The Transformation Blog

Sadly, for many companies today, Agile is in the trough of disillusionment.  Why?  Simple -- the support needed to foster success from Agile practices requires deep, engaged cooperation to work differently across a number of enterprise departmental silos.  For those familiar with Moneyball, Billy Beanes found himself in exactly the same situation during the 2002 rebuilding season

I was watching Moneyball this weekend for the first time and was riveted by the story of Billy Beanes and the Oakland A’s miracle of 2002. I’m not much of a baseball fan (I grew-up and live in the heart of ”tobacco road” where college basketball is king) so I was only superficially aware of Billy’s bold, perhaps reckless move in 2002 to pursue an unproven, unorthodox approach to building a championship baseball team.

I won't recount the film's entire storyline, but the basics go like this--Team wins big one year, loses talent the next, due to free agency, and “rich teams” like the

While those of us in the Agile community have for years fostered the values of employee empowerment and creating productive work spaces for our employees and teams, I’m increasingly bothered by the degree to which some Agile advocates place employee happiness above nearly everything else.  Is this the key to business and innovation success as some claim?  Is this a smart thing to do?  Maybe not.

We’ve all experienced it at one time in our lives or another, you “think” you’re working on a team for the collective good BUT someone is constantly demonstrating destructive, self-serving behaviors.  These individuals’ behaviors put the team’s collaboration at risk all in the vein to make themselves look smarter or more-hard working than their counterparts.  Ironically, often times that competitive, back-stabbing conduct is a direct result of the metrics put in place by the team’s leader.  So, how do you encourage peaceful, productive collaboration?

While most of the Agile community is comfortable promoting Agile and Scrum practices as relatively simple and straight forward, they overlook the fact that in many organizations these new “required” practices are anything but simple to implement.  The reality is that there are devilish details to concern yourself with when nurturing Agile process, planning, engineering and organizational change that you wont read or hear about from those promoting “Agile by the book”.

In recent weeks, there has been increased discussion among some in the Agile PMI community who are seeking empirical proof for how and why autonomy and team empowerment actually works. What I find interesting is how difficult it is for Agilists to provide much more than anecdotal evidence supporting this foundational Agile principle.

This discussion interested me because I have reached beyond the Agile community over the last year to learn more about how human performance is influenced by our work environments and our cognitive biases

The last few months at Gear Stream has revealed a recurring client challenge that I’d like to highlight that has the potential to undermine Agile success and worse, introduce outcomes nearly as dysfunctional as those we’re seeking to eradicate with Agile.  What is this challenge you ask?  Agile teams routinely lack insight and appreciation for who their real customers are.

Are you a Scrum-Bot?   What’s that you ask?  You know, Scrum-Bot… the people we program with Scrum, wind-up, put in a box-about the size of two weeks, and watch as they work furiously to complete the tasks that have been assigned inside the box, only to be asked to do it all over again in another two weeks.  Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

The drum beat around Bottom-Up values and practices has become so widespread that I now routinely find my new prospective clients designing entire organizational transition plans based on an absolute belief that Top-Down is “bad” and Bottom-Up is “good”.  As the saying goes, be careful what you ask for…

I’m a simple guy, so I’m always looking for simple ways to convey the powerful truth of an idea or concept. This clip from I Love Lucy is a classic and it’s a sobering reminder of how incredibly important it is for larger organizations to decide carefully if Agile is really worth the hassle.