Agile Development Blog

I have been back in the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook this week thinking about strategies for creating a shared vision to 2020 at Rally.

With our newest round of funding, we will be growing rapidly in multiple locations and beyond the max tribe size of 150-170 people. (Dunbar’s Number)  Over that last year, we grew the business well but without advancing our total headcount numbers.  Now with headcount growth slated in the field and in two development centers, we need a stronger foundation to steer our growth.  Doing this work, hit me with a BFO (Brilliant Flash of the Obvious) that is impacting many of largest Agile adoptions that I am working with.

Many leaders are seeing the benefits of Agile and “Telling” or “Selling” their organizations to go there.  But, the “Telling” and “Selling” strategies run counter to many of the guiding ideas behind Agile itself.  I have seen this rub  limit or slow the positive impact of an Agile adoption.  This rub almost guarantees you will only get incremental benefits from Agile and will most likely fall back to your old ways.

As Bryan Smith and Peter Senge remind us “Telling” is just the first developmental step in creating a shared vision to adopt.   This strategy has many flaws including that fact that most people only remember 25% of what they are told.  However, it might be the right strategy given a dire current reality.

In extreme contrast to Telling, is the Co-Creating strategy that has the whole organization working together to create the vision and implement it.  This requires a leadership group that can truly let go and an employee base that has enough personal mastery to understand their own personal vision.   Those are big pre-requisites to this strategy, but it should be obvious that if you can run this strategy, the self-motivating benefits will be highly supportive to getting the most benefit out of Agile.

The complete model, from the Shared Vision section of the Fieldbook includes five strategies that can be grown into over time:

1. Telling
2. Selling
3. Testing
4. Consulting
5. Co-Creating

We have discussed our Flow-Pull-Innovate approach for adopting Agile in larger organizations, but I have talked very little about strategies for leading this adoption process.  I think it is because most Agile adoptions get started in a grassroots approach and are led by the teams that testing it out.  The success of these teams then caused people to take notice and start talking about how to replicate this success.  In essence, I have been assuming, and the market has been executing a Testing level strategy.

I believe to put an organization on the path to continuous improvement, you must at least be executing a Testing level strategy to scale your adoption.  Over time, I believe your ultimate ability to move to the Innovate level of Flow-Pull-Innovate will be tied to your ability to adopt a Consulting or Co-Creating strategies.  As Agile is a journey to greatness, this journey depends upon your organization maturing in all including strategy execution.

What are your experiences with these strategies in your Agile adoption?

At Rally in 2010, our planning team is running a two pronged approach using a Testing strategy with the organization in Q1 for our 2010 plans and a three quarter long co-creating strategy for our 2020 vision.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is a lego building father,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.