Adaptiveness

Management teams make decisions in isolation without input from teams who will implement the work.

Leaders become so busy with daily operational tasks that they lose sight of their most important work: growing organisational capabilities and developing people.

Organisations create too many specialized roles too early, leading to knowledge silos, coordination overhead, and organisational complexity that becomes impossible to reverse.

One interesting observation I made several times during agile transformation initiatives is that they seem to be activated by a sort of organisational energy that drives the change. This lasts for a certain amount of time, but then it usually fades and is eventually gone.

Organisational agility requires reducing ‘accidental complexity’ - rather than just implementing agile methods at the team level.

Scaling frameworks create rigid rules that clash with organisational realities, making it difficult to adapt agile practices to large, complex environments with existing constraints.

Organisational change initiatives fail because they don’t address all six essential conditions that must be present for successful transformation to occur.

Coaching Organisations as Systems, i.e. Agile as a Systemic Change at the Scandinavian Developer Conference 2011.

It’s not just about teams! - ‘Agile as a systemic change’ presentation at the Italian Agile Day 2010.

This is a short post to share the slides of the presentation I gave today at XP 2010 in Trondheim.

I attended recently a meeting of project managers where ‘agile methods’ was the subject of the evening. I noticed an interesting cultural aspect: what do you fear about Scrum?