Speeding Up Your Agile Transformation

We need safety to form the mindset necessary for change.

Why does an Agile Transformation take so long? Well, change is hard. Years can pass as you go through your transformation to an Agile mindset. When safety is low, transformation is much more difficult. It can slow your transformation journey to a crawl. When we are not feeling safe, it is too easy to fall back into old, comfortable patterns.

We need a continuous improvement mindset, supported by leadership without pause.

In this post, I outline symptoms to diagnose when low safety is stalling your transformation. I will also propose helpful patterns to help create safety and grease the wheels of change.

Symptoms

When low safety is slowing your transformation, several symptoms reveal its presence. I describe these symptoms in the following sections.

Asking for Permission or Forgiveness

Early in my career, I remember a situation where I had tried to suggest a new way of working to my manager. My manager thanked me but told me that we do not have time to change direction. He then indicated that I need to press forward with the current approach.

I confided in a fellow colleague about the exchange. He said, “You need to learn to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.”

At the time, I remember thinking that asking for forgiveness was courageous. It even felt a little rebellious. It seemed to be an attractive approach to handle changes I desired to make. I thought I could use this approach to avoid the pressure of getting denied when asking for permission.

But today, I see both asking for permission and asking for forgiveness as symptoms of low safety. When team members are asking for either, it is a sign that they do not feel safe. It is a sign of trouble.

Avoidance of Change

This is likely the most obvious symptom. It is often caused when people see a change as risky to their career. Sometimes there is comfort in holding onto the status quo.

Tactics are often used to delay or avoid the change in behavior. Symptoms of avoiding change can manifest in several ways, including the following behaviors:

Skipping retrospectives
Discussing problems but never taking action to resolve
Hoping the problem will go away (wishful thinking)
Supporting the change in public but avoiding or stalling it behind the scenes
Holding onto past successes too long

You may also hear statements being made, such as:

“That’s not how things are done here.”
“Why change when our changes just get overruled?”
“We have been successful in the past doing it our way. Why change now?”
“You need to meet us where we are.”
“That change is too pure or idealistic.”
“It seems like you have an agenda, and it is not my agenda.”

Change is a Cost

Short term thinking can cause us to avoid change or improvement and the disruption it causes. This happens when we see change as an unsavory cost to the delivery budget and timeline. In this mode, change is not seen as a competitive advantage or an investment.

Seeing change as an undesired cost to delivery can result in managing or metering the change. We do this to ensure too much change is not introduced into the system. We aim to keep tactical delivery as the primary focus.

Often, our rewards are for meeting delivery budgets and delivering scope on time. This tends to squeeze out innovation. Improving the way we deliver or iterating to meet user outcomes become secondary. Experimentation is not encouraged.

No Problems

If your teams rarely raise impediments or ask for help, the typical culprit is a lack of safety. Let’s face it, problems are rampant in software development. The absence or rarity of them is a warning sign.

The team could be hesitant to raise problems for several reasons:

Lack of historical management support when impediments were raised
Concern of being blamed for not seeing the issue coming
Not wanting to be compared to others / standing out
Avoidance of criticism for not being able to solve the issue without assistance
Historical management concern over optics rather than solving problems

Rushing the Transformation

It is tempting to rush the transformation.

Budgets get tight, and delivery gets behind. Transformation agents are in low supply. As the new behaviors drive success, demand surges to get coaching in the new techniques.

The pressure to respond timely to these pressures creates haste, which can lead to waste. We fall prey to cutting corners with the transformation, such as:

Slowing down improvements to focus on delivery efforts
Spreading the limited transformation agents / coaches broadly across the demand areas in a light-touch manner
Pushing out standard frameworks to all teams
Broadcasting generalized training rather than deploying high-touch, team-by-team coaching
Documenting a standard, centralized playbook for all to follow

Consistent Delivery

Results are great. Consistent results are dependable and predictable. But this could be a sign that apathy for continuous improvement has set in.

It is natural for a team’s performance to stabilize over time as they mature as a unit. But change for the better should never stop.

A team’s anxiety around destabilizing their consistent, predictable performance could be at fault. They have plateaued in a new status quo behavior.

Feedback Avoidance

When a team pursues continuous improvement, they request frequent feedback to hone behavior. It is omnipresent.

If a team does not ask for feedback on a regular basis, avoiding criticism could be the reason. This behavior pattern will prevent key in-context moments of inspect and adapt. This will stall out change for the better.

