Disrupting The Agile Industrial Complex Part Nine: Mindset Mindtricks

AIC gurus gull executives into multi-year dependence on a framework and consulting brand by promoting Agile as a kind of mystical mindset rather than a simple, accessible, pragmatic way for teams to self-organize and streams to self-manage.

The Anti-Pattern

The cult of personality starts with feel-good workshops on Agile Leadership that have no practical outcome. Clients are told they've started on a long journey where they must root out their hidden assumptions. They're issued business cards with branded "Agile" roles. All-hands communications apply neuro-linguistic programming manipulations. Critical thinkers are purged and ceremony standardisation is treated as a maturity metric. Meanwhile business throughput goes unmeasured and KPIs remain tragic.

The Solution

Four thousand years ago Lao Tzu summed up the agile mindset this way:

Agility is practical, not mystical; a way of working, not a state of grace: listening as if crossing thin ice, testing as if surrounded by pitfalls, learning as in a strange land, adapting as thawing snow, connecting as the deep woods, focusing as the river valley, generating as spring silt. 

Imagine the ice solid or the stream clear; stop to plan the way ahead; ignore what moves underfoot; you fall and disappear. 

Lao Tzu's term for agility, sheng ren, is often translated into English as "the sage". But literally it's just "the lively ones". There are four concrete disciplines that generate and maintain this liveliness in a value stream:

• Business Agility, which aligns organization of value steams to business throughput.
• Product Management, which prioritises a value stream for maximum market impact.
• Delivery Performance, which minimises costs of delay, quality and change.
• DevOps, which automates metric feedback loops to coordinate all the above.

The effectiveness of coaching these things is not measured by rounds of applause in woo-woo Leadership workshops, but by changes in the first and second derivatives of throughput analytics over time, Because we can’t optimise what we don't measure. And because what we can't measure is flimflam.

––– Previous: The Change Cost Catastrophe ––– Next: The Agile Roman Empire –––

See Also:

XSCALE Alliance is an initiative to solve the top ten anti-patterns in Agile culture. For the full list of these anti-patterns see part one, Through The Sunglasses ...