Untapped Agility: Seven Leadership Moves to Take Your Transformation to the Next Level

Agility

CHAPTER 1

Transformation Frustration

Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.

—Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

This book is about leading change, and we need to start with a story. I once worked for a startup entrepreneur named Jeff who told me a business story so compelling, I will never forget it.

Jeff was a colorful character, whose first career was that of a restaurateur. Jeff was a force of nature and over the years worked his way up from busboy to server to sommelier to general manager to restaurant builder. One year, he was sent off to a hot new location to build the latest Planet Hollywood, the franchise eateries famous for their décor patterned after the movies. Their playbook was solid, with key criteria for geography, layout, furniture, décor. These guys knew how to build a repeatable premier experience. The boss told him, Your new location build-out is a slam dunk. The space is in a great location, and we got the old building at a steal. Just renovate and launch, and this place will make money.

With his orders in hand, Jeff traveled to the property to meet the contractors who would construct the new location. When he arrived, he saw firsthand the easy access from the main roads and the busy retail foot traffic. Everything looked promising. Until he went inside.

There, standing in the middle of his promising new restaurant space, was a giant, ugly column. It was a massive monstrosity; it took several people holding hands to surround it.

Jeff summoned his new team and said, "Hi there. Nice to meet you all. I’m hoping someone can tell me, what is that? Well, boss, that is a load-bearing column. We can’t demolish it, so we’ll have to build around it. Frustration welling up inside him, Jeff said, That thing consumes dining space and is a giant eyesore. What do we do?" Immediately the team started brainstorming:

Could they use it as a bar? Nope, too centrally located inside the dining space.

Could they use it as the guest reception desk? Nope, it was too big to do that elegantly.

Could they move the point-of-sale systems there? Nope, too far from some of the dining sections.

The team was stumped. In all his years of expertise, Jeff had never come across anything like this. Eventually they realized the column could serve no functional purpose. It was just there. Jeff asked the team, What if we just let it be? We could at least make it appealing and hang décor items on it. Maybe, said one of the contractors. But the prop mounts are designed for flat walls, not curved surfaces. Another chimed in, Instead of hammers, we could use paint. How about a custom mural depicting various movie scenes? The group got a little more animated, and another person wondered, What if that mural rotated slowly around that column, so that customers got to see different parts of it as they dined?

There were no silver bullets, but with some ideas in hand, they began working. After a few months of feverish scrambling, the restaurant was set to open on schedule. Meanwhile, Jeff was still nervous. Yes, the team put in their best creative efforts, but this was still very different from the standard blueprints, the standard designs, the standard brand layout. There was a ton at stake, and it just felt wrong.

Except customers loved it.

This is so cool, they said. We’ve never seen anything like this, they said. We’ve been to Planet Hollywood locations around the world and this is our new favorite, they said. Despite the roller-coaster ride, it became Jeff’s most successful project to date.

That is what untapped agility is all about.

We boost forward with a solid plan. Eventually we hit a frustrating barrier. Finally, we take the risk of rebounding on an alternate path forward.

In the world of work, fewer endeavors draw more hype and yield more frustration than the lofty goal of business transformation. Companies around the world are facing new and unexpected challenges. More disruption, more change, more competition than ever before. For most of us, the strategic response is to reboot the organization to achieve a greater degree of agility. That almost always takes the shape of a formal change initiative to embrace one or more of those latest management buzzwords like Design Thinking, DevOps, Lean Startup, Holacracy, Scrum, or Kanban.

Unfortunately, every single one of those transformations go through the same roller-coaster ride that Jeff went through. This book is about how to ride that roller coaster without losing your mind in the process.

The Pattern of Untapped Agility

I have examined dozens of case studies and interviewed several transformation leaders to find out how they achieve the results that everyone else is finding so hard to achieve. In my research I found a surprising pattern. Over and over, leaders walked through a familiar sequence:

1. The Boost. Most leaders start with a proven first step to generate momentum. They begin with the right things. Planet Hollywood’s playbook had worked before and even generated a win—the great location for the Jeff’s restaurant. Moreover, Jeff and his team had good reason to turn to standard solutions: he was super successful at solving problems with that expertise. Similarly, when launching an effort to create the modern organization, conventional wisdom is a good place to start. Leaders are justified when starting with proven steps like taking initiative, mobilizing their teams, and installing best practices.

