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It all becomes Kabuki theater when an entire company decides to “go Agile”. This also demonstrates a deep lack of awareness on behalf of a company’s management when “going Agile” with big tralala comes after 10 years of having “gone Lean” (the previous Kabuki show).
Beware when the name of practices that represent otherwise useful skills start infecting job titles.
Example:
Around 10 years ago, I ran various projects with autonomous teams across business units and used ideas, approaches, methods and tools to remain responsive, inspired by Agile, Lean Startup, etc. The results were excellent, especially in terms of getting to value fast, and with way less effort than with a phase-gate.
10 years pass, during which the old-school phase-gate mindset was never dethroned, and agility remained confined to individuals and small non-bureaucratic pockets that had to develop new lines of business. Yet, this company kept breaking its own record of revenues without respite.
Could it have broken even more records with Agile?
I don’t know, how likely is it that stable value streams that deliver known products to known customers actually gain that much from cargo-culting capital-A Agile practices?
Now, suddenly, “Agile” is part of job titles there, even for people who seem to be engaged in work that doesn’t deal with that much uncertainty. It has become the new big thing, at least for peacocking. Meanwhile, the people who had been demonstrating lowercase-A agility for 10+ years are probably dumbfounded to see so much blah blah about marginal improvements, at best.
For them, agility was a necessity. The others now treat it as a luxury, as a kind of corporate status symbol.
Here’s to another 10 years of Kabuki. Perhaps in 2032 this company will finally embrace Bagile, Cagile or some other flavor of Deft.
The Incredible Story of Deft explores this phenomenon, not only for Agile, but for all similar “miracle cures”.
