This article was first published on LinkedIn in January 2020.
This is second part of my series on things I've learnt leading teams in agile organisations. In the first part, I talked about people, in upcoming parts I'll tackle execution and managing yourself. In this part I'll look at the theme of 'structure'... How do you help to organise the chaos and help people to understand what's important.
People are smart, they rarely need to be told what to do. If you don’t agree, you need to consider the way you run your organisation. People do need structure however. They need to understand how their work fits into the bigger picture - what’s important, why are they doing it, and what’s the aim. With his structure, they can usually work out what needs to be done.
Rules make people stupid, they rob people of the understanding of why they are doing what they are doing, they remove from people the chance to make their own smarter choices. If you treat people like children, they will behave like children.
One of the biggest differences between an ‘agile’ organisation and a traditional one is the belief that everything is a work-in-progress. Traditional organisations consider themselves to be the ‘finished article’, and all that’s left is to refine that finished product. This leads to great efficiency, but makes them very inflexible - it’s hard to change anything without breaking everything. Agile organisations are fluid, chaotic, and inefficient, but they can turn on a dime...
Agile organisations are constantly experimenting to see what works, what could be better. They prototype, they try things out. It can be an exhausting experience, but it’s never boring! Agile organisations aim for ‘good enough’ not ‘best of breed’, knowing that adaptability will trump optimisation in the long run.
In this environment, there is a constant supply of great ideas… and terrible ideas. The important thing is not just to have ideas, it’s to find the good ones, and get consensus to try them out. Some simple tricks can help:
Always create a straw man: It can be hard to get consensus as a leader when the ideas are abstract. Pick the best candidate and create a straw man, and people will find it much easier to say what’s good and bad about it. If it’s good, develop it, if it sucks, pick another idea (using what you have learnt) and straw man that instead
Never underestimate the power of giving something a name: It’s funny how the simple act of giving something a name helps people to make it a thing. The catchier the name, the more the power. Make it part of a set of three things? Even better! If you give something a name it ceases to be an idea, and becomes a pattern… And people start to see that pattern everywhere. For instance ‘20% time’ is a thing, but only because someone decided to call it ‘20% time’, imagine if it was just the idea that you should be allowed to use some of your core hours to work on non-core stuff… how long would the idea have lasted?
If you can't test it, it's not real: There is a lot of great ideas out there that are worthless. They are worthless because they are unprovable or untestable. If you can’t apply an idea, and see if it makes a difference, then what is the point? It might be right, or wrong, but if you can’t tell which, what are you supposed to do with it? It may sound obvious, but some untestable statements can sound very profound and compelling, you want them to be true, but if you can never actually prove it either way, it ain’t worth nothin’.
Incomplete is better than wrong: Most ideas start off as incomplete, and it can be tempting to fill the holes with speculation - people hate holes. However, it’s better to know holes are there and work around them, than to fill them with things that will turn out to be wrong, and will need to be unpicked later.
Everything is terrible… we’re screwed! Everything is amazing… we’re unstoppable! This thing is wrong… I need to fix it STAT!
We seemed to be hard-coded with a recency bias… When things are going well, it’s awesome, when something goes wrong, it’s a disaster… In an agile and sometimes chaotic environment, this feeling can be amplified.
In reality, life is, on average… average! Sometimes it’s better, sometimes it’s worse, but short-term set-backs are usually soon forgotten as things get unblocked. React to problems, but try to take a long term view. The waves will push you around, but it’s the gentle current that will sweep you off-course*. As a leader, try to damp radical swings of direction and emotion in the team “things are still a mess, but look how far we have come!”, “we are doing well, but let’s not be complaint”, “the thing about waves and currents was wrong, but we’ve learnt a lot”. People always overestimate the short term impact and underestimate the long term impact.
*Having never swum in the sea, this may not be true, don’t plan your next cross-channel swim on this advice
It was the first day of the team off-site - everyone was excited, we were in a different city, we had a couple of great days ahead of us, we’d had a lovely meal the day before. I was excited, I’d spent a few weeks working on the team OKRs - I thought they were pretty radical, but finally we had something that captured everything we did, and why. I’d asked a few people (ok, a lot of people) for feedback and they all said the same thing - I was an unalloyed genius - well perhaps not quite that, but still… I proudly put them up on the screen and asked for feedback… People made encouraging noises… Someone asked for some clarification… I explained, they nodded… And then somebody spoke up and said simply “that’s not going to work”. I was a bit surprised. Other people started to agree, they weren’t sure it would work either. I was a lot surprised. In a less than a minute, everyone was falling over each other to explain why my genius ideas was a disaster waiting to happen. I was upset, but thankfully my curiosity trumped my frustration, and I politely asked them to stop talking over each other and tear my idea to shreds in a polite and orderly fashion...
Of course, as you will have guessed by now, they were right. They brought a completely different perspective to the problem that I hadn’t considered. Once I understood their point, I could immediately see they were right. I was excited, a new problem to solve! I agreed that they were right and I was wrong, and explained my thinking. Together we reworked what we had into a new thing that met most of the goals of the original proposal, but avoided the big pitfall that I’d overlooked.
Creating an environment where people can say what they really think is vital. There can be no sacred truths. If an idea can't be defeated, it is probably wrong. At best, accepted and unchallengeable 'truths' are like the boulders that everyone has to plough around, at worst they are like a boulder in the middle of a motorway...
People like quick fixes, and people like reassuring beliefs in difficult times. People want to believe that there is a ‘magic formula’ that will come to the rescue, or somehow strike them with genius in their hour of need, or make them succeed where others have failed. I’m been unfortunate to see a lot of versions of this formula, a few classic examples are ‘money’, ‘smart people’, ‘an agile approach’, ‘innovation’, ‘machine learning’... After all, it’s not like Edison had to iterate on the light bulb and some people are just naturally creative.
The sad (but reassuring) fact is that most things come down to hard work, a healthy dollop of luck, and having a reasonably good plan to start with. Being agile means being prepared to learn and adapt your plan, but it doesn’t mean you can set-out with no plan at all. If it really just came down to smart people and money, everyone would be doing it. If the secret sauce of innovation was a thing, they would be putting it in bottles and selling it in supermarkets. “Hope is not a strategy”, and in most cases, if people are aggressively touting some sort of ‘secret advantage’, they are scared, confused, and don’t know what to do. There is only one thing I’ve found that works - sit down, work out where you need to be, test your assumptions, then break down the problem of getting there into smaller chunks and solve each one.
Hopefully there are some nuggets of wisdom that resonate with you! Learning is vital in any organisation, so I'd love to know what people think! Hopefully I'll have the article on 'execution' ready to share soon (ironic?!).