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:
Telling
Selling
Testing
Consulting
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.
In my last post I discussed the awesome workshop I attended called Leading and Learning for Sustainability and why I think it was so beneficial. It changed me. This post is about how it changed me.
While at the workshop, I learned from deep reflection that I get things done by example. I also learned that I like to work with my team and my customers. In other words, my strategy for leadership is “walking the talk” and sharing it. (It only took me a year of blogging to figure out why I blog and to whom I am writing. I feel my best posts are the ones written to my team and customers that are based on my own personal experiences.)
As a result, I have learned to articulate my strategic roadmap toward sustainability and restorative economies in these steps:
Get Rally and our customers effective at Flow, Service and Lean in software and product development
Get myself and my family to a zero carbon footprint lifestyle
Mature the software & hardware development practices as a highly valuable, joyful, respectful and humane profession
Get Rally to a zero carbon footprint
Get our High Technology industry to a 80% carbon reduction in total footprint
Grow High Technology as a leading sustainable industry and critical enabler of green technologies and as an 80% carbon reduction in other industries
Step 1. Back in 2002 when I was working on the initial concepts for Rally, it was Paul Hawkin’s Natural Capitalism book that really shaped my long-term vision for Rally. We basically committed to to bring service and flow, and lean to the high technology industry. I would declare our first 6 years as a success. We have succeeded at introducing the concepts of Flow, Lean and Service into the software and hardware development industries. In addition, we have made many of the worldwide leaders in this space very successful by realizing the benefits of enterprise agile software development.
New Baby Goats this Spring
Framed Greenhouse on Barn
Step 2. We have been incrementally investing in solar-based solutions to make our personal life more sustainable. It was PV’s, hybrids, chickens, goats, an e-bike and now this year a new in-ground greenhouse. A solar hot-water and pre-heater is up next in 2010. (Hopefully, I will even get a cool Tendril home monitor from one of our customers for Chirstmas!.) I think our home life will be over 80% of the way to zero carbon footprint by 2011 with the final addition of electric vehicles.
As a well paid worker in the executive in the High Technology field, I figure it is my role to help these new green technologies move down the marginal cost curves. In addition to actually doing something about this problem, I am learning about living in close-loop, sustainable value chains. (I will tell you there is something very grounding and joyful about starting the day by feeding animals who provide for you. Even on a day like today that was -1 F outside.)
Step 5- 6. These steps will come as we share our experiences based on our own relentless pursuits of steps 1-4. Right now I learn a bunch from work shared by Interface carpet’s mission zero, Google.org’s RE<C and as a member of NRDC’s E2 program.
It was as a direct result of this workshop that I learned enough to articulate my choices, what to conserve, what to let go of, my leadership approach, who I need to do this with and ways to bridge the creative tension between my personal vision and reality. It was a very powerful workshop.
In closing, I would like to share two of my favorite quotes:
Edward Deming: “The prime requirement for achievement of any aim including quality is joy in work.”
Humberto Maturana: “Emotion is the bedrock of all that we do and love is the only emotion that expands intelligence.”
Thank you again Peter Senge, Sherry Immediato, Darcy Winslow and all the other great folks who attended the SOL workshop on Leading and Learning for Sustainability in DC.
Climate Change due to the increase of carbon from human activity is a “Global problem,” thus it has a couple of unique attributes compared with other world problems:
This three-day workshop leveraged long-time SoL content on leadership and mastery into the context of the global climate change. It was a fantastic workshop that I highly recommend – as it has changed me and my mental models.
Tim, our CEO, Peter and myself at the end of day three
Living in Boulder Colorado with tons of the worlds best climate scientist and a University that helps you Lean More About Climate, I am familiar with much of the science behind climate change. But, in this workshop we got to take our understanding up to the larger system level through system archetypes, multi-player games and simulations.
On the third day, we played with and did mock negotiations using the climate change system simulators that were built for negotiating teams going to Copenhagen in the next two weeks. The systems dynamics models baked into the C-Lean simulator are made more apparent in the Seed Simulator on Carbon flows. (It is a simple bath tub model of how carbon flows through the natural system.)
For your information, the answer to the simulation puzzle of putting climate change in check and keeping average global temperature from rising more that 2 degrees involves three things:
have all countries in the world (un-developed, developing and developed) reduce there carbon output by 80% from 2005 levels by 2030
stop deforestation efforts
maximize reforestation efforts
To do this, the world will have to cross the threshold to a new game; an infinite game of win/win behaviors that measures success based on ecological restoration and social well-being. Finite game behaviors coming from zero-sum game thinking and patterns of shifting the burden and escalation will have to stop. I like to think of this an maturation of our species from wildly growing adolescents to young adults.
Peter’s 5th Discipline Fieldbook and The Dance with Change, come with tons of exercises, tools and guest lectures that are all helpful at understanding organizational learning and systems thinking. However, as Peter said in the workshop, understanding the concepts are easy, but practicing them can be much harder.