Corrective Patterns

We are fortunate that several patterns exist to counteract low safety. I explain these below.

Celebrate Experiment Successes and Failures

When a team experiments with something new, celebrate it! Celebrate the act of experimenting and the results.

Many times only successes receive celebration. This can produce an adverse side effect. A team may begin hiding experiments that did not pan out. They start to view these experiments as failures and an unnecessary cost. This can also lead the team to avoid experimentation altogether as they see failure as not an option.

A failed experiment is what we call learning. Instead of calling an experiment with a false hypothesis result a “failure,” call it a “learning.” Nobody wants to fail fast. But who does not want to learn fast?

Promote all experiments regardless of the outcome. See experiments as an investment. The only way that an experiment is a cost is if no learning occurs. There is learning when an experiment succeeds and when it does not .

In your next town hall, highlight experiments with false results as well as those that yield success.

Give your teams permission to experiment regardless of the outcome.

Don’t Rush the Transformation

Don’t fall victim to rushing the change when demand is high and coaching supply is low. Instead, roll out deliberate change by customizing improvements to each team’s context.

When scale is a concern, descale by focusing on a team or two at a time. Resist the urge to deploy broad, light-touch coaching or training. This will only teach a team the motions. A lasting change in behavior will not result.

In contrast, deep, targeted coaching with a team or two will speed up internal belief in the Agile mindset. This will cause the change to stick.

As one team has success, other teams will notice. Curiosity from other teams will cause the new behaviors to spread. Keep rolling out the new behaviors deep into teams before moving to new teams. Before long, a new culture will start to form and will become the new “way we do things here.”

The Beauty of Small Changes

Virginia Satir is the family therapist that developed the Satir Change Model.¹ She developed this model to help people deal with unexpected change.

We can use the concept of this model to navigate the Agile transformation process. It is as relevant to organizations going through change.

Figure 1 shows the change curve from the Satir Change Model.

Figure 1 - Satir Change Model — Figure 1 – Satir Change Model

Every change to the current status quo, after initial resistance, will cause disruption. The “Chaos” stage represents this period in the Satir Change Model.

The key is to not make sweeping changes. A large change will result in large chaos that will be too disruptive to allow the change to take root. If the large change does not succeed, it will get much attention. This is usually not positive attention.

Rather than making large, sweeping changes, focus on small, incremental changes. Small, incremental changes will have small and short chaos periods. Small changes have a smaller risk of failure and a smaller blast radius if they do fail. Transforming ideas form faster with smaller changes. Integration into beliefs will happen faster.

Accept That the Only Constant is Change

In the modern world, if you are not changing, you are stagnating. Someone will pass you by.

There is no deadline or due date for an Agile transformation. It is an unending journey to strive to the Agile values and principles. There will always be new challenges and contexts. These will test your Agile instincts and demand new ways of working.

Accept that change is a way of life. This journey of continuous improvement is unending.

Have Endurance

Transformation takes time because developing a continuous improvement mindset takes time. Learning to see waste is not simple.

For example, Kaizen events at Toyota are crucial to developing their continuous improvement mindset. George Koenigsaecker details these Kaizen events in his book Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation.²

Kaizen events are one-week long, intense improvement experiences. They focus on a particular improvement goal.

At Toyota, they believe the continuous improvement mindset takes deliberate practice. They believe it takes 100 Kaizen events for one to undergo a personal transformation. This transformation makes them frustrated with waste in the current status quo. They become self-motivated to drive improvement without end.

Have the endurance to see your transformation take place. It will take time and many inspect and adapt loops. But it will be worth it once your teams learn to see waste and become obsessed with eradicating it.

Conclusion

A lack of safety can get in the way of change. It can slow it down. Change is the only constant. Ensure your transformation does not stall out. You must be proactive to increase safety and embrace change to your competitive advantage.

Continuous improvement is an ongoing and unending journey. We can always improve to get a little bit better. It is not about whether you are Agile or not Agile. It is about becoming Agile experiment by experiment.

What will you improve today?

References

The Satir Model: Family Therapy and Beyond, Satir, Virginia, et. al., Science and Behavior Books, 1991
Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation, George Koenigsaecker, 2012

Coach Lankford

Todd Lankford unlocks Lean Leverage in organizations to cultivate powerful, engaged product teams who maximize outcomes and impact.

His articles share his experiences and learnings along the way. Join the mailing list to get them in your inbox.

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