One of the major global IT companies has a saying

“Its not personal, you were just road kill.“

“Road kill” refers to the fact that your career destruction was not a personal act but simply a result of a shift in an executive’s strategic direction, or a whim. Although it feels personal to the hedgehog, there was nothing personal from the eighteen wheel truck driver’s perspective, and why should it. The phrase is normally used when the hedgehog is well known to the driver of the eighteen wheeler.

Lets take a systems thinking view of this phenomena.

Whence Road Kill?

Why “road kill”? “Road kill” refers to the “unintentional” destruction of someone’s career when an executive rolls out a top down strategy.

Whence Top Down?

Why a top down strategy rather than a bottom up strategy? “Top down” puts the executive in charge. They can be seen to be active in the initiative. At the end of the year, they point at the result of the initiative and claim them for themselves. “Top Down” is a Dragon Slayer strategy.

Have you ever noticed that a visit to the local Doctor (GP) normally results in either a prescription for pills, or a referral to a consultant (a specialist doctor)? That’s because doctors in the UK get a bachelors of medicine, bachelors of surgery which is one degree with two titles. In order to maintain their status in society and justify their high salary, the GP wants to be in control of your treatment. Doctors are finding life increasing stressful as the internet allows people to self diagnose or check their doctor’s diagnosis. If you receive a diagnosis of Diabetes you can expect Metformin or Insulin as a treatment. Alternatively, your doctor will prescribe a change of lifestyle, a change of diet and prescription of daily exercise and regular vigorous walks in the Welsh Mountains. Changing lifestyle is as much to do with changing your social network.

So why do some Doctors prefer to prescribe medicine? In the UK, only Doctors can prescribe medicine, patients cannot just rock up at a chemist and ask for whatever they would like. Doctors act as a gatekeeper to medicine. If a doctor convinces someone to change their lifestyle, it is the patient who gets the credit for their cure. In other words, some Doctors prescribe medicine rather than lifestyle because it puts them in control whereas lifestyle changes are in the control of the patient.

This is not meant to be medical advice. Always consult a doctor!

Similarly, only executives can implement top down strategies. People at the gemba (where the work is done, the coal face) cannot implement top down strategies. They have to get the support of executives to do so. Top down strategies empower the executive, giving them something to point to at review time.

Whence the need for Empowerment?

Executives are like sharks. They need to keep moving or they will drown. Its not their fault, its the lack of life support at such high altitudes. They need to keep demonstrating value otherwise they will be out in the next corporate reshuffle caused by the top down initiative of a more senior executive or the turmoil caused by a merger or acquisition*

Friends

The executive suite can be a very lonely place. As an executive, you have probably seen a number of your friends turned into road kill… often at your own hand. The safest thing to do is not have friends. You are constantly fighting turf wars with other executives, with minor skirmishes being fought at lower levels of the organisation requiring your close attention. You hire ambitious individuals to get the job done, and each one of them is looking to stab you in the back and take your job as they seek to reach the top of the pyramid. Friends become a liability as you climb the ladder, they may reveal a weakness or may be held hostage in some executive action. The executive suite can be a very lonely place.

Training

There are no training courses for executives. There are no training courses to prepare people for a role in the executive suite. MBAs and their flawed case based approaches teach students what good looked like a decade ago but do not teach practical day to day skills for today. Harvard Business Review and its monthly serving of early majority ideas provided comfort for executives looking for ideas. The HBR Online blog is a machine gun rapidly firing out anxiety inducing ideas reminding executives of the things they are not doing. Add subscriptions to CourseRA, Economist, Wired, McKinsey and you are fully in overload, and in need of beautiful expert consultants to help with your anxiety. None of them talk about failure, about things that other executives tried but failed. Talking about failure would only make you feel less inadequate.

And none of them teach obvious practical skills that you need to perform well in the long run.