Part of the success of this public workshop was working with these concepts in a context of a global problem that we all share. We got to work on ourselves and a shared global issue. And as a result, we seemed to all have limitless energy and worked from 8:30 AM to 7 PM each day.
I encourage you to visit these sites, they give climate change a face and a shorter feedback loop. Both of these benefits can lead you and your teams to better understand and more easily act on this Global issue.
I do not believe there is a recipe for Agile enterprise transition plans because good ones must take the context and setting of the organization into account.
I do believe that starting step-by-step is the only way to get the snow ball of incremental improvement rolling down hill. Our model, Flow-Pull-Innovate, is based on a strategy of creating a self-funding sustainable approach to adopting Agile; where some of the savings/profits from each step are reinvested in the next improvement step. (See my post An Alternative to Agile Adoption Cookbooks – Flow, Pull, Innovate for details on this approach.)
In addition to a step-by-step transition plan, you need a vision, shared commitment and social contract to be successful. Although, The Flow-Pull-Innovate model does provide sign-posts for your roadmap, the actual stories necessary to transition vary. When we work with groups or organizations to build a plan that will take them from one step to another, we use a transition planning model that I helped define in the mid-1990’s. This planning model is based on organizational change work from Peter Senge’sDance of Change and Michael Hammer’sReengineering the Corporation.
In this step-by-step plan, we use these high-level variables for planning change; “Strategy, Process, Organization and Technology.” In these transition steps, a typical story starts with the implementation of new technical and organizational infrastructure to support new methods, tools and techniques that lead to new way of working. Download An Example Transition Plan (PDF).
An Example Transition Plan based on the Flow-Pull-Innovate model for Enterprise Agile Adoption
Again, please note this plan is very high-level and a fairly generic application of the Flow-Pull-Innovate approach. (See Jean’s post on What’s So Great about Flow? for more details on the first step.) I have seen many variations on these detailed plans over that last 6 years. Use this as a simple starting point for you and your group to think about your own situation. If you work with Rally coaches to help you plan your organization’s transition, you benefit from their years of experience and ability to start with a clean white version of this model.
Transitioning to Agile at the enterprise level can be a very simple step-by-step process as long as you and your group thinks about it in this way. If you do a good job of defining “Done” for your steps, you will then be able to inspect your progress and adjust your plans based on empirical feedback. In this way your adoption approach is just like the Agile process your adopting for software development; an empirical process that you steer with regularly schedule inspection and adjustment.
If, on the other hand, you think about the adoption as a “Big-Bang” that will be done on a certain date, I believe your “plan-driven” thinking will cause you to miss the real opportunity. You will typically end up with only incremental improvement and not have the momentum to enable your teams to keep up the good work. And, you will fail to get on the continuous improvement curve that will lead towards Agile/Lean expertise. Given that most organizations are operating in a “plan-driven” world, this is not a surprising reaction to Agile adoption. Agile success comes as you gain success incrementally by taking one step after another, while keeping process, technology and organization change areas aligned.
In CMMI, Level 5 teams get to a place where they “become continuous improvement teams.“ In enterprise Agile adoptions, we start folks at continuous improvement and watch them benefit from creating employees and teams that both solve their own problems and continue to re-focus on value delivery through each step.
Over the holiday break, I had the pleasure of spending an hour with Peter Senge from MIT and founder of the Society on Organizational Learning talking through some of the concepts and models in his new book, Necessary Revolution. In particular, he uses the Shareholder Value matrix from Hart and Milstein to help organizations build a comprehensive vision and strategy for sustainable value.
We decided to use that model for our 2-day annual planning session that was led by Jean Tully at Creating Clarity. The model worked very well and helped us manage four intertwined aspects of strategy, divided on the axes of today/tomorrow and internal/external.
While using the model in planning at Rally, we realized that working in two dimensions allowed us to see the whole, and bound the conversations in a way that made the meeting very productive. We are students of Verne Harnish and Gazelles.com; we have and continue to use his one-page strategic planning matrix. However, we have struggled in the past in only talking along the time dimension.
Proposed Framework for Agile Adoption
It was so successful that I built an example Agile adoption strategy model to help illustrated its use. I built this model of a fictitious software-driven organization to illustrate the result of completing only the “Today” part of the plan at the exclusion of “Tomorrow.” The trick of balancing short-term and long-term agility is completing both the top and the bottom to keep the business from myopically focusing on today.
This proposed framework can help you effectively communicate your Agile strategy in the context of the overall business.
Example use of the Agile adoption framework for a software-driven organization
In this model, I define Agile as a strategy and not a driver. I have yet to meet a company who has been successful at adopting Agile development that did not have a higher-level driver or business goal such as a massive increase in quality, cycle-time, customer satisfaction or market innovation. However, many people argue about what is Agile – a methodology, an approach, a process? To me it is all of those things, but its success and impact are starting to make it a strategy for many of our customers.
BTW, Peter Senge’s book is great for folks new to sustainability (balancing economic, social and environmental factors – see the SoL sustainability consortium) and deep learning strategies or for folks with a deep collection of both. And, if you are really interested consider attending their two-day training in Boston next week.
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