Agile Transitions as Self-Sustaining Reaction

Weird confession time? I used to be a little dubious about the long-term role of coaches and even of Scrum Masters or equivalent in an Agile organization. Once you’ve taught people the rules, what else is there to do? People are smart, and Agile methods as a rule aren’t complicated. I wondered—how could it possibly take more than a year or so to get this thing going?

Then I spent several years observing an Agile transition from its initial push phase through to a kind of equilibrium, and I have gained a different understanding of the roles and the process in such a transition. I’m going to call these roles Primary Agile, because their work centers on fostering agility—and nothing else.

Agile transitions can be thought of as something like a chemical reaction. The system starts in one state, and by adding some ingredients and – most importantly – energy, the system changes into a different state. For most organizations, that end state is going to be very different from where they started. So while Agile isn’t complicated—no specific method takes more than a few days to learn about—it is deep. It involves changes in personal behavior, habits of thinking, organizational strategy, physical environment, and culture.

That degree of change takes a lot of time, and a lot of energy. What’s more, there is no static end state of “being Agile.” Agility means adopting a state in which change is a constant and accounted for. In other words, the chemical reaction doesn’t just need a one-time push into a new place; it needs to become self-sustaining. That’s where the Primary Agile roles come in.

You can have part-time agilists—I have been one, and seen others try their hand at it. They can be a valuable supplement to your transition activities. But the past few years have taught me that if you don’t have some number of people whose only priority is to direct energy into keeping it going, your Agile transition is likely to stall out. Inertia will assert itself. Change starts to seem too hard; people have too many other things on their plates already. Your part-timers have other responsibilities. For all that they might genuinely want the transition to work, if it’s not their top priority, people will get distracted and revert to habit.

Three years later, you’ll look around at people trudging through the motions at standup, compiling their metrics spreadsheets (same as last sprint), and finding excuses to skip their third retrospective in a row, and think that this isn’t what you were promised. Where’s the innovation? Where’s the engagement, the collaboration, the… well, the agility? The nimble teams of self-organizers ready to take any challenge in stride?

The reaction didn’t become self-sustaining. Instead, you have ritualized Agile, zombie Agile, faux Scrum… that we have so many names for this state speaks volumes.

Fire is a chemical reaction. You know how when you build a fire, there’s that bit after lighting the match, where you wait to see if you put enough kindling on? Whether the fire is going to catch, or will it die out and you have to start over? It isn’t enough to light a fire; you need to give it something to grow on, to get big enough to keep going with less (not zero) intervention. Every reaction needs ingredients. If you’re counting on your Primary Agile team to provide the energy, you can still make or break the results by the environment in which they work.

Here are some ways to make sure you never get self-sustaining agility:

• Don’t give people time to absorb changes and make new habits before you fling them into another change cycle
• Stifle feedback. (Do you want to know how many times I’ve heard the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid” in the past three years? From people who believed that their opinions were not wanted and would not be listened to?)
• Lie to your people. About anything at all, really—few things break trust faster, and agility absolutely requires trust—but in this context, lie about what the transition entails, why you’re doing it, and what is expected from them. Like I said, people are smart.

You want your Primary Agile team members to spend their energy with the teams, coaching people through the changes and nurturing the new behaviors you eventually want to become habit. The most passionate and dedicated agilists will burn out if they instead have to spend significant amounts of energy fighting the environment.