First published on Medium on 16 October 2019.
From the surveys
VersionOne’s 13th State of Agile report (2018) puts organisational culture at odds with agile values, general resistance to change, and inadequate management support and sponsorship at the top of the list.
The Business Agility Institute’s 2019 report (453 respondents across 274 companies) found leadership style was, by a large margin, the biggest challenge to business agility adoption. Related to that: lack of buy-in and insufficient support for the implementation, change management and culture, “agile mindset”, and alignment. In many organisations, leaders keep using styles and behaviours consistent with the old culture rather than the one they’re asking everyone else to adopt, which sends a mixed message throughout the organisation.
From the consulting groups
McKinsey points to a lack of alignment on the aspiration and value of an agile transformation, treating agile as a pilot rather than a strategic priority, and not putting culture first.
Boston Consulting Group cites restricting agile to the IT department, not delegating empowerment, and lacking sustained leadership commitment.
From individual coaches
Jasper Sonnevelt, Director of Global Leankit Consulting Services, speaking at London Lean Kanban Days 2019: an inability to explain how agile benefits the organisation as a whole, refusing to comply with processes other people need (even when we disagree with them), and winning individual battles becoming more important than winning the war.
Michael Sahota, enterprise coach and author, writing on the power of invitation: culture is the number one challenge with agile adoption; agile is not the goal in itself; and a lack of management support, with leaders not going first, pushing too much and pulling too little.
Ian Mitchell, UK-based agile consultant, lists twenty failure patterns, starting with not recognising the immediate significance of organisational culture, treating agile change as purely technical, and trying to delegate responsibility for change rather than owning it.
From the press
A Raconteur report in The Times quoted Mark Holt, then CTO of Trainline: “In my experience, most organisations are fake agile.” He describes a common contradiction where programmers use agile development techniques while the wider organisation can’t provide the agility to support them, or even properly evaluate whether the project is worth continuing. Real agility, in his view, can’t be bought off the shelf; it comes from continuously searching for better solutions and implementing them efficiently, with leadership embedding it into the broader culture rather than treating it as a technique confined to delivery teams.
My own summary
- Lack of effective leadership, including no clear understanding of why the organisation is doing this in the first place.
- Not starting, growing and maintaining success at a sustainable pace.
- Not recognising what actually gets in the way: dysfunctional structures and networks, lack of experience, old culture, a shortage of role models, naive copying of other people’s models. These structures resist change or make it harder, for example running an agile team inside a waterfall governance structure.
- Not recognising the balance between points 2 and 3, and where the organisation actually stands right now.
- A lack of situational awareness: understanding the landscape and climate you’re actually in, and what that specific context calls for, rather than what worked somewhere else.
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