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Imagine that you are running your own business, or have a significant stake in one, and therefore take a keen interest in helping to ensure its long-term wellbeing, both for you and for others (shareholders, customers, suppliers, stakeholders of all kinds).
You would rightfully be careful, critical and discerning about the claims of anyone who promises or implies that the method, framework, process or management system they sell (of course, with an accompanying periodic re-certification scheme for your employees) will miraculously make everything better all by itself.
Those making a living out of peddling management methodologies, processes and tools would suddenly become very discerning, critical and discerning about whom they might hire for such services, if they themselves had any “skin in the game”. In fact, they would become all that not even about whom they hire, but about whether they should hire anyone for that kind of work.
If they didn’t, they would soon be confronted with the painful reality that in the pursuit of getting things done better (or at all), everything they so eagerly champion is a frivolous luxury, especially when it comes in a package deal of a retinue of consultants, Scrum Masters, senseis, expensive meeting rituals, and all that jazz.
No matter how you slice and dice the work to be done (with Kanban or stand-up meetings or sticky notes on some “canvas” or or or …), at some point work needs to get done; that is, the actual work. The work that someone was educated or trained to do, the work that someone has deep expertise and experience in, the work that someone was hired to specifically do among a set of other candidates who applied for that job with similar hard credentials and capabilities.
Actual brainpower and “hard skills” / capabilities on a specific subject matter (not Agile or Lean or anything like that – think electronics, or programming, or engineering design, or financial modeling) must be applied on a specific problem with specific sources of information and materials, in a specific competent manner, to eventually generate a valuable outcome that contributes to the business mission.
Don’t fool yourself. No amount of rituals, titles, coaching and certification will make up for a shortfall in the above necessary elements.
Inversely, if the above necessary elements are absent, the “how” might (not “will”) be suboptimal, but the work will get done, somehow, eventually – as long as the person attempting to do the work is not gaming the system, delaying, operating in stupid ways, or having one or more bad days for whatever reason.
But hey – when it’s about spending other people’s money on other people (and on oneself), many people are far less discerning about and critical of “miracle cures” and these alleged cures’ actual value for a business, or judicious about their use while considering trade-offs, compromises and sacrifices inherent in those “cures”.
So bring in the consultants to put your company in the SAFe straitjacket, talk incessantly about Spotify and Toyota (like those in the past were talking about Motorola, GE, Neutron Jack and Six Sigma), make “enterprise agility” a “strategic imperative” without ever explaining what “agility” means in general and for your business in particular, build a “Lean PMO”, announce an “Agile transformation”, give people roles in which they can claim to “enthusiastically cross-pollinate Agile” across the organization, elevate some blabbermouth to a “Chief Agile Officer” figurehead, present a Lean pilot project at Lean conferences while voicelessly implying that your company “is now Lean”…
You can at least pad your CV with yet another acronym, right?
Again, if you had to pay for all that ritualistic and make-pretend “business excrement” out of your own pocket or out of your future earnings: would you do it?
If you would do it, how long would you be able to afford it?
And even if it’s not coming out of your own current or future pocket: why are you spending your life’s precious time on this, instead of on actual work?
“The Zero Hype Bundle” explores the above, and more, helping you to see the hidden costs of business “miracle cures”, both on the organizations adopting them, and on the professional trajectory of those peddling them either directly or indirectly through the proud display of certifications and enthusiasm.
