruthlessness with people, where commitment = guarantee: leading to teams being under pressure with what they can commit to and what they can guarantee
Lack of cognitive diversity – organisations need fresh thinking and perspective
Imposition

John says, “If you don't deal with these deletions, your environment is going to lack humanity”. At the end of the day Agility is about people, and that people that they're valued, and they can be inspired and that they can do great things, and make a difference.

So, how do you counteract the challenges?

Let teams coordinate at value stream level
Focus on ageing
Create product teams
Talk to customers and users regularly
Be ruthless with value and compassion
Invitation rather than imposition

Sometimes, it can be a huge concern that organisations are still project-focused and focused on outputs, rather than spending time consulting and listening to customers and users.

Other deletions include:

Efficiency tunnel vision
Big bet as the norm
Long-lived impediments
Over-milking the cow
Scaling
Project teams
Initiative budgets
People in the wrong seats on the bus
Individual meritocracy
Build it and they will come
Customer/consumer centric ‘BS’

Without these deletions, it’s a feature factory.

It's an expression for delivering lots of stuff, but we're taking really high risks with the money that the company is investing and at some point you could adopt with what Jared Spool calls ‘Feature Rot’ or ‘Experience Rot’.

This is the point where prior to what’s getting disrupted, so much stuff has been added that people aren’t using it anymore and now some competitor can come up with some simpler version of the same product or service. It doesn't even have half of the functionality, but they do so much better and it’s so much easier.

How do you overcome this?

Compassionate dissent – we need to allow people to be opposing some of the ideas that we've had
Focus on fixing problems – rather than focusing on projects, focus on problems
More regular funding cycles – more and more companies are talking about quarterly reviews to assess how well they are doing and moving money into projects accordingly
Self-designing teams – teams have more autonomy over their processes and roles within the bounds of what team members agree is needed to achieve agreed upon team outcomes
Experiment when risk is high – organisations should explore the product backlog and experiment with whether they have the right business problem or are they worrying about the right people?
Discover to deliver and get out of the building customer/user interviews – become outcomes focused and listen and learn from your key users and customers
Another set of deletions would be data-less decisions. Go for more data-informed decisions.
Push for the rule of 80:20, where organisations explore how they can get 80% of the outcomes with maybe 20% of the outputs.
Scrap ill-suited workflows and processes and de-scale processes and flows
Maybe instead of just having a managerial or any career path, organisations can start thinking of a growth path where people can grow horizontally. Can they actually stay technical and work on improving technical excellence?

If we don’t deal with these deletions, potential is more limited than it could be.

Without these deletions, we lose customers:

Thinking about the past and not focusing on future outcomes and goals in multiple time horizons
New leadership positions, rather than technical focus
Harming the environment – what is the footprint of revenue?
Dependency management: how do we get teams to learn more?
Instead of targets, think of trends

The list of deletions is far from exhaustive.

If you implemented the complete set of deletions, can you imagine how simple your organisation would be?

John does have concerns: if you're in a situation where the organisation or the people in the organisation aren't reading history, and they're just repeating what's happening, like a Kodak/Nokia moment, maybe the executives will get deleted.

There is so much pressure on organisations to make progress, that the executives are visionaries and failing that the fear is that the organisation can be deleted.

So, it is imperative that we make things simpler.

We create an environment where it is human and authentic.

An environment that is sustainable.

A real environment that’s not agile theatre.

In order to improve organisational agility, we actually need to stop doing some things. This could mean simplifying and making things better for organisations. On the path to executive agility deletions are required.

About John Coleman

John Coleman is a Professional Kanban trainer (PKT), Professional Scrum Trainer (PST), LeSS Friendly Scrum Trainer (LSFT) who practises most of the time; Co-creates a sustainable environment for agility, including executive agility for the 2030s.

John specialises in transformations for business agility using change models based on change leadership, change evolution and behavioural change.

John Coleman is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, a top 10 thought leader for agility at Thinkers 360, a Scrum.Org Professional Scrum Trainer, a Prokanban Professional Kanban Trainer, a LeSS Friendly Scrum Trainer, a podcaster (Xagility™ for curious executives, Daily Flow for agility practitioners), and prolific blogger. John co-authored Kanban Guide and authored Kanplexity™. He coaches and consults in tech and non-tech. John is Irish, living in the English countryside. John has four offspring and a dog. When John isn't writing content, he's either out and about walking or on dirt trails on his full-suspension mountain bike.

Implementing Sustainable Organisational Agility