Have you heard someone say “I want that” after watching a video or hearing a story about a successful Agile transformation. Or looking at the video on the Spotify model video and thinking that the latest article or video they watched is the answer to making agile a reality in their organization. It is easy to appreciate the beauty of the flower even without knowing how it is grown. Appreciating an Agile way of working is similar to falling for the beauty of a flower. I mean, how hard can it be to grow a flower?
Growing flowers can be broken into four basic components. Analyzing the environment for temperature, sunlight and access to water is the first. Gathering the soil inside the pot that is adapted to the environment is the second one. Planting the seeds and cultivating the plant’s stem is the third. Allowing the flower to bloom and grow into a delicate piece of art to share with the world is the final piece.
Experienced gardeners know that we cannot just grow a plant without the appropriate environment and soil.
“Consider an acorn and an oak. Is the acorn the cause of an oak? Clearly it isn’t. Why not? Although an acorn is necessary for the oak, it is not sufficient. That is easy to demonstrate.
Snippet from Russell L Ackoff From Mechanistic to Systemic thinking (48:30)
How? Thrown an acorn in the ocean. You do not get an oak tree. Throw it in the desert and you do not get an oak tree. Throw it on an iceberg and you do not get an oak tree. It is necessary, but not sufficient.”
The Organizational Flower Model
You can break down the discussion of “I want that” into the same set of interdependent components in an organization.
- The flower, the visible and most visible part of the plant’s health can be the set of methods and capabilities coming from people working.
This is the WHAT people do and is highly visible and can be expressed explicitly. - The seed, stem and plant is the collective mindset that grows and supports the flower development.
This is the HOW people do it and is embedded in tacit knowledge and the guiding principles. - The soil and the pot are the the components of Leadership mindset, organizational design and measures. This area provides the information for the growth. It provides the foundation for setting the stage for the WHAT and HOW by also outlining the WHY.
- The environment is the business setting, market conditions and local culture.
Gives external information and energy to generate the interactions within the system.
The Agile Industrial Complex has been very successful in selling licenses and certifications based on the beautiful orange flowers. The ability to focus the discussion on Methods, Frameworks and Tools regularly floods our LinkedIn feeds ad nauseam. People spend their time arguing over scrum and kanban or tools like JIRA as if they were arguing how tulips are better than the roses. A good example is how the Spotify model become a target, despite only being a snapshot in time based on a specific management model and context. The discussions all miss the appropriateness of the context and culture that builds the myth of the agile transformation.
Transformations are Cultivating Agile Onions
The transformation of a culture requires analyzing and shifting the eco-system. For several years we have been using Simon Power’s Agile Onion to express what is visible and valuable. However, the message about the onion seems to fall directly on the heads of teams who need to be more do-er than thinkers. The featured image of this post is a flower produced by the humble onion.
The missing element to grow Agile onions is an appropriate soil and environment. If our onion is planted in a pot with soil that is too acidic due to managerial biases and restrictive policies, the onion will not be healthy. The soil is a collective aggregation of the Leadership behaviors and biases that guide the organizational design for structures, policies and measurements. This socio-technical convergence between the way the management infrastructure behaves (socio-)and organizes the business with structures and policies (-technical). Adapting the soil and environment is part of moving from a form of dark-agile to the advancing of management methods to generate better outcomes. To cultivate the soil, you need a willingness to raise the glass ceiling with Catalyst Leadership habits (previous post here) and a model like the Enterprise Change Pattern (previous post here). Shifting management in the age of digital through Management trends from 1.0. 2.0 and 3.0 (video by Pete Beherans). The shifts in trends are happening at faster pace of changes as well.
Management trends is the result of the environmental changes. The combination of the environment has made leadership changes re-evaluate how to make healthier soil. This fertile ground creates the foundation for motivated teams organized around value to grow like a plant. Our teams start showing the beautiful flowers as a result of why they are working and how they approach problems By creating a set of supports for your gardeners with appropriate systemic coaches, the garden can flourish. Sustainable change involves bringing on Enterprise Coaching for your soil and the pot, Agile Coaching for your plants to grow within the limits of the soil and environment and execution coaches that curate your flowers. Aligning the three creates a confluence for sustainable change.
So what does it all mean?
Generating change requires seeing the system as a cohesive whole as a complex adaptive system. Growing plants is easy as nature will naturally cultivate what is optimized in the context the seed germinates. As someone who has done some gardening, I have experienced the impact of planting a seed in soil or an environment that does not thrive for that plant type. This is why the paradox of moving a culture starts and ends with a management system of work being dealt with as an ecosystem rather than a linear, mechanistic transformation plan. Yelling at plants does not make them grow as you want. Growing your flowers takes learning new theories, time to experiment, and persistence.
So what next?
A Lean-Agile plant cannot be implemented, it is cultivated. The same as a flower planted in non-fertile soil, it does not grow as expected. There is a confluence of experimentation between the leadership soil and a team plant on experimenting the best ways of working as a flower. Leadership must be engaged to change the soil via their behaviors along with a team that is willing to try new ways of working. Without this, the risk to become a cargo cult grows.
A pattern for improving your outcomes will depend on the environment and the soil. But a way of moving forward would include the following :
- Define the business problem you want to solve and outline that learning and the flow of value are high priority
- Define the people and who will work on this initiative and take co-ownership to experiment to better ways of working
- Train the people with the managers in the room so they have a common language and understanding of the social contract
- Have your coach(es) facilitate workshops to work the team to clarify the business problem, invest in understanding your value streams and define your teams by the value stream activities
- Get managers to convince to be coached to add catalyst habits and coach the team in parallel
- Start working with the managers and team based on the Lean and Agile principles to evaluate how to change the organization in small steps while focusing on flow and continuous improvement
Lean-Agile with Paul 
