Enabling Agility

Posts Tagged ‘Agile’

There are two Kristyns.  The first worked at a large, well-respected firm, did her job competently, but nothing extraordinary.  The second Kristyn is extraordinary. She is unemployed, and a volunteer Producer/Director of “The New England Job Show”.  It is a new cable program to help people find work, produced, directed and run buy people out of work.  Articles have been been written about the show and carried by the Associated Press.  Good Morning America, Chronicle and Fox are planning to do pieces on the show.  There is interest in expanding the program to help more people statewide. Kristyn is a masterful networker, connecting people everywhere she goes, always looking for new possibilities.

They are both the same Kristyns, only separated by about 5 months.

So what’s different?   If she were to get a job tomorrow, would Kristyn go back to her cube, keep her head down and do her job?

I doubt it.  I don’t think you’ll ever see Kristyn in a position where she’s unable to make a difference in the world again.  Ever.

I asked her what was different.  In her previous job, she’d tried to make things better, but never got much support to make the changes she wanted to make.  There was a lot of talk about change, but nothing changed. When she was laid off, she realized she had to do something special to get noticed.  And she did.

How many of the keep-your-head-down-and-do-your-job Kristyns do you have in your organization who would do extraordinary things with only a bit of nurturing?

For an organization to be truly agile, it is critical to have people who are enabled to give their best.  The next product idea, the killer customer-service model and the next great marketing campaign are probably out there.  You just need to give them room to come out.

In their book a simpler way, Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers write:

Fuzzy, messy, continuously exploring systems bent on discovering what works are far more practical and successful than our attempts at efficiency … They slosh around in the mess, involve many individuals, encourage discoveries, and move quickly past the mistakes  The are learning all the time, engaging everyone in finding what works.  The system succeeds because it involves many tinkerers focused on figuring out what’s possible.

Go find your Kristyns and let them loose.  They are everywhere. And they will make your organization great.

My wife got a book called The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten.  Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis, is one of the 100. Instead of reading the synopsis, I decided to read the whole book.

The Oakland Athletics managed to have success in Baseball while having one of the lowest overall budgets.  They did this by identifying the characteristics that were the most important for winning baseball games and hiring people with those talents, many of whom lacked other, less important, skills.  Other teams overlooked these players either because they undervalued the critical skill, overvalued the less important skills or simply because they didn’t fit the teams’ image of what constituted a “real” baseball player.

Now that I’ve read the book, I’m wondering how much companies overpay to get skills that don’t make a significant difference in their overall throughput.

It might be interesting for a manager to ask the question “if I had 20% less to spend on my team’s salaries, how would I do that”.

What are the core skills you think critical to your team’s success?  What characteristics or skills are less important?  Where are you missing skills you need?  Where do you have an overabundance of skills?  What skills are you willing to pay a premium to get?  What skills are you paying to much for?

How do you know what skills are really worth paying for?  Do you have any quantitative information to back up your decision?

Would the most important people on the team be the ones who were best able to train and develop others, so you could bring more college new-hires onto the team?

If you had to cut 20% of the total salary (not people) across your team (assuming you had total freedom to move people in and out of your organization) do you think you could do it?  Could you be spending you money more effectively?

Note: I’m not suggesting you cut your team’s salary by 20%. I think it is a worthwhile exercise to get you thinking about who you hire, how much you pay and why.

I don’t follow baseball, but found this book interesting and provocative.  I’d definitely recommend it to someone thinking about how to staff their teams effectively. If having a big bank account was the critical deciding factor in being a good baseball team, Oakland would never have made the playoffs. But they did.

The amount you have to spend on your team may not be as large as it has been in the past, but by rigorously looking at what you really need, can you still be as effective?

In the book “a simpler way” by Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers, there’s a paragraph that got my attention.

“Life is intent on finding what works, not what’s “right.” It is the ability to keep finding solutions that is important; any one solution is temporary.  There are no permanent right answers.  The capacity to keep changing, to find what works now, is what keeps any organism alive.”

In software development, teams are often asked to follow practices that seem to impede effective work.  I’ve seen them respond by pretending to follow the formal process while doing what works behind the scenes.  Instead of being open about what they are doing, they conceal it.  And they incur the additional work of making it seem like they are following the official process by filling out the approved project templates.

How much more productive would it be if teams could talk openly about what they were doing, and other teams could learn from their experimentation?  How much more engaged would an organization be where experimentation was encouraged?  Where people talked openly about what they learned?

Have you been part of an organization that has encouraged experimentation with process and open discussion about the results?  How did it work?  What was it like being part of that culture?