How many of them teach the following strategies:

1. Coaching and skills to help others learn. To enable executives to distribute their strategies effectively rather than having to rely on consultants.
2. Real Options so that executives can effectively risk manage their organisations, and learn to make decisions when faced with uncertainty.
3. Cynefin so that executives can understand the appropriate approach for each problem.
4. Exaptation so that executives can reuse existing people and assets instead of buying new products and services.
5. Safe to Fail so that executives can ensure that initiatives are safe to fail, and they can teach their organisation to be safe to fail.
6. Culture. How to see it and how to left shift it to where they want to be.
7. How to build a learning network that extends beyond their organisation so that they can learn from other organisation’s failures.
8. The values and principles of Lean, Flow and Agile so that they understand and further the state of the art.
9. Facilitation skills so that they can show by example how their managers can step back and let others do the work in a focused and risk managed manner.
10. Cost cutting.

Transparency

Many executives are often blind to the realities of what is happening in their organisation. They rely on second, third and fourth hand accounts of the impacts of their initiatives. They receive their intel from power points that are beautiful with beautiful images and beautiful diagrams and beautiful prose that tell beautiful stories that are written by beautiful story writers who are beautiful consultants from beautiful firms.

When the executives “Go to the Gemba” to see the work, it is part of carefully prepared state visits that would make ambassadors and state department civil servants blush. It is joked that the queen thinks the world smells of paint because everywhere she goes, one hundred metres in front of her is a decorator painting the walls. Executives think the world smells of fresh powerpoint, immaculate Kanban boards and improv presentation skills.

When executives do make impromptu visits they are made aware that they are causing a disruption.

No one teaches executives how to read the raw data or create a culture where no one notices when they make an impromptu visit.

Consultancies

Most executives rely on consultancies for introducing change. Consultancies have access to skills that are not available in the organisation. In reality, organisations have better access to the skills.

Consultancies are great for people looking to get diverse experience, or build their brand. Most competent practitioners in a new skill are unlikely to work for a consultancy. Why would you work for a consultancy and give up 60%-70% of the fee? Furthermore, world class experts want to build their own brand rather than be subservient to the consultancy’s brand.

Assuming you are an executive who knows the community you want to hire from. You will struggle to bring them into the organisation. You will spend orders of magnitude more effort to bring in a world class expert over the effort of bringing in someone mediocre from a consultancy on the preferred supplier list. Most organisations are geared to make it easy for executives to get good support from consultancies rather than top class support from world leading experts.

Consultancies come with other added benefits. If you bring in someone from a top consultancy, they will have a hot line to the top of the organisation. Whilst you need to respect the hierarchy, anything that threatens the success of your consultant will go straight to their engagement partner who will tell the top guy what to do.

The Executive Team

Most executive teams are not an executive team. They are a bunch of individuals each with individual responsibility for their own initiatives. They succeed or fail according to the success of their initiatives. How often are the entire executive team held responsible for the success of an initiative? If they are, they becomes the responsibility of the CEO.

Most executives really are on their own.

Safety Net

Many executives have spend many, many, many years building a network within their organisation. They need the network in order to make them effective. Studies have shown that shown that high performers at one firm become significant less effective when they move to another firm. It would seem that executive effectiveness is much a function of an their network and relationships. Often an executive moves organisation, to discover they it was their network and relationships that made them successful, and their skills are not enough.

Al-Noor Ramji understood the value of the network. He successfully moved from Swiss Bank to Dresdner Klienwort Benson to QWest to BT, and each time a chunk of his team followed him.

I know a number of senior executives who devoted a significant chunk of their career to building an organisation. Executives who failed to get a similar role when they left the organisation and are now working in a much smaller role because their network has no value to them. Executive effectiveness does not tend to be transferable.

In most cases, an executive’s network in the organisation they leave has no value to their new employer. The exception is consultancies. A friend who worked for a consultancy once told me that they had reached the time in their career where they needed to work for their client, a government department, for a few years. They would hire a team of managers to report to them before rejoining their current employer as a partner. Then the network and all of the relationships would be valuable, especially their successor who they would chose and mentor. This is why consultancies are often perceived as the recruitment consultancies for senior executive positions.

Is it any wonder that executives are often risk averse?

