Oh hi, my name is Martin Hinchelwood. I’m the owner at Naked Agility. I’m a professional Scrum trainer with Scrum.org. I’m a Microsoft MVP and I’ve been delivering software for about 20 years and working in organizational change for more than 10 years.
I’d like to thank Akaditi and Nana for the opportunity to talk to you about the inevitability of change. I speak often in Ghana. I love coming to Ghana and I have done a lot of training and consulting there with Akaditi. I was looking forward to being in Nigeria, but obviously that is not the case. But this is second best for sure, getting to meet all of you and interact at this level.
So please feel free to ask any questions in the chat and I’ll hopefully have time to answer them all at the end. Hopefully Akaditi will moderate those for me. Failing that, you can ask me any questions on Twitter as well, and obviously LinkedIn. I have a whole bunch of webcasts over on NakedAgility.tv that I’ve recorded previously. I’m sure Akaditi are going to be publishing all of their recordings later and I’ll be providing a link to the presentation in the presentation at the end. The final slide has a link and a QR code to get you access to the presentation.
Something that I’ve been considering for quite a while is that there’s really no such thing as an agile transformation, a digital transformation, DevOps transformation, or any other transformation in business that you can think of or that you might have been sold. You can’t buy agility and you certainly can’t install it. There’s no end states, no optimal outcome, and certainly no best practices, only adequate practices for the situation at hand.
So instead, you have to grow and nurture and prune agility as it grows inside your organization, and eventually you too will be able to take advantage of business opportunities as they arise in whatever changing marketplace that you’re in. This is continuous change; it’s an evolution, not a transformation.
It’s easy to see if you think of the evolution, sorry, the transformation of a caterpillar that transforms into a butterfly. It has a beginning state and it has an end state, and in between it has a transformational state. It starts in one place and it finishes at the end. But evolution is a constant and continuous set of experiments. The successful experiments succeed and do well in a particular niche. The unsuccessful ones fail and die. The same is true with companies and organizations.
In the past, the ebb and flow of niches in the business world was very slow. Niches that we could take advantage of existed for a long period of time. Look at the length of time that the coal industry has been around or the oil industry, and there are many of those types of niches that were there for a long, long time, tens if not hundreds of years. We could grow our organization to fit into that niche slowly, and once we owned that niche, it was very hard for competitors to come in and disrupt our abilities; we owned that space.
Today, however, niches grow and change much faster than ever before. My belief is that it’s due to the new flow of information. The internet has made things a lot faster. We find out things quicker. We have a feeling that we need to do something with this information much more quickly. And as it gets faster, we need to react faster, and thus a virtuous cycle of increasing change perpetuates. However, for now, organizations only change when they are in danger. Fight or flight kicks in and they either adapt to the changing environment or maybe they die. That’s the way it’s kind of always been, but very, very slowly.
Ask yourself if your organization or organizations you can think of that you interact with would have survived COVID-19 20 years ago. Think of the technology that we had 20 years ago. The average worldwide internet connection speed 20 years ago was 56 kilobits per second. You wouldn’t have been able to do video conferencing. We wouldn’t have been able to run this conference. What about 10 years ago? Was the technology even there 10 years ago to solve some of these problems and allow many organizations to continue with very little disruption?
The big tech organizations that were mentioned earlier, like Google and Microsoft, have had very little disruption. Any organization that has people sitting in an office doing work shouldn’t need to be disrupted in the way they potentially were because they weren’t relying or they didn’t have the new technologies that have become available in the last 20 years. If you did have those technologies but you put them in maybe five, ten years ago, you probably relied on VPN. So suddenly, instead of having a few employees connecting into your network to then access everything, you had all of your employees trying to connect in and access everything, and most organizations’ VPNs couldn’t cope with that number of users. They expected a small number of users to be connected at any one time rather than everybody in the company connected all day.
