September 2017, I am interviewed in a small café in Paris by Julie Albet. I just found the interview again. Here it is.

September 2017

PABLO PERNOT: “Companies that will make a difference will empower people”

Agile coach, organizational support expert, agent provocateur… Pablo Pernot is all of these at once. For his clients, he leads actions around change management, agility and organizational transformation. He talks to us about feedback, the right to fail and different agile methods.

JULIE ALBET: What are the foundations of agile thinking?

PABLO PERNOT: When I start a so-called “agile” engagement, we need to quickly align on what that means. People move their chairs around, they tell you they’re agile today! It’s a word so easy to grab that it’s been emptied of its meaning. Originally, agility corresponded to a know-how for IT teams. It has now expanded, but you need to understand that it’s a way of knowing how to evolve in the complex world that surrounds us. And the first thing to do to move through so much complexity is to give people an enormous amount of responsibility and autonomy. Their engagement then changes completely. When we talk about empowerment, it always scares managers. However, empowering people doesn’t mean: “Do whatever you want!”. It’s more like: “Here’s where we want to go, here’s the framework and the constraints.” Empowerment means that attention is paid to the person making the decision, and involves letting go for management. Empowerment also means the right to fail, and therefore continuous improvement. These are the foundations of the thinking, which can be found in the Agile manifesto, written in 2001 by 17 American anarchists. They agreed on twelve principles and four values: interaction with individuals over tools and processes, collaboration over negotiation, the ability to react to change over following a plan, and working software over a description of tasks to be performed.

JULIE ALBET: Why is feedback essential in agility?

PABLO PERNOT: If we move forward in small steps and we have the right to fail, we need to regularly question what works or doesn’t. Feedback, this look at what we’ve done, therefore becomes necessary. In one of the best-known agile methods, Extreme programming (XP), feedback is part of the core values. We need to constantly know where we are since we’re evolving in a complex world. There’s no preconception, we don’t have the answers at the start! We have an objective that makes sense, but we don’t know what form it will take. So we need constant feedback to analyze the emerging form and validate whether it conforms to the objective to be achieved. For feedback to be valid, you need finished things, that have been carried through to the end. Actions and results must be analyzed to adapt for the next time. People who don’t believe in agility think that upfront analysis saves time, because everything is planned before triggering. However, agility works more by zones, we work on small sets, in stages. We test, we learn, then we expand.

J.B: Once we have these pillars, there are methods…

P.P: Methods will adapt to professions: XP for technical experts, Scrum for project management, Kanban for flow management… These methods are not mutually exclusive. In a classic company that does IT, there can be XP for technical professions, Kanban and Scrum to manage projects or products… Scrum, for example, allows you to sequence a project, describing everyone’s roles and responsibilities. It’s very rhythmic, every X weeks, there are 3 or 4 types of meetings, where expectations are defined and visibility is expected. On the tools side used for these methods, there’s always visual management in Agile, and facilitation. A workshop very representative of agility is the retrospective. Every two weeks, we meet to discuss what went well and less well. We come out of this debrief with an action plan for the next 15 days to change things. It’s a continuous improvement workshop.

J.B: What doesn’t work with agility?

P.P: The big mistake with agility is repeatability. All these movements have a distant parent, Lean, deployed at Toyota. Coming from the industrial world, Lean was repeatable because there was standardization. This is not the case in Agile. In the world we live in, adaptation will take precedence. Just because an agile method worked in one company doesn’t mean it will work in another. If you remove Philippe and put in Jean-Luc, it’s not the same thing that happens! There’s no repeatability, because it’s neither the same people nor the same context. Generally, we say that agility works better for companies in danger, because they’ll have to dare, to try. So repeatability of the framework, yes; repeatability of the gesture, no. The framework can be reproduced, but not by telling people what to do within it. That’s a global management mistake.

J.B: What are the conditions for Agile success?

P.P: Everything is based on invitation in change management. Imposition doesn’t work, people need to want it. Since agility is fashionable, there are those who want to test it, but fundamentally, they don’t want to change. In that case, it’s not Agile that’s the problem, it’s change management. Moreover, I always start the first meeting with alignment: “You want to do Agile? That means empowerment, the right to fail, etc. We all agree on that?”. Top management gives the target and constraints, and invites people to gather in the following months to review and set a new target. For Agile to work, strong support from top management is absolutely necessary. I experienced an adventure where it worked very well, we really managed to transform things. It was in the financial management part of a large company, three teams used the agile SCRUM method for six months. It was then deployed more broadly to several hundred people. And then the company was acquired, top management changed, collapse. The employees experienced a return to distrust and non-transparency. All the talents left, because someone who has tasted empowerment, engagement, doesn’t go backward.

J.B: Do you have examples of 100% agile companies?

P.P: I don’t think anyone is capable of citing an agile transformation that completely worked, in France or even in the world. Because it’s constantly moving, you never reach a 100% success state, or only in very small groups. An organization is a living organism, so there’s a moment when it disintegrates somewhere, and then it reaggregates, it’s shifting. You have to constantly rebuild, it’s exhausting! So I don’t think there’s a company that’s 100% agile, not one. Which makes it very difficult to have numbers on agility. However, there are signs that don’t lie: an agile team will be entrusted with more projects, increasingly strategic ones, and will often receive very concrete feedback from users (congratulatory messages, usage rates increasing…). In any case, the goal is certainly not to be agile, but to respond to the company’s reason for being.

J.B: How is agility a response to current world problems?

P.P: Everyone realizes that it’s cracking in every direction, that the old system no longer works. We no longer know how to react to new markets, we have to change, we have no choice. The average age of death of companies in 1950 was 58 years. Today, it’s 18 years! Stories like the death of Yahoo will repeat themselves. Agility corresponds to the complex world we live in, so with an equivalent approach, it will have more performance. It’s one of the key answers for reorganizing. And then the companies that will make a difference will empower people. They say that companies have three times more things to do than their capacity. Consequently, you have to prioritize by value. If we’re capable of having small autonomous sets that make sense, and we’re capable of prioritizing them by value, we get what people look for a lot in the promise of agility, that is, the possibility of attacking or learning about their market, with an ability to benefit from the value produced immediately.