Steering Through the Agile Apocalypse: Navigating Chaos 🌪️
Hello, Agile navigators! Today, I dive deep into the tempest that is chaos—one of the seven ominous signs of the agile apocalypse. It’s a storm that brews in the midst of digital and agile transformations, threatening to engulf organizations in confusion and disarray. Let’s unpack this chaos, its origins, and chart a course towards clarity and coherence. ⛵
Chaos manifests in two critical areas that are foundational to any organization’s success: the work and how we do the work. Here’s how these elements contribute to the turmoil:
1. Chaos in Product Ownership: The Vision Void 🚀
Poor product ownership plants the seeds of chaos by failing to communicate clear, compelling goals. Imagine a ship where every sailor rows in a different direction; that’s what happens when strategic objectives are murky or non-existent. The absence of well-articulated goals leaves room for misalignment and a scattergun approach to progress.
Trust, Autonomy, and Alignment: The Balancing Act ⚖️
In traditional settings, organizations enforce alignment with a heavy hand—milestones, Gantt charts, and arbitrary deadlines. But what happens when these crutches are kicked away in favor of agility, and nothing is put in its place? You guessed it—chaos reigns.
2. Chaos in Implementation: The Communication Breakdown 📡
Transitioning to agile methodologies requires a metamorphosis in how changes are communicated and implemented. Far too often, a high-level email blast is considered sufficient to herald a new era. This approach fails spectacularly, as interpretations vary wildly, leading to fragmentation and, ultimately, chaos.
Charting a Path to Clarity: Vision, Value, and Validation 🌟
To navigate out of chaos, we must establish a core strategic direction—a North Star—that guides every action and decision. This involves:
Vision: Crafting a compelling future state that everyone is excited to move towards.
Value: Ensuring that every step taken adds real value in the direction of that vision.
Validation: Continuously checking that we’re on the right path through feedback and adaptation.
Strategic Objectives and Tactical Goals: The Roadmap 🗺️
Creating a clear roadmap involves setting a strategic objective that acts as your North Star, then breaking it down into intermediate goals and tactical actions. This layered approach helps everyone see how their daily work contributes to the ultimate goal, fostering alignment without the rigidity of traditional project management.
Communication and Reinforcement: The Agile Beacon 📣
Effective communication is the antidote to chaos. This means not just announcing changes but embedding new measures, incentives, and continuously reinforcing the direction and purpose of the transformation. It’s about changing the very system within which people operate, aligning it with the new agile ethos.
The Measure of Success: Principles Over Prescriptions 🛠️
In the agile world, success is not measured by adherence to a rigid set of rules but by the principles that guide our decisions and actions. These principles should be few, meaningful, and designed not to become covert rules. They should foster honesty, courage, and transparency, empowering everyone to make decisions that align with the organization’s goals.
Navigating Out of Chaos: A Call to Agile Captains 🚢
Chaos need not be the death knell of your agile transformation. By establishing a clear vision, communicating effectively, and aligning incentives with strategic objectives, we can steer our organizations through stormy waters into the calm seas of agility and innovation.
Continuous Learning and Adaptation: The Agile Way Forward 🔄
Remember, agility is about continuous learning and adaptation. It’s about creating an environment where autonomy, mastery, and purpose thrive. By focusing on principles rather than prescriptions, we can foster an organization that not only survives the agile apocalypse but emerges stronger, more cohesive, and infinitely more capable.
Wrapping Up: Your Agile Compass Awaits 🧭
As we navigate the choppy waters of chaos, let’s remember that the key to successful transformation lies in clarity of vision, effective communication, and the empowerment of every team member. Let’s embrace the principles of agility to guide our journey, ensuring that chaos is replaced with coherent, collective progress towards our shared goals.
If you’re keen to explore more about agile, scrum, or devops, or if you simply want to chat about steering through chaos, reach out for a coffee chat. Together, we can explore the vast oceans of agile possibilities. Until next time, keep your sails set towards agility, and may your journey be smooth and your transformations transformative. 🌈
Liked this deep dive into navigating chaos in agile transformations? Follow, subscribe, and join the conversation for more insights and guidance on your agile journey.
One of the seven signs of the agile apocalypse is chaos, and chaos seems to be the watchword of almost every organisation’s digital transformation, agile transformation, whatever watchword transformation they’re using at the moment. It comes out as kind of two things that resonate in chaos. One is about the work, and then one is about how we do the work.
