Back in October I attended a very thought provoking talk
titled “Why Agile Transformations Fail (and what you can do to prevent it…)” by
Gez Smith at Agile Tour London. Gez
hosts a podcast at WhyAgileTransformationsFail.com
which is a collection of interviews exploring the title of the blog. He has a great cross selection roles impacted
by agile transformations from Developers, Agile Coaches to recruitment
consultants. If you have time to listen to the interviews, I would recommend
downloading the podcast. The talk at agile
tour London was made up of a number of quotes from the podcast that highlight
some themes and challenges to implementing agile in organisations.
Episode 6 of the podcast, an interview with Andrew Horn, is
particularly interesting for me. Andrew
talks about the failure of organisations and some of the root causes of
failure. He argues that even profitable
companies can be on the verge of failure when we consider market disruptors and
the impact of organisational rigidity on innovation. He introduces the Fractal Model for
organisations. You can read more about
this model here. There a number of parallels with Agile ways of
working and in particular the moving of delivery responsibility to those
closest the customer/user. I
particularly like the example of Traffic Lights and Roundabouts.
This brings me on to a great book that I would highly
recommend. Reinventing
Organisation by Frederic Laloux.
Frederic talks about his research into organisations that are structured
in quite radical ways. With many cases
having a completely decentralised organisation structure. He categories these organisations as Teal, you
will have to read the book to discover the other colours and their meanings,
but I would be very interested to hear your views on which colour you think your
company is? What this book doesn’t give you is a blueprint
for this kind of new organisation. No
two organisations implement a wholly comparable system. However there are common traits to these
organisations. Again there are strong
parallels to agile ways of work, in particular - delegated responsibility. As such a number of commentators in the agile
community are referencing ideas from Laloux’s book. Definitely worth a read.
