Why I don't talk about "agile"

The last free "paid" newsletter!

Hi,

I hope you are doing safe and well. It is freezing here in the UK. I am writing this wearing a pair of gloves, body warmer, hat and big fluffy slippers (on top of my normal clothes I may add for clarity). I know you needed to know that.

Welcome to the 2nd edition of the Releasing Agility masterclass newsletter. The next edition of this masterclass (in two weeks’ time) will only be available to paid subscribers to the Masterclass. I'll send details of how to subscribe this week.

I have around 130+ lessons to go through as we explore how to Release Business Agility - straight from my playbooks and consulting work. The Trello board I use gives you some idea about how much is involved, but don't worry we'll go through it clearly and easily and have some fun doing it.

After today's email the lessons will be shorter and focused on a single core idea, along with ideas/actions to do (if you wish to). There will be a "Cultivated Support" section outlining further reading, resources and other goodies to help you.

All I can do is share what I know to date, and I've been doing this kind of work for decades now. I will weave in experience from my work as a manager, VP, HR background and communication trainer, to hopefully give you a rather unique perspective on "agility", but one that consistently "releases agility" in organisations.

You'll discover how Releasing Business Agility requires management and HR to work in harmony. We'll also cover Enterprise level agility too, as well as some Portfolio Management stuff too.

As this is fundamentally a newsletter about effective communication, I will share how to break complicated topics down in a simple way, how to communicate your ideas and how to gain clarity and alignment around strategic direction.

Business agility has a lot to do with clarity.

We’ll borrow some ideas from other thinkers, we’ll deconstruct many theories about “agile” and I will share how to build these back up in creative ways to solve your business problems.

Examples of simplifying communication

(Enable images to see the following two diagrams I often use with clients)

The first diagram is a high-level primer for Enterprise Business Agility. We apply the same ideas we'll cover in the newsletter whether you're wrangling with 5000 people or 50, it's just the view needs to be slightly different about the work. And it becomes a lot harder to track investment to activity, but we’ll cover ways to do this. There is also WAY more complexity - i.e. people, measures, lots of watermelon reporting to get rid of etc :)

The second is the role HR play in Releasing Business Agility. We’ll cover plenty of ideas around this too - as HR and management, working in harmony, is a sweet spot indeed.

Agility is always released

Let's recap on what Releasing Agility is. (Don't worry I won't keep repeating this in every email).

Release - to set free from confinement

Agility - moving smoothly and quickly towards your business goals

So, this ongoing masterclass is about removing the obstacles and blockers that are preventing companies (and people) from achieving business goals (and the results that measure you’ve achieved them).

You already have agility in your organisation. We need to unleash it.

It isn't a masterclass about "agile" methodologies or techniques. Almost all of these better known aspects of “agile” (scrum, backlog management, kanban etc) are potential solutions to business problems so we should never start with them, until we understand the problems.

It is instead a masterclass on building amazing workplaces that enrich the lives of all who work in them whilst delivering on our business goals: which helps to keep the business alive. All through the view of effective communication.

When you have the right people, in the right place, overcoming obstacles (with management support), with a clear purpose and strategy, and all learning to overcome problems together - you can move smoothly and quickly towards your goals and employee engagement is often a free side effect.

Engagement is a positive side effect

I see it time and time again when I do this. When I measure qualitative and quantitative data points (which we'll cover in the masterclass), we see engagement, workplace satisfaction and retention rise, even though we've not made it a direct focus point. It’s a side effect.

Often, it's the very same people in the teams who get outstanding results when we intervene. Agility is released; they are moving smoothly and quickly towards their goals AND people are enjoying it.

Agility was there all along. It just needed releasing by changing the system (communication, rules, etc), providing clarity, aligning people and overcoming problems. And when we align people to their strengths, free them from obstacles and provide clarity, we inevitably see their engagement go up.

But this starts with not talking about “agile”.

Not talking about “agile”

Clarity is required and there’s too much ambiguity and contention with the word “agile”.

So, instead, we will talk about releasing business agility; moving smoothly and quickly towards your business goals. We’re not introducing new terminology or getting into the weeds of what “agile” actually is. We’re pinning our success on existing business results, not agile maturity models or other snake oil measures.

And this is a key to success - clarity and use of existing language. And we’ll cover why in a minute.

However, I should like to point out that I always adopt the language and terminology of my clients, it's a core element of effective communication (people resonate with those who sound like them).

So, if my customers/clients are using the word agile, I will adopt that word, at least to start with, as it aids in relationship building and provides (some) clarity over expectations.

However, as we go through our journey, and we cover what follows in this lesson, they soon start to talk about releasing agility.