But if you had already adopted many of those cloud technologies that are available, like the one we’re using now at Microsoft Teams, it is all set up in the cloud. All of you are connecting not into Akaditi’s offices but directly to Microsoft servers in the cloud in order to take advantage of all of your internet connections rather than be restricted by one single point of failure. And how many of those organizations made that change? So if you’ve been able to utilize the cloud, if you’ve already moved your services online, then there was very little disruption. Employees working from home probably got faster connections than the connections they got in the office because they’re using their home connection that they own the whole bandwidth rather than the office bandwidth that they’re sharing with all of their colleagues.
If you had changed, if you had adopted new things as they became available, I often hear the phrase, “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.” But I think that is a very outmoded and old phrase for today. Today, I would much prefer to hear, “If it isn’t broken, you’re not pushing change fast enough. You’re not trying new things. You’re not experimenting.” Evolution is about embracing failure and learning from it. It’s okay to fail; we do it all the time. But if we learn from it, we pick ourselves back up and figure out how to do things a little bit better because success is the result of continuous experimentation at a sustainable pace that enables you to take advantage of whatever business opportunities occur as they arise. This is the inevitability of change.
Our current way of working, the management practices that I and my colleagues see as prevalent in the world, I’m not going to say that everybody is using these management practices, but the vast majority of people are still using management practices that were developed 130 years ago during the industrial revolution. They were created in an environment of very low change. Things weren’t moving fast at the time. We didn’t have the communication levels that we have now, and those practices were able to support those systems of the time. But they’re no longer able to keep up with the constant evolution of now.
Prior to the industrial revolution, manufacturing took place at or near your home in small workshops. You might imagine a cobbler making shoes in a village. His compensation came through earned value that was based on how well he made the shoes and how well they fitted the needs of the customer. He understood who his customer was.
So again, please don’t use the mute all button; otherwise, you will mute the speaker. If you look through the list of participants, you will see people flashing that are making a lot of noise, and you can click on them and mute them individually.
We didn’t mute you; maybe she couldn’t hear you, but we could hear you. Sorry, oh okay, perfect. Now I’ve forgotten where I was. We were talking about the cobbler in the village, weren’t we? Because he understood who his customers were. He probably engaged with them a lot more often than we engage with our customers. He probably met with them for a drink in the pub. The local policeman, the farmer, they’re going to drink, and they’re going to have this person right next to them who made the shoes on their feet that they walk about in every day, and they can complain. They can say what they liked and what they didn’t. It’s a very powerful way to work, and there was purpose to his work. He could see and engage with his customer and get that purpose.
And because he had that purpose, it also enabled mastery. Think about the master and apprentice system that operated at that time, and you would have the not the great wealth of knowledge that the long beard had created over many years of being a cobbler, and they would pass it on to the next person down the line.
Whether that is just out of interest, I have a lot of background noise here. Is it okay for you? We can’t hear it. Awesome, I’m using that crisper thing, so it’s deleting. All I hear is a lawnmower outside my window.
But I’m glad you can’t hear it. So that mastery, that master and apprentice system passing knowledge down through the generations, people chose to work hard and well in order to get better at what they did. So that getting better at what they did, becoming a master, either manifested itself as increased wealth or greater time to pursue other interests that they have, whether that be drinking in the pub or whatever other things they like doing.
So during the industrial revolution, a big change happened in the way we work and the way we do things. The industrial revolution changed the world forever. We’ve already had a show talking about it earlier. We needed to scale up really quickly, but the technology of the time couldn’t build the quantity of goods required without human help. We needed to mechanise the workforce. We turned people’s jobs into robotic jobs. Workers no longer had a purpose beyond the paycheck and neither understood the value of the customers and didn’t have any mastery. People became replaceable cogs in a machine.
Think about that modern, even today, management practice where it’s okay. We don’t need to help and support our workers because if somebody quits, there’s 10 people waiting at the door that can go do that job. That’s for unskilled labour. If you have somebody who’s solving problems with their brain, then that’s not good enough. You’re losing a lot more than just an individual; you’re losing a lot more than just a cog in the system.
