Metaphors and Avoiding Agile Transformation Failures
Photo by Kev Wheeler
“Where have other companies failed in their agile transformations, and how can we avoid those same mistakes?”
Close contacts of mine from multiple companies have been asking that recently and seeking my advice. They may be at the early stage of considering a move to agile delivery approaches, or they’ve seen it work in pockets already and are wondering how to broaden the use of agile and get more benefits from it.
Being a consultant, I’ve seen some challenging situations for sure—that’s often what I’m coming into at the start of an engagement!
Trying to unpack where and how “failures” occurred has tempted me to go down the “root cause analysis” path. Exploring the root metaphor and nature in my previous post highlighted that addressing problematic roots is delicate business. Which is why I was excited to come across John Allspaw’s article also looking at what we talk about when we say ‘root cause.’
“Incidents have a way of producing genuine and unsettling dismay; it’s understandable to search for an explanation, a cause, that we can be sure of.” – John Allspaw, What we talk about when we talk about ‘root cause’
The article included a quote noting that incidents can be better explained as “perfect storms.” In my experience, it seems like organizations undergoing change efforts sometimes miss early signs that a storm is coming. Feedback loops both within the company and externally to customers and the market may be ill-defined. There are things that can be done to detect problems earlier. Part of me likes this storm metaphor because it respects the complexity of the current state and removes blame from the conversation.
Yet I suspect most of us are not knowledgeable enough about weather systems to use this metaphor to speak of how organizations can go about transformations with greater transparency, alignment, and engagement… would we be trying to control the weather? Make it through storms better? I don’t know. Looking to mythology, there were typically multiple gods or goddesses who controlled different aspects of weather…
Imperfect metaphors aside, I talked with someone whose previous company had such an awful experience trying to do agile delivery that she called their approach “tragile.” Tragic + agile. Her past experience has given her greater ability to see potential storms or pitfalls as they start their agile journey. She wants better for her new company, and I do too.
