“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.” — Manifesto for Agile Software Development. 1
The traditional top-down command and control approach to managing organisations is too rigid, inflexible, and pedestrian for our increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.
That’s why organisations need future-fit cultures of agility, innovation, and adaptiveness where sense making, decision making, & action taking are ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
Way back in the 1980’s when I still did technical work, my specialism was real-time digital control systems development — both hardware and software. It was then that I first got involved in iterative software development, fifteen years before the famed Agile Manifesto was published in 2001.2
Iterative software development represented a major mindset shift, intended to solve one of the perennial problems that still plagues software projects to this day — customers don’t know enough about software to know what they can realistically expect for their money, whilst software developers don’t know enough about the customer’s world to make well-informed design trade-offs.
Iterative development seeks to bridge this knowledge gap by producing a series of prototypes, each of which progressively embodies more of what the developers have understood of the customer’s needs.
The customer then gets to play with the partially completed software, and provides feedback to guide the developers in the next iteration.
Before iterative development, the prevailing wisdom was that software design should not commence until the customer had agreed, up front, a complete, unambiguous, and comprehensive requirement specification that the developers would then go away and implement.
However, due to the knowledge gap described above, this often proved disastrous, leading to massively unmet customer expectations, time and cost overruns, and even the complete failure of multi-million dollar projects. 3
Over the last 20 years or so, iterative software development — which gradually came to be known as “Agile” — has proven itself by enabling customers and developers to repeatedly iterate the sense making, decision making, action taking loop, homing in on agreed designs that balance customer needs, costs, and timescales.
Whilst this evolution in the software development world was taking place, clients of traditional mainstream consulting firms were increasingly asking for help to enable their organisations to become more innovative, agile, and adaptive.
Unfortunately, the finders, minders, grinders operating model of mainstream consulting firms not only fundamentally prevents them from helping their clients create future-fit cultures, it obliges them to come up with ineffective alternative approaches -- so they can continue to mobilise the large numbers of junior consultants on which their profitability, and ultimately survival, depends. 4
As a consequence, mainstream consulting firms have tried to “cut and paste” methods, tools, and techniques from Agile software development — such as Scrums, Sprints, Standups, Backlogs, Retrospectives, etc. — which their clients hoped would lead to organisational agility.
Unfortunately, bolting on Agile practices, terminology, and tools doesn’t work, because it fails to leverage the seven channels of culture through which future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness are created.5
So, what can you do instead?
A good starting point is to attend Miljan Bajic’s free “Agile to agility — Leadership & Management in Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS)” conference this coming Wednesday 11th January 2023 from 12:00 to 4:30pm EST (5:00pm to 9:30pm GMT).
I’ll be speaking on the topic of Making sense of sense making.
Other speakers and topics include:
Sonja Blignaut on Demystifying Complexity
Iain Kerr & Jason Frasca on Innovation Led Leadership with Complex Adaptive Systems
Dr Jacqueline Conway on Embracing paradox in executive leadership
Dave Snowden on Distributed leadership — process over psycho-paternalism
Dr Sharon Varney on Dynamic patterning: Slow down to speed up!
Christopher Bramley on The Tautai of Leading — Navigating complex environments together
Derek Cabrera on Leading Complex Adaptive Systems
Ian Macdonald on Entangled Agility. Complexity in Praxis
Mary Uhl-Bien on Leading in Complexity: Enabling the Adaptive Process
Gene Bellinger on The Essence of And?
Glenda Eoyang on Seven Dragons of Complexity
FREE registration is available here.
Further details on the Conference here.
As recently as 2019 Hertz sued Accenture for the $32 million it had paid for a “website redesign from hell”.
See for example this previous article on Courage in the C-Suite and this on the Five Fatal Habits perpetuated by the mainstream consulting industry.
I’ve written previously on the seven channels of culture.