Whence Empathy

I started writing this series of posts where “Executive and Agile Beliefs Diverge” because I hoped to show executive a better way of thinking. As I’ve written the pieces I’ve developed empathy for executives. They exist within a system that prevents them from succeeding at introducing change.

The following are all set up to make the executive’s life hard:

• No friends to support them
• No training
• No transparency
• Consultancies without world class experience
• No team
• No Safety Net

Would you want a job like that?

Most organisations have a group of experts in system thinking. Perhaps they should get them to map out the systems at the executive level of their organisation to identify the system level changes that need to be made.

Me, I now have a lot more empathy for executives trying to make change happen in organisational systems that provide them little in the way of support. Rather than seeing them as the controllers of the system, perhaps we should see them as the ultimate victims of the system who need our support.

Happy Easter!

*Mergers were very popular in the 1980s and 1990s as a means for investment bankers to make money out of over capacity in markets. Unfortunately mergers lead to lumpy revenue streams but require maintaining high cost M&A departments. Since the 2000s, investment banks prefer to make money out of over capacity in markets through the credit derivatives markets. The credit derivatives market provide constant revenue streams which benefit from the occasional bankruptcy.

An obvious place where Executives and Agile Beliefs diverge is when it comes to Agile Transformations. Executives tend to favour top down big bang implementations whereas Agile Practitioners prefer bottom up safe to fail experiments.

This is not really the executive’s fault as they are driven by the need for fast results. Executives generally have a tenure of five to ten years. This is a surprisingly short period of time to effect significant lasting change in any established, traditional organisation.

The difference between traditional methods and Agile is that traditional methods tell you how to write software. Agile methods do not. As Tony Grout says “Agile methods are the simplest practice that will tell you the problem you need to solve“. Whereas traditional methods force the team to mold around the practice, Agile molds practices around the team and the context that they operate in. In other words, one size DOES NOT fit all. It takes time for a team to develop a stable and effective method for their context. It is not simply a case of the teams learning a new method, its a case of the team using Agile practices to create their method.

The change is bigger than just the development teams

Its not just the teams. The program management structure that manages the risks of the cross team development needs to be developed using Agile techniques. Whether you adopt Flow, LESS, Nexus, SAFE or DAD, its not just a process. All of the people operating the system need to learn a new way of working, and even harder, a new way of behaving. People need to learn how to learn “work with” rather than “work for”.

At the portfolio level, the organisation needs to bring all the business heads together in order to agree on the organisation’s backlog. This allows engineering to start managing its skill liquidity using a tornado graph to support investment and divestment of capacity. The organisation can become a team of teams and focus on its customers and it external competition rather than focus all of its energy on internal rivalries.

And this brings an uncomfortable truth and realisation to the CEO and Chief People Officer. Getting a business executive to give up their goals in order to help a fellow executive achieve theirs for the greater good of the company means that the (executive) reward system needs to be upgraded. An upgrade to reward collaboration and reward focusing on the goals of the overall organisation rather than sub-optimal local goals. It will take the HR function a number of attempts before they find the right path to a new successful reward system.

The organisation will need to implement a risk management system that allows business leaders and IT leaders to collaborate on managing the risks associated with investments involving IT. Not just copying a blog post but training audit and assurance functions in how to tell the difference between a well run project and one that presents a serious risk to the organisation.

The simple matter of funding becomes a issue at some point, though later than most think. Although the finance department needs to build a new way of funding projects, a more urgent imperative is to find a better way assessing the value that investments in IT deliver.

As well as learning to collaborate as a team, the executives need to learn how to create safe to fail cultures that promote learning. Executives need to learn an entirely new set of skills and behaviours. They need to learn how to create a new culture and tools for changing culture such as story telling and walking to talk. They need to learn how to see culture, the culture they need and the culture they need to move away from.

But before anything can start they need to build trust and respect with their fellow executives. Not something that happens over night.

And they need to do this fast, during their short tenure of five to ten years. No wonder they prefer big up front design, top-down transformations run by consultants who can be blamed for failure.

Starting an Agile Transformation Fast the obvious way

Doing it fast is easy. You select a method…. LESS, NEXUS, SAFE or DAD and simply roll it out. You hand out copies of the relevant book. You hire clever consultants and coaches, and you hire trainers to roll out standard training.