So I would say, what’s the difference between these two pictures? On the left, we have the master passing a wealth of knowledge on to the apprentice. They understand the whole context of the product they’re building. They understand who their customer is and how they’re using the product, what their job is, what they do day to day, and the customer has direct access to the people that are making the product.
And on the right, we have a bunch of factory workers making something. I actually don’t know what they’re making. I’m pretty sure you would not be able to figure out what they’re making. It’s a round thing with some pins in it, and there’s lots of people doing the same thing. Do they even know what it’s for? Do they even care? Does that even matter? Maybe it doesn’t.
And the thing that happens when you’re doing that kind of mind-numbing work, the example I always use is if you might have read a book called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. In that book, Charlie’s dad lost his job at a factory, and his job was screwing the top on toothpaste bottles. That was his job day in and day out, and he was replaced by a robot. He’s just a replaceable cog; he’s a machine waiting for robots to happen.
So because people were disengaging from the process, there’s this idea, and they had a name for it at the time. It was called soldiering, which is not the soldiering that we know today, but it was this idea of somebody working more slowly than their capacity. They’re deliberately working more slowly than their capacity. You might use the phrase to loaf, or that depends on your cultural background whether those words have meaning. But that’s just to work more slowly than one’s capacity, to lay about not doing much, try and avoid doing the work, going in hiding around the corner from where the supervisor is because you want to have a cheeky extra cigarette break.
So I want you to imagine that you are a management consultant around at the time of the 1890s. Now I have a link that I’m going to put in the chat, which might make this a little bit easier, so I’m going to put it in the chat. Can everybody see my slide? Oh yes, you can see my slides. One person was saying they can’t see my slides. They are displaying, so it might be a computer network issue. I’ve put a link in the chat. It would be awesome if everybody could click that link.
And they will go to a tool called Mural. This is a web-based stickies on a wall post-it system. I don’t see anybody coming in yet. I can see when you’re coming in because I’m going to give you an activity in a few minutes. You can use the link that’s on screen, so that’s nkd agility.net forward slash soldiering 1980, capital S, and that will take you into the mural. Has anybody been able to do that?
No, no, this includes you as well. It doesn’t look like anybody’s joining. Maybe we do it over the chat then instead. I’m just on it. Awesome. I will give you another few minutes to figure it out. I see one person in. I see Adi. He actually has an account for this system. It is just fine to join as a guest to click the visitor and come in that way. So I see there’s two people in. We need more people. So I want everybody to click that link in the chat and open up at this lovely mural and go in there. I only have two. Come on, we need more.
We need you to, this is not just a presentation; we need you to engage in the process. We need to come up with some ideas because I’ve hired you. I’m the owner of a paper mill, and I’ve hired you to help me come up with some ideas to defeat this loafing and malingering workforce that I have. They’re all laying about; they’re trying to avoid doing work. They don’t want to do anything, so we need to figure out how we’re going to deal with this.
So I’d like you to use this mural, and if you double-click anywhere on the mural, it will create a post-it. I’m going to create one now for those that are in there already so they can see. Create a little post-it, and you can type in your idea. So what I would like you to do is create as many ideas as you can think of for dealing with these loafing and malingering employees. We’re management consultants. You’re management consultants, and you need to help me deal with this problem. What are your suggestions going to be?
So I’m going to put two minutes on the clock. So I’m going to give you two minutes from now. The timer has started to go and add as many ideas as you can. So all you do is double-click anywhere on the page. It will create a little post-it. Yes, you can create multiple different colours. Some people are overachieving and typing in that post-it your idea for solving this problem. And I want you to think like it’s 1880.
Okay, so it’s not 2020; it’s 1880. So you don’t have to be politically correct. Think that like you’re in the 1800s. Yes, thank you, Arthur. So anybody who is, you’ll be able to see what’s going on even if you don’t want to participate by clicking the link, and you’ll be able to see the mural and zoom in and zoom out.