The reason there are so many potential lessons in this masterclass is because it's a deeply complicated topic. I've made it sound easy but it's not. But we'll unpack every aspect of this in future lessons - always making it simple and easy to understand, explain to others and digest.

We will learn how effective communication cuts through a lot of the ambiguity and provides clear direction for agility to be released (and it’s also a great lever to pull to release it).

But first, let's start with why I don't talk about "agile"

The main reason is because agile is a loaded term that means so much to so many. It's why I spent 6 months, when leading a HR team, trying to work out what agile was. I’d come from a “frightenigly agile” DevOps team and none of the dev-ops-scrum-agile-like things we did in Dev translated easily to HR. Try getting people in HR to do Behaviour Driven Development.

I nearly turned grey during this time - and realised, eventually, underneath the ‘tactical’ agile activities, it was all about communication and overcoming problems to get smoother and quicker at delivering value, little by little.

It wasn’t about stand-ups (that’s a communication solution to a problem - and there are many other possible solutions). Nor was it about Kanban (that’s an approach that suits some work), nor was it about mindset (we have no idea what people are thinking). It was about behaviours, improved communication, and a focus on overcoming blockers towards our goals, whilst retaining good people. Management 101.

Even within the agile community there are plenty of fights and disagreements over what agile is.

Most people can't agree on agile

When I work with customers and clients, I ask them why they want to go “agile”.

The answers are varied. Sometimes about tooling, sometimes mentions of a famous framework come up, sometimes about culture, sometimes about mindsets.

When I dig below the surface of these answers, I eventually get to the heart of it:

business leaders want to go “agile” because they believe it will lead to a better and faster business that thinks differently/has a different culture.

In my language I would paraphrase this back as:

We want to move smoothly and quickly towards our business goals, and we want new behaviours (culture) to achieve this.

The market for "agile" is huge. Yet very few people can agree on what agile is. At conferences the world over there are talented people talking about different aspects of “agile” and creating enemies in the process. People have their flavour, their view, their definition and weirdly, people get very hostile towards those who disagree.

Even after presenting an actual case study on releasing agility, I upset at least 80% of the audience at a conference once. I wasn't doing agile correctly (according to their world view of it), and they weren’t shy in telling me.

I stay away from this Sisyphean Task of trying to define what an agile company looks like (and I never speak at “agile” conferences anymore).

The key point here is that many business leaders and managers (those with levers to pull and budgets to spend on change), don’t often care about the methodologies. In fact, they often see them as an overhead or a process to do. They often don’t care about many agile measures or metrics, or they fixate on velocity etc.

What business leaders want is to achieve their business goals quickly, smoothly and easily. So, we’re going to use that very language to resonate, explain agility and use as our primary measure.

Agile not an end goal

There's a myth about agile, especially at a leadership level, that "agile" is the answer to all their business problems. Agile will allow them to move quickly, remain competitive, release value, and solve pretty much every problem their company currently has. There will be a time when they are “agile”, and they will dominate their market (and have no problems).

All companies, at all times, will still have more problems than they can realistically solve. And some problems don’t need to be solved. And shiny problems are often merely symptoms of something deeper. We’ll learn how to find the right problems to solve in future editions.

• What makes a company agile, and what makes one not agile?

• What differentiates an agile company from a non-agile company?

• What does a company that is half-way agile look like?

It's notoriously hard to describe what agile is (unless you are a firm fan of one of the many frameworks), which is why it’s not a term that aids communication in most workplaces.

It's even harder to measure a company's journey against becoming "agile", which is why, as we’ll cover, I hang my measures off existing business measures.

Many people and companies have tried to measure agile and offer an array of agile maturity models and assessments. I'll go so far as to say, they are all wrong. Push them away whenever you can. How could these maturity and measurement models be right, when very few can agree on what agile is?

They are often measuring tactical things such as “backlogs”, “standups”, “team size” etc - all of which, during the assessment, could meet their definition of the standard and be highly mature, yet not improve business results.

We'll cover measures in future editions, but in the meantime, this poster offers some fun advice on answering this maturity question:

By speaking the language of business measures, goals and results and weaving in a couple of productivity measures, we can piece together a data picture that everyone in the business should understand.

And we can use these measures to know where to intervene and whether our interventions have made a difference…..to our business goals and measures. We’re introducing nothing new.

Agile is not an end goal. There is no magical time when a company moves from being non-agile to 100% agile. And given there is no universally agreed definition of agile, nor agreement (as an industry standard) on how to measure it from company to company, I tend to stay away from this argument entirely.

Agile is in service of something else

I don't use the word agile much because it's not a state to become, nor a place to be, nor a verb, nor a point in time to use that is clear to everyone. As we’ve discussed, it means many things, to many people, and it is heavily loaded with a gazzilion opinions.