That “works” if you assume that an Agile transformation is “obvious” in Cynefin terms.

You will start fast and fail even faster, though perhaps only after you have spent a lot of money on consultants and coaches and training.

The upside for this strategy is that your bosses will perceive that you are a “get it done” individual who is making a difference. You will have a big up front design for your transformation. A big plan from a big name consultancy to get to success.

In the words of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder…

“No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength” (or “no plan survives contact with the enemy”) and “Strategy is a system of expedients”.

Starting an Agile Transformation Fast the complicated way

Instead you may consider that an Agile transformation is “complicated” in Cynefin terms and seek “experts” or get a big name consultancy to undertake an extensive analysis.

• If you are unlucky, you will encounter consultants who will show you powerpoint slides with lots and lots of detail of successful transformations at similar organisations, a brightly painted roadmap, and a standard process that involves time boxed analysis or capability assessments. They will have an army of graduates and cheap developers micro-managed by “get it done” leaders to help you transform.
• If you are lucky, you will hire one of the small handful of people in the world who have real experience of creating genuine Agile transformational change… And they will tell you that an Agile transformation sits on the boundary of “complex” and “chaos” in Cynefin terms, with large elements of “obvious” and “complicated”. P.S. If you are wondering which stone to look under to find these people, you could do worse than start here.

You will learn the goal or destination in an Agile transformation is “complicated” which only an expert or analysis can tell you. Big name consultancies are good at providing a business case and delivery plan to help you secure funding and “commitment”. They will provide a nice “complicated” powerpoint diagram showing all of the elements of the new organisation. It will be a beautiful diagram with an even more beautiful story told by beautiful expert story tellers in beautiful suits with beautiful hair. It wont work of course, but it will be beautiful.

The good news about assuming the transformation is “complicated” is that if it doesn’t work, you can always blame the experts and their beautiful diagrams. This is a particularly popular strategy in risk averse cultures.

Finishing an Agile Transformation Fast the Complex / Chaos Way

Although the goal is “complicated” the transition from where you are now to where you want to be sits firmly on the border between “Complex” and “Complicated”. Although everyone might agree that the destination is Paris, the path you take will be different dependent on whether you are in Versaille, or London, or Tokyo, or Cape Town, or Athens, or Olympia, or more likely Olympus Mons.

Experienced agile practitioners will tell you that tales of success are inspiring but you need to dig beneath the polish and look at the failures. Success is more likely if you avoid the failures rather than try to emulate the success.

You will need to set up a portfolio of “safe to fail” experiments. Experiments that tell you the best place to apply LESS, the best places to try SAFE and DAD and Nexus. The best places to organise using the Spotify Model and the best to organise using the Buurtzorg Model. In order to make the experiments “safe to fail” you will need to speak to people with real experience of applying these approaches so that you can learn about the known failures. You won’t find out about failures from a sales brochure or a shiny powerpoint. You find out about them from people who trust you.

Executives attempting an Agile Transformation need to build a lot of trust and that takes time. It takes time to build trust with the Business Heads, and the CFO, and the CRO, and the CPeopleO, and the COO… Especially as the CIO is often not considered important enough to be on the board of non technology companies, often reporting to the CFO or COO.

When instigating a Lean Transformation Students of Taiichi Onho would insist on the board, lead by the CEO making a significant change to the production line. Taiichi Onho’s students would lead them from the boardroom and make them publicly dismantle a key part of the production line. If they were not prepared to do that, Taiichi Ohno taught them to walk away as they were not ready. If an organisation is embarking on an Agile/Lean Transformation, the first act of the board should be to appoint the CIO to the board (if they are not already on it). The second act should be for the board to go to the place where the transformation will start and dismantle the desks and dark cubicles with screw drivers and allen keys and , and replace them with collaborative spaces. The board should collaborate with the teams to create the Kanban boards that they want to see when they “Go the Gemba” to sit with the teams so that they can remove impediments and blockers for the teams. If the board are not prepared to do these things, they should abandon the transformation before they start.