We have a few suggestions already, not many, but it’s doing good. So we’ve got dock their pay, sack them. You know, if they’re not going fast enough, let’s sack them. Cut their break times because they’re not working fast enough. We’re not getting enough widgets, therefore we’re not making enough paper. So you’re going to have to have shorter breaks; you’re going to have to work longer time. We’re going to have to do some overtime. If you don’t look like you’re performing, we’re just going to sack you.
What else are we going to do? Close the toilets. Adi, I don’t think that’s going to work. We’re going to end up with a very smelly factory floor. Punish the slow ones. How might you punish the slow ones? Or how might you create incentives to have people work faster or harder? Food reduction. Oh, that’s mean. That’s mean. It’s not going as mean as it has done in the past.
What things happened in the 1800s? Chinese conscripts building the railroads in the US. I’m sure they didn’t get paid well. What else was happening in the 1800s? Humiliate them, send them to Australia. Yeah, everything’s trying to kill you in Australia. Sack them, punish them, make them join the army.
Okay, so we’ve got a few suggestions. The time is up. Thank you very much for your participation. I will just quickly move this over to the other views so that everybody else can see and for the recording at what was created. These are our interesting ideas. So punishing the slow ones, cutting their breaks, making them work overtime, docking their pay, sacking them. They’re not doing enough work.
I have run this exercise with many, many people in the room, and just to give a little example of what sort of ideas have been created in the past, time off after deliveries, tapping into personal motivation, decreasing lunchtime, so we saw that already. Employee of the week, you know, some kind of bonus for being the best person this week. Discipline.
Well, I don’t know if you see on the right there, there’s armed guards, enforcers, threat of imminent death, large amounts of screaming, those whips, and there’s also free beer. So you can see there can be a lot of different ways that you might come up with to solve this problem.
And really, there was no holds barred in the 1800s. There were very few things that were out of bounds for you as a company owner on what you were able to do to your employees. Very few rules. So kind of a little bit open. So what really happened? Well, the thought leaders at the time, the main thought leader was a gentleman called Frederick Winston Taylor, and he coined this particular phrase. I’m going to read it out because I think it’s very important.
Hardly a competent worker can be found who does not devote a considerable amount of time studying just how slowly they can work and still convince their employer that they’re going at a good pace. This for me has been the fundamental basis upon which most modern management practices have been built. We don’t trust people; they’re going to do a bad job. They’re going to try and get out of doing the work, so we have to control them. That’s the founding basis of these management practices, and it was true at the time.
We had disconnected workers who didn’t care about the work, but if you want people to care about the work, maybe we need to do things a little bit differently. So this phrase became the foundation upon which traditional management practices have been built. And he created something called the scientific management method.
And all of the, you put some of these ideas on the mural. I see some folks are still looking around on the other ideas that are in there. But let’s develop some standard methods for performing each job, so we’re going to train the workers in those standard methods. So that was on the list. And we might divide workers into appropriate ability-based groups. So the people that make widget A will put all of them together, and the people that make widget B, because then we can just control them separately.
We’re going to create incentives for increased output. There were a number of incentives that you had on the list. Over time, I’ll pay them badly. Let me flip back over to the ideas that you created. Make them work overtime, cut their breaks, dock their pay, sack, threaten, sack them, or just threaten them with sacking. Humiliate them, punish the slow ones. These are all things that are creating incentives.
But we need to plan their work. We don’t want them to think. We want to plan all of the things that we’re going to do. I’m sure in some of those statements you might see some of the things in your current management practices, maybe in your organization. Maybe some of these are things that you’ve been doing. That’s entirely possible. These are practices that are ingrained in the way we work. They’re part of our bureaucracies, and we’re going to talk about why we need to change them in just a moment.
After Taylor was another fellow called Henry Gantt. Yes, that Gantt. And he built on those Tayloristic ideas and used scientific analysis to improve the efficiency in the industry. Remember, we’re mechanising people. People are just robots; they’re just widgets. It’s unskilled labour. We can train anybody to do these jobs in the factory.
