I was in the restaurant waiting for my friend to discuss his current gig at a large SaaS company. He was hired to lead the effort to fix the company’s failed agile transformation that has struggled over past three years. He wanted to share his current findings and brainstorm next steps. He was running late as his various, overlapping meetings generated a non-stop flow of issues and corrective actions. He finally poured himself into the chair next to me and paused to breathe.
He described how the company had restructured multiple times with frequent changes in leadership. The new leadership team had aggressively backed the ‘agile’ brand, embraced every agile method, instituted CI/CD changes, and published multiple detailed customer roadmaps. The CEO felt they had sufficient engineering staff to meet all these new demands. The VPs were operating in silos with each wanting their own ‘agile’ tools and methods. The Product Management organization operated in one tool while Engineering operated in another tool. The major product was an amalgam from various technology suppliers and acquisitions. Beyond a basic stitching of the pieces together, the product had never been refactored to improve user experience or operational efficiency. They had weak architecture and poor operational control. Meanwhile, the company was growing fast and expanding into new markets.
Leadership published a long list of product 'new ventures' that were categories of work that the organization had to deliver something ‘new’ in each ‘venture’. Meanwhile, they published customer commitment roadmaps that were a mixture of sales commitments made to sign new customers and exciting new enhancements for the annual customer event. Leadership demanded that Product Management put the litany of commitments and new ventures into the work tracking tools. Since the organization was large with multiple Engineering organizations, they felt a flat list of outcomes assigned to teams made the most sense. Teams duplicated the commitments as they saw fit and broke the work into their own incremental deliverables. They were able to categorize the work by new venture and by desired release for reporting purposes.
The key coordination mechanism between teams were meetings, endless meetings. When leaders were confronted with a new escalation, they held a meeting. When a product build failed, they held a meeting. For efficiency, they held meetings via chat sessions. Leaders, middle managers and teams were flooded daily with new requests, new dependencies, and new requirements. Product Managers would work out multi-sprint outcomes with their engineering teams, only to have these undone by the new daily requests from other teams. The changes in plans led to more meetings.
Seeing the increasing time spent in meetings and the slowing of work, Leadership rushed to the root cause of this situation, meeting efficiency! The leadership rushed new training for the managers and teams on how to conduct meetings, who to invite, and if invited, how to decline the invitation. They seemed to believe that everyone in the company had somehow forgotten this basic professional behavior in the din of on-going work pressure.
Upon entry into the organization, my friend talked to Leadership presenting his diagnosis that the organization lacked prioritization of defined outcomes that would help the organization out of its thrashing and into a series of sensible, coordinated successful deliveries together. The focus was on how to bring about collaboration and focus rather than the ever increasing 'do everything' that was based on their belief that they had more than enough resources to do everything.
The shocking part was the hostility that the recommendation received from Leadership. The hostile responses were that his observations were just wrong, that the product was necessarily complex, that executives were too busy running the business, and that there were plenty of resources to do the work. For raising his observations, his boss started to explain why the Leadership was right and why my friend shouldn't be so blunt in his assessment. His boss needed my friend to be a better team player, provide the supportive answers as needed, and not attempt to instruct Leadership on reality.
He paused just long enough to order his lunch. Turning to me, he asked, what did I think of his situation.
I shared the summary of Martin Seligman’s book, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. Martin’s work builds upon learned helplessness, where an individual shuts down due to having no control during adverse situations. While Martin’s work focuses on an individual, I have seen this same behavior in work organizations that disempowered their employees and managers by relentless demands, constant changes, disconnected decision making and scapegoating. Since there is no constructive structure, each manager and team controls what they can control, that is the work that they choose to do for the day (or sprint) completing the work to their group-specific DoD as they unwittingly accumulate organization-wide technical debt.
Sadly, I told him that I have only seen one thing that forces Leadership to change direction when an organization hits the learned helplessness state. That one thing is total failure. Total failure is when the organization fundamentally fails to deliver what’s promised to customers whereby those customers reject the product and likely switch vendors. Total failure cannot be masked over by Leadership and forces the organization’s acceptance that fundamental change is required. Most times, the fundamental change starts with changes in Leadership. Sadly, total failure can lead to business failure too.
“Is everything lost?”, he asked.
Here's where Martin’s book can help after total failure occurs and Leadership decides to sponsor meaningful change. Martin talks about how an individual can learn optimism, hence overcome pessimism and learned helplessness, by thinking about one positive thought every day. Once Leadership realizes that they must change and fix what’s broken, the organization can step back and make incremental changes to correct what’s been broken. The analogy of one positive thought every day for the organization is the retrospective, action, and learning that an organization can take with each sprint, product increment and release. These small corrections will snowball into measurable improvements that can win back those customers.
However, until Leadership sets its sights on learning and improving over demanding and thrashing, a learned helplessness organization will continue towards total failure. Nothing that my friend could do will stop this organization from reaching total failure.
Our lunch arrived.
My friend sat there staring at his lunch.
“Should I start looking for another job?”, he sighed.
I would look for new opportunities just in case you need them.
