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Every morning, I see the unfiltered thoughts of 1200+ engineering leaders as one of the community moderators in the Dev Interrupted Discord server. We start every day with a Daily Interruption topic about how to make agile work in real life; scaling teams, building culture, hiring, continuous improvement, metrics - fun stuff like that.
Recently this Daily Interruption popped up and stopped me in my tracks:
At the Influential Agile Leader workshop earlier this year, I led a session about scaling, and how it might not be the answer. My experience is that when people use frameworks for larger efforts, they experience these unexpected side effects:
Agile Scaling Frameworks: An Executive Summary
One of the participants asked, "But what if we have to scale?"
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Remember the Monty Python crunchy frog sketch? (If not, you're in luck because you can watch it above.) Now, the final section is particularly noteworthy:
Many of today's enterprises are hardly fit to play a leading role in today's world. They are designed on the past-world premises of stability and high predictability, of repetitive work with easily scalable results. They experience profound difficulties having to navigate the predominantly uncertain and unpredictable seas of today's world.
An increase in agility is needed. They adopt Scrum. But rather than updating their past-world structures while introducing Scrum, they twist Scrum to fit their current organization. An illusion of agility is created as a result.
A paradox is something that is seemingly absurd but really true. When I experience complexity and uncertainty, I find comfort and power in paradox. It opens up creativity, possibility, and collaboration. Let's take a look at four paradoxes we need to navigate in the agile world and beyond.
Agility is about accepting that the work is complex and unpredictable and committing to working in a way that honors the truth of this. In Scrum, we take an empirical approach to minimize risk and enable informed decisions along the way.