The board need to understand that the transformation is not the destination. They need to understand that the transformation is the journey. They need to nourish and protect their experiments, removing impediments and blockers for them. At Agile2007 in Washington D.C. one of the participants stated that “Agile is a commitment to personal growth and learning as well as a company’s commitment to growth and learning.” The board need to make their trailblazers feel safe on their learning journey and shape a culture that supports growth and learning. The board need to be involved and make sure that improvements are happening. The board needs to ensure that value is delivered along the journey and not just at the end. A constant movement towards a better organisation.

A tale of two approaches

The Agile approach to transformations is to start small and gradually grow the size of your “safe to fail” experiments as you succeed. Start small and build your knowledge. Grow your people and get them to engage with the Agile community outside of your company. As you build your knowledge, build your infrastructure and risk management systems to support the new way of working. The key to success is growing the knowledge and experience of your existing people so that its your own people who do the scaling and not external consultants.

The executive approach is to hire a big name consultancy, create a top-down big up front design of the organisation and implement it in a big bang approach. Of course the bang normally comes just after the consultants have taken their fee. It is normally driven out of IT as an IT initiative without the need for proper engagement with the business. The IT executives do not need to learn anything new as they are doing it to their organisation rather than with the organisation. The good news about this approach is that the experts or consultants can be blamed when it fails.

Perhaps if CEOs were given the proper amount of time to roll out a transformation and given the proper support of their colleagues on the board (assuming they are on the board), they might try a more sensible approach.

A key value of both Scrum and Extreme Programming is courage. Both methodologies are based on the idea that team members create a system that allows them to act with courage.

Scrum says…

1. Risk Averse – The risk averse want to avoid or ignore risk. Their main strategy is to get an expert to manage the risk for them.
2. Risk Neutral – The risk neutral are flat risk, they buy and sell and aim to keep their position flat or neutral. They often act as intermediaries in deals or use their superior expertise to break complicated problems into simple ones.
3. Risk Takers – These people seek to understand risk and manage it. Their goal is to make risk free profits through arbitrage.

In finance, behaviour of the people with the intention of being risk averse is to assume massive risk due to their ignorance. The behaviour of risk takers is to understand risk and only take it on when they are adequately compensated, often making profit with no risk.

When attempting to transform an IT function, most executives are risk averse. They seek to hire experts who will manage the risk for them. The problem with hiring experts is that you really need to be an expert to hire them otherwise you will not know whether they are an expert or a smart person reading one chapter ahead of you. As a result, executives tend to appoint big name consultancies so they cannot be blamed as an individual if things do not work out. Robyn Dymond has written an excellent article on the subject. The reality is that most big name consultancies have little or no depth of Agile experience. The big name consultancies are buying in experts themselves.

So what is needed for an executive to adopt the agile value of courage?

1. The whole executive needs to work as a team to solve the problems that an Agile Transformation throws up. The CEO needs to act as the product owner and the CFO, COO, CPeopleO, CProductO, CMO, Business Heads need to act as a team rather than compete. They need to empower and support whichever executive is leading the transformation and help them remove impediments where ever they arise. This will allow the executive leading the transformation to manage the risk rather than go risk averse and appoint a big name consultancy. In other words, the executive team needs to model the behaviours that they want to organisation to adopt.
2. The entire executive team need to engage in deep learning. Each executive should engage a number of coaches and commit several hours a week to learning about the new way of running the business. After all, they are transform their organisation and need to know how to run it when it has changed. This will mean new behaviours and patterns of working. It will almost certainly mean that all executives will need to “go to the Gemba” (Go to the place where work happens) rather than receive the majority of their intelligence through carefully manicured and filtered powerpoint decks.
3. Executive will need to visit companies that are touted as successful. However, that is not enough. They need to use their existing employees and coaches to manage context risk. Get their team to attend conferences and find out the real stories behind the success. Understand if the solution they are looking to adopt will fit with their context. Most importantly, they should know what failures have been experienced by organisations adopting approaches.
4. The executive leading the transformation should engage in several “safe to fail” experiments to try out different methods and approaches. They should try out one or two big name consultancies, as well as small niche Agile consultancies, and groups of independent experts. The only measure of success for these projects is real business benefit and not the production of paper or software “deliverables”. The IT Risk Management Framework might be useful for this.
5. The executives need to understand that an Agile Transformation is hard and that some of the sacred cows of cost cutting need to be slain along the way.
6. Any consultancy proposing a big bang, one size fits all approach should be shown to the door. That is exactly the reason the IT Risk Management Framework was created, so that teams and departments could adopt the most appropriate method for their context in the knowledge that the IT investment risk was managed if they operated within the constraints of the framework.
7. Finally, executives need to understand that context is the most important thing for them to consider. They should become experts at managing risk and spotting when a solution does not map well to the context.