So they created the task and bonus system. They created a basic wage based on expected low performance, and then you get a bonus for exceeding the expectations. And maybe we should bonus the managers for motivating their staff to exceed that proficiency. So let’s find all the bullies, make the managers.
At the time, today there are many types of managers around. I’ve worked with some awesome managers that have to work within this system of traditional management practices, and they do things a little bit differently and use it to their advantage. I’m not saying I’m not painting every manager with the same evil stick, but there are certainly many evil managers out there. The system allows that to happen.
I would like you to also think about the traditional classroom in schools. Create a picture in your head of maybe the classroom you grew up with. But the traditional classroom view that you see in schools, everybody sits in rows. Everybody has to do the same thing at the same time. No talking, rewards for fulfilled tasks, and incentive-based learning. That sounds like a factory floor to me.
The school system, the modern school system, was designed to train people with just the information they need to work in factories. Now it’s changed over the years, and there are good teachers and there are bad teachers, but that’s the fundamental basis upon which the system has been built. So traditional management practices focus on output, not outcomes.
Traditional management theory comes from these turn-of-the-century manufacturing ideas that came about during the industrial revolution that had that emphasis on output. It was what they needed at the time; they needed output. And in that system, you measure efficiency by how many outputs you get by given input. That’s the only measure that really matters.
So these ideas were formulated by an organization called Harvard Graduate School, and this is their first-ever graduating MBA class in 1908. That’s a very long time ago, and these were, it was Harvard, so these were the wealthy leaders or the children of the wealthy leaders of the time, and they flocked to organizations around the world.
These Tayloristic practices, these traditional management practices, spread all over the world. That’s kind of where we ended up. And then in the 1950s, a new way of this new way of working emerged where we’re going to divide the workforce into specific skills, create things sequentially, so in a particular order, tell them how to do their work, encourage them to specialize in just one thing, and then reward them based on individual output. That sounds a little bit familiar.
It’s just the next phase of that idea. This was the birth of sequential working, where you complete your stage and then pass it on to the next department. Marketing markets the deal, sales clinches the deal, contracts codifies the deal, business analysts document the deal, the makers, maybe coders, build the deal, could be manufacturing, could be anything. Testers test the deal, and then operations deploys and runs the deal, whatever those things are.
They don’t need to understand anything outside of their little box of operations or marketing or sales or contracts or whatever those things are. The US military complex came along, and they became the largest purchaser of services and goods in the world. For those that don’t know, the US military today has a budget of 850 billion dollars every year and has 2.8 million employees. So that’s not including contractors; it’s not including consultants, all of those things, all of their vendors.
And they became this largest purchaser because of that focus of trying to defeat communism after the Second World War. The US turned towards the Russians, and they created a bunch of processes based on these ideas, Taylor and Gantt, and rewarded their suppliers and contractors based on the incentives model. So it just became part of their procurement process, and because it became part of their procurement process, they demanded that all their suppliers work the same way sequentially.
That’s where these ideas came from, this sequential way of working. It spread across the world because it was so effective when applied to the most common type of work at the time, which was simple work, widgets in factories. However, in the 1980s, things began to change. It was really changing before then, but this is when things really started picking up speed. Communication got easier, data began to be processed, and the internet was born.
This sealed sequential working’s fate, even if it would take many years for it to even realise that it was doomed. Today, the world is moving faster than ever before, and how many of the old guards are still left? The best analogy I have, and I don’t know culturally how this translates, but the best analogy I have is this thing called orienteering, which apparently is some weird sport in Europe. But it came, it has military origins because if you’re a soldier and you need to get from one place to another, you have to use a map; you have to be able to read a map.
Orienteering was a technique for practicing map reading, but it’s become a sport. But in orienteering, you have a goal, a place you have to get to, or potentially a set of checkpoints that you have to get to along the way. Here is one of the participants in the sport checking in at one of the checkpoints. They usually have a little way of identifying themselves, so they have to get to every checkpoint along the way.