2. The Barrier. However, after that initial momentum, leaders encounter common human barriers. Jeff and his team struggled with the column problem because they were relying on what had worked before: practical, functional, tidy solutions. That column didn’t play fair, and neither does change. The reason for transformation headaches is that organizations are a complex mesh of people, and the people business is a sticky business. It’s not a matter of good or bad, it’s a matter of reality. Once we accept the barrier, we can move forward.

3. The Rebound. The way forward is a different direction. Instead of merely brute-forcing the initial strategy through the barrier, leaders yield further gains by leaning against the concept of the original boost. Jeff’s original successes were based on following established career patterns and a proven construction playbook. But that load-bearing column would not permit progress using any known established practice. The way forward needed to break the mold. So the team leaned into the awkwardness and tried a strategy that was decidedly not following the playbook. Many change champions will either push harder in the face of barriers or simply give up and blame everyone else. Others are able to step sideways toward breakthrough results, by using specific leadership moves.

The Untapped Agility Pattern

No, your transformation is not a failure. It turns out the buy-in, the talent, the alignment, and the growth you need to break through are already in front of you; it’s all simply hidden under the surface. Undiscovered. Unutilized. Untapped.

Let’s take a look at how this pattern plays out on an industrial scale.

Transformations Boost Results

The good news is, these modern ways of working actually do work. Over and over again, we see data and case studies that paint a compelling picture of achieving greater outcomes through specific change initiatives. Let’s take a look at the most popular modern transformation movements.

Lean Startup Has Executive Attention

The Lean Startup technique began as a way to help small ventures get aligned with their customers as quickly as possible, before running out of cash. Popularized by Eric Ries and Steve Blank, the fundamental idea is to avoid wasting time and money on the wrong business idea. Senior leaders from Alaska Airlines to 3M saw real opportunity for applying this entrepreneurial framework to larger companies.

According to research published in the Harvard Business Review,¹ a meaningful percentage of corporate executives have seen the technique enable decisions based on evidence rather than instincts (67 percent), faster development of ideas (61 percent), better customer feedback (55 percent), speaking directly to customers (54 percent), and more flexibility adapting ideas through the life cycle (48 percent). Moreover, in his book The Startup Way,² Ries tells a provocative story of how the adoption of Lean Startup at General Electric accelerated good products and killed bad ones.

Agile Benefits Are Practically Guaranteed

In 2001, a small group of technology thought leaders issued an online charter known as the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.³ It was a bold, simple statement that prioritizes customer satisfaction, frequent delivery, and empowered teamwork. In the years since, what started as a modest technology movement has exploded into a management revolution. By defining a set of core values and principles, those early advocates inspired a whole host of techniques and methodologies. But are those values, principles, and techniques actually helpful or merely hype?

Every year, the community asks themselves that very question. The most recent State of Agile Report shows a shocking result.⁴ For eleven key outcomes, teams are literally more likely to get a given benefit than they are to even want it. For example:

• 43 percent want agile for more quality, but 47 percent got it.

• 51 percent wanted more productivity, but a full 61 percent got it.

• 62 percent were motivated by more adaptability, yet 69 percent achieved it.

For eleven key outcomes, teams are literally more likely to get a given benefit than they are to even want it.

Put another way, if you set out to improve your adaptability, productivity, customer alignment, predictability, quality, visibility, morale, risk, engineering discipline, or remote collaboration, then it is a statistical slam dunk you’ll get those things. Meanwhile, the Agile Alliance has amassed a database of nearly 200 experience reports describing in more detail how agile methods have improved work around the world.⁵ Indeed, a Google search for agile case studies yields over 34 million hits.

Suffice it to say, agile works. There’s evidence to support it. And people know it.