So whenever you are thinking that your executive is not acting with courage, understand that it is probably the team they are working with and the reward system they operate within that forces them to be risk averse. Its really hard to go back and learn a new way of thinking and doing, and it is something that will only really happen when you have the support of your team.

This is the third post on where Executives and Agile Experience diverge. It relates to the attitude towards creating a safe environment to work in and in particular the attitude towards “Get it done” individuals.

“Get it done” Individuals

Executives love “Get it done” individuals. “Get it done” individuals agree a set of outputs and deliver them with ruthless efficiency and focus. “Get it done” individuals speak to executives in simple terms that the executives understand. In return, “Get it done” individuals focus on the results and nothing else. Anything that stands in the way of the agreed outputs is steamrollered in pursuit of the goal.

Agile environments are learning environments. In order to learn, people need safety, emotional safety and job safety. “Get it done” individuals are toxic in those environments. If you are an executive, and you want to create an Agile Environment that delivers outcomes rather than outputs, you need to have a zero tolerance to the following:

1. Threats
2. Abusive Behaviour
3. Bullying
4. Prejudice
5. Cronyism
6. Cliques
7. Wilful Incompetence
8. Over simplification
9. Lying
10. Failure to deliver outcomes

These are all tactics that “Get it done”.

Agile practitioners have a zero tolerance towards these tactics. If you do not stamp these out, especially in your “Get it done” individuals, your best performers will leave and you will be left with a culture of under-performance.

Threats, Abusive Behaviour and Bullying

You would think that in any modern organisation, threats, abusive behaviour and bullying would result in instant dismissal. However it turns out that these behaviours are tolerated by executives in “Get it done” individuals, especially if it is in the pursuit of results. “Get it done” individuals are expert at these tactics. Years of practice means that they know just how far they can go. They know what to say that gets the menace across without putting themselves or their career in danger. They have honed their tactics to know when they can most easily get away with it (late at night in an empty office is popular) and when they cannot (in a public place where there are independent minds that they cannot control).

These tactics mean that the “Get it done” individual can slice through argument and get things moving in the way they want. The fact that they might traumatize people in the process holds no interest for the executive.

Agile is all about learning. Individuals who embrace agile start to learn at a much faster rate than colleagues who do not. Learning means taking chances and trying new things. The result is that these individuals become much more valuable in the marketplace. When these individuals experience threats, abusive behaviour and bullying, they discover they have options, ones that pay them more, and ones that have better working conditions… ones without threats, abusive behaviour and bullying.

Prejudice

If you are an executive and you tolerate prejudice in your organisation, expect your best people to leave. Prejudice takes many forms. As well as racism, sexism, homophobia, beware of more subtle forms like roleism or employee type.

Agile as a community is bringing together all of the roles to work out better ways of delivering value. If your developers are allowed to abuse your testers and business analysts, good people will leave. Similarly consultants and permanent staff should not abuse contractors or vice versa.

As an executive, it is your responsibility to stamp out any form of prejuduce. Agile believes executives own that responsibility and should actively detect problems and remove them rather than turn a blind eye or claim that you were unaware. A failure to be aware of prejudice is no defence as it is the executive’s responsibility to know.

