Sustainable Agility
The question on everyone’s lips these days seems to be how do we get large, waterfall aligned organizations and teams to change and do Agile! The answer seems to be ‘coaches’ although I suspect we don’t have the same understanding of the word ‘coach’ and may have disguised ‘consultant’ and ‘telling’ into this new role of ‘coach’. We kinda had to rebrand our old unilateral ways so that they look like this new autonomous teaming that Agile needs and we need Agile … to deliver faster, from less!
I can’t help wondering if we are using the same outside driven thinking to solve the ‘problem’ and in so doing re-creating what we want to leave behind.
What if Agility comes from inside ?
People create work and people who already live from Agile mindsets create Agile spaces both without any kind of process and within non-Agile processes.
Agility is an inside job!
It is inside your culture and it is inside your people. When the inside is agile, the outside does agile with ease!
I shouldn’t mind this insistence that to do Agile needs an Agile coach, it is job security after all, but perhaps we have a different ‘how’ in mind. Because in my mind my job as an Agile coach isn’t to tell you how to do Agile but allow you to find it for yourselves and create it for yourselves! That is the difference between a team who complies and only does Agile with consistent, directive ‘coaching’ and a team that is committed and uses coaching lightly, to keep direction, come unstuck and take the next step!
Until we let go of controlling this, directing it into our idea of how it looks, we will be stuck in an endless loop where teams are stuck and coaches needed to tell them how. We never had control anyhow, all we had was fear and power and they aren’t the same at all!
There is a reason why the Agile Manifesto values people over process – do we really value people over process ? Or are we still holding onto process and roles as a way to control and direct ?