This text is the first part of a rework of this one: modernity, agility, committed dating back two years. I talk about this to many audiences. My discourse necessarily evolves. I wanted it to reflect more what I say today. The second part to come will be about commitment.[I’ll add that, yes it’s normal, one paragraph is duplicated, and there are repetitions, because this is a text that I tell so I like to repeat the same sentence several times.
Time and money or involvement and the right product?
Companies, managers think they need time and money, more time, more money.
They are wrong. In the complex, changing, fluctuating world in which we live, it’s neither having more time or more money that makes the difference. What makes the difference for companies, for managers, is an ability to engage the people with whom they work, because the gap between the impact produced by a non-engaged person and by an engaged person is immense. What makes the difference is maximizing the value of what we produce while, ideally, minimizing the efforts to produce it.
Forget time and money. Have a focus on engagement, the empowerment, the involvement of the people with whom you work, and make sure very regularly that you produce the right things. The current craze for the term Agile is nothing other than the translation of that.
Agile is ultimately the marketing term for complex. Saying that one wants to be Agile is first to acknowledge that the world is complex. Complex comes from “interweave”. Needs evolve, technologies evolve, communication is global, instantaneous. Impossible now to deny that things, projects, products will live partly in an unpredictable way, that the unexpected will be there, impossible to have certainties in this complex world. Being agile is knowing how to evolve in this complex world. And, you’ll agree, Agile is a term easier to grasp than “complex”. I doubt you’ve hired a “complex coach” or that you’ve launched into a “complex transformation”.
So being agile is knowing how to evolve, to be performant (another magic word) in this complex world. How does this get implemented? The first thing for managers is to learn to let people take responsibility, be autonomous. When a person is empowered, is autonomous, they become much more easily engaged. And engagement considerably multiplies the impact of these people. You know very well yourself that when you undergo things without being able to control them, without wanting to, or having your say, your performance is, how shall I say, very mediocre. In any case that’s how it is for me. And if on the contrary you are engaged by being empowered, by having decision-making power, autonomy, you become much more involved, much more performant.
Remember those battlefield stories where generals camped from atop their hills dictating to each of their soldiers or squads the movements and actions they had to perform. It’s hard to imagine such a setup today, in modern warfare. If a troop or commando doesn’t have autonomy, it will be far too slow, far too inefficient, far too vulnerable. To empower it, to give it autonomy, is to make it much more effective, but it’s not leaving it free to do what it wants. This imaginary troop does have an objective, it must destroy such bridge, it does have rules to respect: it cannot go to such place, because enemy forces are present, it must not destroy such other structure, etc. It’s no longer the gesture that you dictate to your teams, it’s the framework: the objective and the rules that you clarify. It’s up to this team, these people, to take this space, that’s what makes all the difference in terms of impact of performance or innovation compared to following a step-by-step, fossilizing process.
Being agile, evolving in this complex world, is therefore first to empower, to give autonomy, to give decision-making power on a whole set of subjects. Modern management is thus first a letting go, a laissez-faire, and a clarification of the framework and rules. But people will only be autonomous, responsible, if they have the right to be wrong. Otherwise your so-called empowerment is a lie. It’s only if you have the right to be wrong that you can serenely make the decision all the time that you think is the best. If you don’t have the right to be wrong, your decision is clouded by other considerations, you no longer choose the best one. Here again a fundamental difference occurs. For this authorization to be wrong to be easy to give, we’ll try to work on small pieces. If we’re wrong on a small piece, it’s not serious, if we’re wrong on a big piece it’s more annoying, implicitly if you work on big pieces you forbid yourself from being wrong. Small iterations, few things at a time, there are several strategies, but we work on small things to have the implicit authorization to be wrong, we don’t have the trouble of protecting ourselves.
Being agile, evolving in this complex world, is thus to empower, to make autonomous, to transform the impact that people can have by taking this space. To authorize people is also to authorize them to be wrong. This implies a large part of continuous improvement the goal not being to be wrong. To easily authorize people to be wrong, so that the prohibition is not implicit, we work by iteration, or on few things at a time.
There’s another important parameter here that people don’t necessarily grasp. To have a real look, real learning, a real observation of what we’ve produced. To make sure not to be wrong and thus say it works, or it doesn’t work. To have this look, this feedback one might say in English, and for it to be real, we must observe finished things, things that make sense by themselves, small pieces (we said we work on small things to authorize error) autonomous that make sense. For example, don’t tell me you’ve prepared your entire data model for future financial reports. When adding business objects, the user interface, ergonomic aspects, things will change. We think we have something finished, but it’s an illusion. We thus perpetuate the risk of being wrong. It’s not good for anyone. Something finished would have been one of the reports or even more simply a figure from one of the reports, etc, but it would have implemented a piece of interface, a piece of algorithm, of business object, a piece of data storage, thus a vertical approach. And especially this small autonomous piece making sense produces value by itself. It already brings by itself something useful.
Being agile, evolving in this complex world, is thus to empower, to make autonomous, to transform the impact that people can have by taking this space. To authorize people is also to authorize them to be wrong. This implies a large part of continuous improvement the goal not being to be wrong. To easily authorize people to be wrong, so that the prohibition is not implicit, we work by iteration, or on few things at a time. To be sure that we’re not wrong, we cast a look, a feedback on the things produced, and to be able to really judge them, these things produced are small autonomous pieces making sense.
For management the change in posture is letting go, the laissez-faire. For business people, product people, it’s this ability to not arrive with a globalizing solution, but to know how to break down into small autonomous pieces that make sense, carrying value, and that will gradually develop.
It’s to know how to produce these small autonomous pieces making sense and carrying value that all these organizations are recomposing themselves into multidisciplinary teams: to have this autonomy, this ability to deliver in a very vertical way. Among other reasons.
To this reflection on being agile, on the complex world that surrounds us, we must add a parameter: we don’t have time to do everything we’d like to do, we very very rarely have the capacity. Being agile, evolving in a complex world, is therefore also an ability to prioritize by value (learning value, concrete value, etc.). Thus we arrive at the promise of being agile: If I’m able to empower and make autonomous I multiply the impact and performance of people, and if I know how to deliver small autonomous pieces making sense, bringing value, and prioritized by it, I know how to read, listen, learn, bounce back on my market. I save money by failing quickly. I reap benefits more quickly by not waiting to deliver too large sets of things.
To evolve in this complex world, to be agile do what you want as long as you empower, you make autonomous, thus you will transform people’s impact. Do what you want as long as you have a strong focus on continuous improvement linked to your authorization to fail, to your understanding that good practices emerge in this changing world. Do what you want as long as you have real feedback a real look at finished things making sense, not at the number of features you’ve deployed, not at the number of hours you’ve spent, but at the number of additional users, at the number of phone calls to the hotline linked to your last delivery, etc. Measures often external and not internal. Thus if you’re able to prioritize these small autonomous elements making sense and carrying value you’ll know how to read, learn, bounce back on your market at lower cost and by quickly reaping benefits. That’s the promise of agile.
You don’t have a problem with time and money. You have a problem with the impact of your collaborators who are not empowered enough, who don’t have enough autonomy, and you have a problem maximizing value: you’re not able to react, to learn with respect to the market.
In the series: