Agile organizational development - the organization as a product?
The title is the name of the keynote speech by Jürgen Dittmar with the Software Quality Days 2019. The presentation was exciting and also fits well thematically with SE trends: not only products are systems, but also the organizations that develop them. And therefore the organization itself can also be further developed using agile methods instead of traditional ones. But does this work in practice?
What is certain is that there are a lot of relevant buzzwords at the moment: Management 3.0 (M3.0), agile leadership, "VUCA" (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) - organizations are under enormous competitive pressure, and new approaches are sprouting up everywhere to meet the challenges. Agility has already proven itself in software development and is about to conquer other areas of organizations.
Incidentally, this view also fits in very well with my recently published analysis What we can expect in 2019: complexity and change.
Three theses
To describe the problem, Jürgen Dittmar has put forward three theses (abridged below):
- Responding to change is becoming increasingly important. But: agile methods alone are not the solution, because We already have big problems with "very simple" behavioral changes
- Systemic and sustainable organizational development is a good idea, but is rarely practiced.
- We must work with simple metaphors The company's managers have to work with the framework because the statements in the frameworks are not concrete and tangible enough to be attractive and practicable for all managers.
What does this mean in concrete terms?
The complexity trap
Jürgen Dittmar calls one problem the "complexity trap": people often confuse complicated and complex. The former is a mechanistic view of the world, the latter a systemic one.
Today, we have a problem with increasing complexity. This challenge needs other solutions than complicated challenges. Therefore, we need social change, we need to change our behavior.
"There is a lot of bad Scrum out there"
The above quote is symptomatic of the problems in organizational development, and thus thesis 2. Agile transformation consists of many elements, such as structure, processes, tools and training. However, the top level, management, is often ignored.
A survey showed that the culture of the organization often (53%) conflicted with agile values in transformation initiatives. However, the transformation of an organization must inevitably start from the top. If the leadership does not represent and exemplify these values, then the initiative is doomed to fail.
Managers need a perspective, and this is often lacking. This then leads to detailed frameworks such as SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) are received with enthusiasm, but are not implemented with the agile mindset.
"Manage the system, not the people"
The above statement comes from Jurgen Appelo (Management 3.0). In the past, managing people worked because the challenges were complicated. Today, they are complex, so a different approach is needed. The metaphor of a gardener who creates framework conditions and only sometimes has to intervene is appropriate here.
Another metaphor is to view the organization itself as a product that is continuously being developed. From this perspective, it becomes easier to apply agile approaches. For example, it then becomes obvious that stakeholders - including employees - need to be involved.
A backlog can then also be drawn up and prioritized accordingly. The first backlog entry is often: "Develop a sustainable strategy and organizational development".
Conclusion
The conclusion of the presentation was not really surprising. Which part of an organization needs to be the most agile? The management, because a transformation that affects the entire organization must of course not only be approved from the top, but also driven forward from there.
Photo: Tobias von Garnier
with kind permission of Jürgen Dittmar