There is agile marketing, agile hr, agile research, agile police, agile everything and they’re all slightly different interpretations of any original clear definition.

And here’s the thing, "agile" or Business Agility is always in service of something else. Why are companies going "Agile"? They are going "agile" to get better business results.

Agility is about moving smoothly and quickly towards your business goals. Everything else that people classically consider “agile” is in service of this, otherwise, why do it?

Clarity of language and thinking

Clarity of language is important to bring about positive business change. This is why I align around the business results companies are already measuring and tracking. What I do is in service of these.

It’s not about “agile” - it’s too loaded and too much time in business is spent discussing what agile actually is: a mindset; a framework; a way of working; lean or agile? Almost all of these discussions, or the confusion that they bring, are burning valuable time, energy and attention away from achieving business results, and releasing agility along the way.

We’re clarifying what “agile” does mean, if they are using this word, to be about “moving smoothly and quickly towards their goals” (agility). We’re not confusing people with which framework is best. We’re not bringing in new ideas that are adding to a workload. We’re always trying to simplify and use existing language - and always in service of better business results and goals.

Bringing it together

Releasing Agility is about identifying our business goals and direction (which will already exist in some form), understanding what’s preventing us from reaching these goals, paying attention to the team and looking after them, optimising some processes as we learn what obstacles we need to overcome, and collectively learning how to grow and get better. And throughout all of this we’ll aim to provide clear and accurate communication.

Everything in this paragraph above is common business language. It is what every leader or manager wants when we dig below the ask for “agile”. And all of the above is under the remit and responsibility of management.

Hence, I always say that agility belongs to managers working with high value HR initiatives.

And this is also why I don’t talk much about agile. We’re not doing anything new. No need for the testing of grand theories. We’re simply working out where we’re going, what’s stopping us and building a solid team to get it done. It’s uncommon common sense.

And when we know what problems we face, we can then start talking about approaches, and methodologies, and behaviours, and communication and everything else we’ll cover in this learning journey.

And I will share things that you don’t agree with, or you think I’m wrong about - and this is where the masterclass chat will prove so helpful in clarifying our thinking around this!

Business Results and Retention

When I personally talk about business results or business goals, I typically bundle in staff retention to this. But not everyone includes “their people” when they talk about business goals.

So, with a major hat tip to the clever folks at manager-tools, I now explicitly define both as separate aspects.

So, we are Releasing Business Agility (the ability to move smoothly and quickly) towards our Business Goals WITH the retention of good staff.

There isn't a single good leader, manager or business owner that doesn't want that - and that's what Releasing Agility is all about.

As we go through this masterclass we will cover:

• Knowing what our painted picture of the future is (business goals, ways of working) (that's the content for the next couple of masterclass emails). If we're releasing agility, we need to be clear what it is towards.

• Understanding what is stopping us from achieving this bright future and coming up with an action plan. (This is a strategy - and many business strategies don't have these elements)

• Building the right team to get it done and then treating them well (retention, capability, behaviours, succession planning, career growth)

• Building routines and processes - and instilling the discipline to follow these. (Methodology, process improvement, measures and metrics, qual and quant etc)

• Learning how to get better collectively, and individually

To sum it up. The goal is not to be agile (vague and hard to measure) as this word means many different things, and ultimately, is always in service of something else anyway.

Our goal is to deliver value through our business goals quickly and smoothly (with the right quality), to keep the business alive, to keep adding value to customers, to grow the business, to achieve better business results and to keep employing good people.

And agility already exists in your company. The trick is finding it and releasing it.

In the next masterclass we will cover the foundations of painting a picture of the future. Sometimes called a True North, or a waypoint, or a vision. I’ll share one I have created and give you some ideas about how this is different to goals, which we’ll likely cover the edition after that!

The Email Format

The reason I chose the email format every two weeks is to not overload you. This format and cadence give you time to digest, try and experiment with the ideas.

A typical business agility engagement for me would be 6-12 months to truly unleash vast swathes of agility with managers and HR.

Great results can come very quickly indeed, but sustaining those and making them habitual, and then surfacing further impediments, is what takes time. And that's working full time with a clear mandate for change - I’m not always lucky enough to have that clear control and mandate :)

So, every two weeks feels like a good cadence, but you can always let me know whether you agree.

I will also be sharing the link to my Personal Knowledge Management System too, as well as some slide decks. I do hope you will consider upgrading and joining me on this journey.

And yes, I am pondering dates to hold the annual seminar which will be community driven - as in, what do you all want to talk about?

Have a great week.

Rob..