So the one about the work is really about poor product ownership, which results in chaos. It results in chaos because if we’ve got no well-communicated goals, then everybody’s able to go in whatever direction they like. If you think of trust and no trust, trust, autonomy, and alignment, where do you fit in that story in your organisation? Most organisations create high levels of alignment by having lots of rigorous project management things going on. They have milestones, and they have dates that you have to hit, and most of those dates are just somebody’s decided what that date is. There’s not a reason for that date; they’ve just decided it.
But it creates this bounded environment within which everybody moves forward. But when you remove the milestones and the Gantt charts and the deadlines, what would you expect to happen? If you don’t fill that void with anything but chaos, right? Nobody knows what direction they’re supposed to go, what needs to be done, when. How do we create that bounded environment in the agile space? It’s very different from how we created it in the traditional management and traditional project management structure.
So the way we do that is, and we talk about in the product owner class, is vision, value, and validation. You need to create this core strategic direction so that everybody understands what direction they’re going in. I talked about it recently in the evidence-based management class as well. You’ve got your strategic objective; that’s your reach for your North Star. Your strategic objective is like a reach, and it’s a bit far out. It’s difficult for people to see how the work that they’re doing every day connects to that story.
So you need some kind of intermediate strategic goal that brings that into something we think we can work towards. It’s progress towards our North Star, but that gets us there. Then we can start thinking about what are we tactically going to do, what are our tactical goals, what are we going to do, what’s our next step we’re going to take towards that next destination in our journey towards our North Star, our outcome.
Then we can start to see how the work we’re doing every day, people doing the work, can see how the work they’re doing every day connects to the tactical goal, connects to the intermediate strategic goal, and helps work towards fulfilling the overall strategic goal and North Star. With that connection, you enable all of those people at every level in your organisation, depending on what level goals they care about, to make decisions that best fulfil the vision and purpose of the organisation because they all understand and are going in the same direction.
But if you don’t have that, if you don’t provide that, and you take away the milestones and Gantt charts and reports, suddenly there’s chaos. That’s one way that chaos occurs. The other way I mentioned was in implementation chaos. This is the meta-information around how you do a digital, agile, DevOps, whatever thing you want to put in front of it, transformation, some kind of change in your organisation. This is really around poor communication.
You don’t involve the people doing the work in the story that you’re trying to tell, and you don’t communicate that story back to them in a way that helps them understand, that continuously reinforces the story that we’re trying to get to. What I see most organisations do is somebody really senior in the organisation sends out an email saying, “We’re going to move in this new direction; we’re going to do this new thing,” and that’s it. They just magically expect things to happen.
What really happens is every single person in your organisation interprets that email differently. Every single person then takes that interpretation, and over time, as they add more information to that interpretation, they all start going in slightly different directions. So even if from that one email everybody ended up going in the same direction, they start to fragment, and you end up with chaos because you’ve got loads of different people pulling the organisation in different directions.
So in order to create that, we’re moving in this direction, just like the goals for what direction are we taking the product, what are we actually building, we also need goals on what do we want our organisational culture to look like, how are we measuring people in order to get them to go in that direction. A great joke in that space is if you give developers a bonus for the number of bugs that they find and fix in their code, all of your developers will end up writing themselves a very large bonus because they can just go add the problem that they can then fix and get the kudos for fixing it.
If you reward firefighters, you breed arsonists, right? If it’s within that same package. So what you need to do instead is look at how are we measuring and incentivising people, right? Because the measures and incentives that you create in your organisation are the things that drive behaviours. We think it’s the goals that we created over here, right? But if your measures and incentives are at odds with the goals, it’s going to start pulling people in a different direction, perhaps in the opposite direction, because you’ve not actually changed the system.
The measures and incentives are part of the system within which everybody’s operating. So you need to focus on how do we understand how those measures are impacting people’s behaviours and continuously tweak those measures in order to maintain the direction and people working together towards that goal. Communicate everything effectively. You can’t just say to everybody, “We’re going to do something new.” No, you have to change the measures so they can see that we’re doing something new.
Then you have to continuously reinforce what it is we’re doing, what direction we’re going, why we’re going there, how they can help, how they’re contributing to the story, and you continually build that picture towards going in that new direction. Otherwise, you end up with chaos: chaos of building the wrong thing or chaos of just going in the wrong direction.
Thanks for watching the video. If you enjoyed it, please like, follow, and subscribe. I always reply to comments, and if you want to have a chat about this or anything else agile, scrum, or DevOps, then please book a coffee with me through Naked Agility.