But the caveat I have for how it doesn’t quite relate to orienteering is though checkpoints are changing all the time rather than being in a fixed place like they would if you were all in a sport together. But you, as a business leader, probably have a vision that describes the intended outcome that you want to have from any change. Effectively, what your currently envisaged end state will look like. That end state will evolve over time, but for now, you’ve got this idea of this is where I want to go.
You have a goal, and we can get behind that goal. You, not some external coach and consultant, need to decide not only what the initial end state will look like but what your first steps are going to be along the way and how you’re going to measure the outcomes. Once you have that, you need to make that first step and see where you get to.
While there are some well-known checkpoints along the way, like having an adaptive backlog of tactical changes or self-organising teams, mostly it’s an open field. That’s why there’s so little guidance when you speak to agile coaches and folks in the agile industry. You say, “What should I do next?” It’s like, “Well, I don’t know; you need to decide what you want to do.”
Let me explain the problem you’re trying to solve. You’ve come up with the ideas. You, as leaders, need to understand why you are taking a particular direction and what you expect the outcome for your organization to be. While you may need help, you are accountable for the changes ahead, and only you, if you’re the leaders in the organization, are accountable for those changes.
As you take each step along your journey, you may realise that you were wrong, that this direction leads not to your intended outcome but somewhere else. You then need to decide if that somewhere else is actually a better place than you thought of at the start and then figure out what’s my next step, where do I need to go next. You need to be free to experiment, accept that any processes and practices you create would be imperfectly defined, and adapt to what you discover along the way.
You will use orienteering to stop periodically, reassess both your goal and the direction you need to go, and then take the next step towards your intended outcomes. Experimentation is key to this process. You will not know what will work until you try it. You’ll also not know what will not work. Think back to how you might have built your company in the first place.
It was likely a short iterative process where you continuously tried different things, figuring out what was a good way to do things and keeping the things that worked and ditching the things that didn’t. This entrepreneurial spirit is what we’re trying to retrieve and create a system within which we can maintain it indefinitely over time. We need to remove bureaucracy and get back the creativity that was smothered by that bureaucracy of these traditional practices.
I want to be clear that this new state of agility, in this new state of agility, everything will change. Every business process you currently have was built on the bureaucracy that you have in your organization. It was created slowly over time. These bureaucratic processes will have to be dismantled as they are no longer valid for the new speed of the world. That takes time, focus, and commitment.
This type of change is not something you can buy in from the outside, and it must be organically and iteratively grown inside your organization. You may hire many consultants, coaches, and trainers along the way, but it is you who must be driving that vision and setting that direction. Don’t get trapped into a transformation of one bureaucratic process for another. Instead, evolve your organization out from under it and innovate your way to success. This is the inevitability of change.
Thank you very much. So there’s a link there. This link here will take you to a copy of the presentation. It has my notes in it as well, but a copy of the presentation. And if you have a camera, you can just take a picture of the QR code and get to exactly the same location. Please also head off to my YouTube channel; I have lots of videos on there.
Is there any questions? Thank you very much, Martin. Please, is there any questions for Martin? You can put in the chat or raise your hands, and then we will let him answer it for you. Any questions for Martin? I see a question that says, “Could that be Frederick?” I’m not sure what the question is. Maybe it’s, I think you made a comment on management and Frederick Winston Taylor. He’s the source of all our problems today.
He’s not really; he was doing the right thing at the time. If you are currently managing a factory, you’re probably going to use the ideas that he came up with. But as your factory moves towards replacing the people with automation, with robot automation, mechanical automation, the people that then run your factory are going to be creative people who are solving problems on a day-to-day basis, and you’ll need these new.
So any questions? The question will take about three to four minutes. At five minutes, we’ll take some few. Any questions, please? Any questions for Martin? Wow, so I think, Martin, your presentation was quite clear, and I think people have…