DevOps Is a Big Boost to the Bottom Line

As popular as agile became in the tech industry, one group in particular felt left out: operations and infrastructure. In 2009, a number of those professionals convened their own mini-conference, discussing how to automate traditionally manual operations tasks, how to build technology that was operations-proof, and how to bridge the organizational silos between those who build software and those who support it. Those concepts were posted on social media, tagged with #DevOps, and promptly went viral.⁶ It sparked a new conversation about expanding agility to include both R&D and operations. A decade later, DevOps has evolved into its own movement with a vibrant $3.5 billion market.⁷

And there’s good reason. In a seminal 2014 research white paper,⁸ we see two compelling discoveries:

• Strong IT performance is a competitive advantage. Firms with high-performing IT organizations were twice as likely to exceed their profitability, market share and productivity goals.

• DevOps practices improve IT performance. IT performance strongly correlates with well-known DevOps practices such as use of version control and continuous delivery. The longer an organization has implemented— and continues to improve upon—DevOps practices, the better it performs. And better IT performance correlates to higher performance for the entire organization.

So, DevOps is much more than a mechanical upgrade of the technology infrastructure used by those Ops people. It correlates to the kind of organizational performance that doubles your chances of business success.

Lean Startup, Agile, and DevOps are just three of the several methods associated with agility, but already you can see the case is closed. These transformations work. Over time, doing things differently yields better results. We’re done, right? We won, didn’t we?

And Yet, Everyone Is Frustrated

Despite all those benefits, the picture is not all rainbows and unicorns. On the one hand, we have thousands of organizations declaring victory with transforming business using these modern movements. On the other hand, a lot of people are very, very frustrated.

Our Staff Are Disgruntled

Change is hard. Just ask the people trying to make it happen. In a 2017 change management study,⁹ 60 percent of those championing agile ways of working experienced moderately to very severe resistance. Consider for a moment: that means staff resist concepts intended to empower them, managers resist changes proven to improve productivity and predictability, and executives resist transformations shown to boost the bottom line. That is more than ironic, it’s deeply discouraging.

Even more concerning, those leaders who are declaring transformational victory are not supported by their staff. The 2018 State of DevOps reports a serious perception gap around the maturity of modern organizational capabilities.¹⁰ Specifically, an average 58 percent of executives believe they’ve achieved a given practice, while only 37 percent of the teams on the ground see it that way. This means a significant number of those working on the ground have the unhappy situation of hearing their boss say, Oh, we’re agile now, when from their perspective, it’s just not true.

Thought Leaders See Their Vision Perverted

Meanwhile, some of the very people who started these movements are rather perturbed. The more popular agility becomes, the more large corporations want to jump on board. Eventually we start to see some common Dilbert-esque patterns showing up: proprietary methodologies, expensive tools and templates, glitzy conferences, and bloated certifications.

In a viral, blistering blog post,¹¹ one of the creators of that original Agile Manifesto, Dave Thomas, declared the whole thing to be dead, saying, The word ‘agile’ has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products.

The word ‘agile’ has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products.—Dave Thomas

Indeed, pioneer of the Lean Startup movement Steve Blank recently pondered his own impending irrelevance.¹² His movement was born of the great recession, when startup capital was scarce. Now, with so many startup companies going IPO, institutional investors are throwing much more money at ventures than ever before. Naturally, this invites some executives to scoff at the notion of empirically measuring and iterating on small bets. How quaint. That’s, like, so five years ago.

Granted, Blank is willing to let bazillionaires blow their funds prematurely, but he and others are growing annoyed that other mainstream organizations are whittling away the discipline and rigor they were initially able to inspire.¹³

As these pioneers see it, traditional business practices are more successful at diluting agility, rather than the original vision of agility transforming business practices. Although always a concern since day one, this sentiment has only been getting louder in recent years.¹⁴

The true believers feel betrayed.

Executives Are Still Deeply Worried

Today, General Electric is not what we thought it should be. In less than a year after Ries published their Lean Startup case study, GE suffered several layoffs, divested some of its oldest business units, and was removed from the Dow Jones industrial average. Of course, public struggles invite