In a recent e-mail exchange with Cutter Fellow Lynne Ellyn (SVP and CIO of DTE), she mentioned that one characteristic of agile leaders is providing focus and clarity for an organization or team. Her comments sparked my thinking about why it’s so hard to be a good agile leader. We tend to create lists of what leaders do or their agilelike behaviors, but these lists and the item descriptions obscure the difficulty in actually being an agile leader. Consider providing focus and clarity. It sounds simple, but it’s not. Why do we embrace agility in the first place? Agility helps us manage change and uncertainty. Turbulence — business, economic, and technological — creates change, which …
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Jim Highsmith
Jun 092010
One thing has always concerned me about the tremendous volume of material about change—books, articles, presentations—and that is an underlying assumption that the change (or preferably the adaptation to the change) in question is a good one. With that as an assumption, then the “problem” is how to align everyone with the adaptation. One of the best models for managing change is the Satir curve (Figure 1.0). The model takes us from status quo, through a change initiation that is resisted, causes some chaos as people learn, and finally ends up being integrated into the new status quo, hopefully at a higher performance level. At any point in the process, the “anti-change” forces may prevail …
Apr 072010
What is Agile? Is it a set of practices, a set of values, or a set of mind—or some combination of the three? Is it “Doing Agile” or “Being Agile?” Is agile defined by a checklist of offered practices—the Nokia test for Scrum, or checking 9 of 12 practice boxes for XP? Is agile a mindset, an amalgamation of adaptation, embracing change, transparency, collaboration, complex systems theory, or courage? Is agile the frequent delivery of high quality customer value while effectively adapting to change, regardless of specific practices? (Ken Collier) The right-brained and the left-brained are alive and well in this debate. Daniel Pink (A Whole New Mind) refers to this as L-directed thinking, “sequential, …
Apr 012010
In a recent blog I wrote about replacing Empowerment with Autonomy. The words we use are important as they both convey a specific meaning, but even more, they bring along historical context. In a similar vein, I propose that agilists use Inspire as a replacement for Motivate. Motivate is similar to Empower, it denotes conveying a privilege to another—they are both extrinsic, not intrinsic. Intrinsic things comes from within, they convey something belonging to a thing by its very nature. Extrinsic things comes from without, they are the result of external forces. When a manager attempts to motivate a person or a team, he is trying to influence behavior by offering incentives. When a manager …
Mar 242010
I’ve never really liked the word empowerment, it’s just an acronym for delegation. The dictionary defines delegation as—authorizing subordinates to make certain decisions, and empowerment as—give or delegate power or authority. Many people, myself included, have used the word empowerment to mean something more than delegation, but that extra meaning has been fuzzy. Empowerment has been used in conjunction with self-organizing teams, but often been carried too far, as trying to delegate far more authority to agile teams than was prudent. Similarly, as projects grew from a single team to multiple teams, certain decisions had to be made by specialty teams. So were these teams empowered, or not? Were they “empowered” or “pseudo-powered.” Empowerment also …
Mar 182010
In the early part of the decade Nicholas Cage starred in the movie “Gone in 60 Seconds,” something about stealing cars very rapidly. In the mid-1980’s colleague Ken Orr wrote “The 1-Minute Methodology,” that uncovered the secret to speed—disconnect input from output. If you can steal a car in 60 seconds or execute a methodology in a minute, why not learn to be agile in 90 seconds? I get tired of articles like “The 3 things you must know to be agile,” or “Five easy steps to agile implementation,” or “The secrets of agility unleashed,” or “Agile Mastery in Minutes.” Software development is hard. Agile may be a better way to approach software development, but …
Mar 092010
Every agilist brings his or her history to the community—agile didn’t spring from the primordial soup in 2001. While we may argue against historical practices, waterfall for example, we owe something to earlier pioneers. So while I can’t speak for other agilists, I can give a snapshot of who influenced my thinking over the years.. First, I would argue that agilists were influenced more by practical than academic literature (see Craig Larman’s Agile & Iterative Development for some historical perspectives). Writers who influenced me go back to the early work of Tom DeMarco, Jerry Weinberg, Ken Orr, Jean Dominique Warnier, Larry Constantine, Steve McMenamin, Ed Yourdon, and others during the early “methodology” period from about …
A spider is an eight-legged arachnid that has a head attached to a central body. Pull a leg off a spider and most can still walk, even if a little lopsided. Cut off the head, and the spider dies. Not so the starfish. While many people know that if you cut off a starfish’s leg, it will grow back, most don’t know that a starfish’s major organs are replicated throughout its body. One species, Linckia, can regenerate an entire starfish from each of its severed parts. A starfish is a decentralized network. A final interesting factoid — “for the starfish to move, one of the arms must convince the other arms that it’s a good …
Jan 112010
The notion of a self-organizing team runs deeply in the agile community. However, there is a flip side to self-organization, one which agile teams often forget—self-discipline. Just as freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand in a democracy, so do self-discipline and self-organization. Companies cannot empower teams that do not want to be empowered—those who are populated with individuals who refuse to accept any accountability for results, those who refuse to confront reality, those who gravitate to their cubicles and refuse to engage with other team members, those who are unwilling to accept team decisions, and those who disrespect colleagues. Jim Collin (Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t) presents three key …
Dec 082009
“Writing is a form of thinking, whatever the subject,” says William Zinsser (Writing to Learn). If, as Zinsser says, learning to write well is critical to learning well, then agile team members might do well to work on their writing skills. The entire results of software projects are writings. Whether the output is executable code, test scripts, requirements documents, training plans, or project status reports, they are all, in some fashion, writing. Writing is both a form of thinking and the results from that thinking—and unfortunately, technical education programs rarely focus on writing skills. Zinsser writes, “My hope was to demystify writing for the science types and to demystify science for the humanities types.” His …
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