So You Want to Be Agile?
Dear CEO, members of the board, top managers — our leaders!
You have completely fallen for this thing called agile.
You’ve seen how things have changed over the past few years — dynamic markets and their sudden shifts, everything going digital and innovation and ability to change quickly becoming one of the keys to success.
You hired us, a bunch of agile folks, to help you prepare our organisation for this future — because we share the same goals.
For some time now, we have been working hard to change parts of our organisation. And whether you have noticed it or not, the reality is sober:
- our company culture is incompatible with agility because of its hierarchic and command&control nature;
- we are not able to create any teams because of performance and contribution being recognised only on individual level, not on team one;
- our IT and business departments are in a supplier — buyer mode, not in a collaborative one;
- many processes that are pushed down from the top inhibit any kind of self-organization or ownership at the lower levels.
It could just be that we are incompetent. And you may go ahead, fire all of us and get the next bunch of agile folks. We’d wish them success.
Or you may pause for a second and think about the message we bring: any organisational change, and especially agile one, starts with you.
Not with us.
Not with the people in the organisation.
If YOU, our leaders, don’t embrace the change and become its biggest proponents, no change is going to happen. As Craig Larman, one of respected thinkers in the agile space, once said: culture follows structure. And agility is one hell of a different culture!
So, please, help us change our company so that we can truly make the world a better place through fully releasing the talents of our employees for the success of our customers.
We truly appreciate you taking the time to read this and we hope we will be able to work together on making the good things happen. Please get in touch with us!
Sincerely,
your agile coaches, scrum masters and other agile-minded folks.
Meet me and Fred (the editor of this blog) at AgilePrague conference on 11th and 12th September. We love to talk to like-minded people and even more to people who have a different point of view than is ours.
Do you feel managers at your organization are a perfect target audience of this letter? Why don’t you send it to them. (You can even do that anonymously.)