Cronyism and Cliques

“Get it done” individuals love cronies. They love people whose primary qualification is loyalty. They will happily deploy individuals who have neither the “Skill” and/or the “Will” to do a job, simply because that person will be loyal drone and act as a spy. “Get it done” individuals will happily employ people who add no value simply because they are loyal and spy for them, or drive through their agenda.

People  without the “Skill” and/or the “Will” create resentment in the hard working individuals who are delivering value because they have to work harder to carry them.

Experienced “Get it done” individuals will have a number of cronies who form a clique. The trusted individuals who drive through the “Get it done” individual’s agenda are also allowed to do whatever they choose. The clique get the credit because its the “Get it done” individual who delivers the message to executives. By comparison, Individuals outside the clique get no recognition by the “Get it done” individuals even though they are the ones doing the work.

Guess what the highly talented, delivery focused individuals do when they encounter cronies and cliques?

Executives in learning organisations “go to the Gemba”, they connect with people at all levels of the organisation. They make it easy for anyone to tell them about risks and issues. Successful executives in Agile organisations make themselves accessible. Individuals do not abuse the option to access power, they respect the individuals time and only come to them with important issues. Giving everyone access to power rather than just the select few means there are no stones unturned, or dark places for the cliques and cronies to hide beneath.

Wilful Incompetence and Over simplification

“Get it done” individuals celebrate the fact that they are not experts. They celebrate the fact that they are incompetent as if that was a positive quality. They are action oriented individuals who are experts at making decisions. They often make the wrong decisions but that is never their fault. They celebrate the fact that they can take complex and complicated situations and come up with an obvious solution. Einstein said…

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

“Get it done” individuals have simplified this statement further to form their own manifesto…

Everything should be made as simple as possible.

As a result, complex and complicated tasks like Lean and Agile transformations become reduced to a four step process:

1. Measure the lead time
2. Map the value stream
3. Identify delays
4. Remove delays

Executives love this simplification that removes the messiness of context and the challenges of understanding their customers and the things that they value.

Experts find themselves in meetings where they struggle to explain to executives that the over simplications are right… but utterly useless. Experts that discover they are valued more in other organisations where the executives share the view that “but no simpler” is just as important.

So Agile believes that Executives should learn about the things they lead. They should learn enough that “Get it done” individuals cannot violate the “but no simpler” rule.

Lying and Failure to deliver outcomes

Lying is an art form. Its harder to lie on an Agile project but it is still possible if executives lack experience with the Agile Toolkit. Executives that are new to Agile will be steered toward burn down charts, velocity graphs and lists of stories that are completed during a sprint. In other words, they will be steered towards activity and outputs rather than outcomes.

“Get it done” individuals will point to stories that demonstrate activity and inputs. They will point to the completion of features and stories.

Agile believes in transparency.

Agile practitioners understands that burn downs and velocity are tools for the team to help the team improve.

Agile practioners understand that progress is measure by achieving business value outcomes and showing progress toward delivering business value outcomes. (Progress is shown using cumulative flow diagrams.)

Executives are too tolerant toward “Get it done” individuals that fail to deliver business value outcomes. Executives are far too tolerant towards “Get it done” individuals who restate complex problems as complicated or obvious problems with a contractual check list of deliverables and outputs. Instead of “reduce churn in Asia”, the problem is restated as “build a blue widget” or create a “Service Blueprint” and a “Wireframe”.

If your deliverable does not involve an outcome involving the customer, you are probably being had.

“Get it done right!”

Agile practitioners “Get it done right”. They believe in delivering value with sustainable quality, and managing risk by reducing lead time and providing transparency.

In order to achieve this, the following constraints need to be applied by executives:

1. Create a safe environment to learn, where it is safe to fail because individuals are taught how to create safe to fail experiments, and understand their risk limits.
2. Have a zero tolerance to “Get it done” individuals or anyone for that matter who engage in any of the following.
   • Threats
   • Abusive Behaviour
   • Bullying
   • Prejudice
   • Cronyism
   • Cliques
   • Wilful Incompetence
   • Over simplification
   • Lying
   • Failure to deliver outcomes

Executives need to take responsibility for their organisations and the culture in their organisation. Not knowing is no longer an acceptable excuse.