Recently, I spent some serious reflection time with a senior executive on how he ‘phased in’ agile into his large organization of 400 plus engineers. His ‘phased’ approach was persistently done across his entire organization over multiple years. These were bold steps communicated consistently to everyone.
His phased steps were: the first directional decision (if you will a north star of where they were all heading), organization assessments, training, scrum team formations, PO assignments, more frequent releases, modernizing tools, building the Scrum@Scale structure, moving big-batch to small-batch, single definition of done and more. The next step was taken as the organization could tolerate that step. He was always focused on the business and customer outcomes knowing that he had to keep people and product value moving forward together.
At the time of our conversation, his organization was gaining on velocity and maturity, so there wasn’t really any pressure to do something radically different. He was just taking time to step-back and reflect.
I asked, what if he would have at one point, at most any point, told his organization, now that we’re underway, we’re trained and we’re doing what we can set out to do, we have an additional change for everyone in the organization. On a particular Friday, everyone’s old job roles, old ways of working, old projects, old commitments, old tools, etc are terminated. Those old things are now gone. On the following Monday, everyone is hired into our new organization, new job roles (as defined in our maturity model based upon Scrum and Scrum@Scale), new tools, new small batches, new definition of ready for grooming, new definition of done for completeness, etc. As with every newly hired individual, our previous experience is valued, but the new jobs-at-hand defines us, as will our future customer value.
He responded with, why, would he ever want to do that?
We were noodling the timeline of the changes that he made and how the timing selected for the next phased step seemed to take longer than desired. We discussed the passive aggressiveness, or collective resistance to the changes. Often the ‘that’s not how we work’ pushback kept popping up. When new tools were introduced, many in his organization would claim, ‘the tool won’t work because it can’t do what the previous tool did’. When Scrum@Scale structure was introduced, his managers initially relabeled their existing staffs as Scrum-of-Scrums or metaScrums and kept working as they historically worked. When releases were shorted to quarterly, they quickly devised a plan for staged development and test quarters for six month or larger work batches.
Each of these initial responses were really a rejection of the decisions to move forward. Some responses were covert. Some were overt. Regardless, the responses slowed the organization’s movement forward and had to be addressed. Now, to his and his leadership team’s credit, they coached and nurtured his teams and managers through the resistance. They got them on the right track towards their north star decision.
I asked, what if given what he knows of the resistance to change, he, metaphorically, terminated everyone’s old positions over the weekend and, metaphorically, rehired them into the new positions, would that have helped ease the resistance? Who starts a new position at a new company by saying, ‘that’s not the way they did it at their previous job’? Doesn’t everyone who joins a new company or takes a new position, start with the usual 30-days of listening, 30-days of planning and 30-days of taking initial steps? They learn before they act anew.
He reflected upon these ‘what if’ questions. His response was, being clear that the old jobs, the old ways of working, the old ways of delivering customer value, the old ways of making decisions and the old ways of thinking were gone would have helped everyone reset expectations. The reset would have provided everyone a clear, clean break with the past. This would have helped everyone resist together the passive aggressives’ claims and behaviors. He said that he should have told everyone that it applied to his job too. In retrospect, that would have been a good step to take. He didn’t just see it at the time.
I responded, we’re all learning together.
Knowing him, he’ll be leading more agile transformations. He’ll continue to reflect on his past experiences to learn. He’ll now have another path to consider, a different road less traveled.
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