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Many of us who work in the space of organisational change are persuaded of the benefits of the Agile Approach. As John Carroll and David Morris* neatly summarise it, Agile has the potential to:
Given that Agile has so much to recommend itself, why do so many organisations struggle to unlock the full potential of this approach?. In my work over the past years, with many organisations endeavouring to harness Agile, one thought keeps coming back to me: beyond our Agile “initiates” and practitioners, very few people in the organisation know what we are talking about when we say Agile, and the jargon we have wrapped around this approach is not helping at all.
My recommended hack for successful Agile adoption could not be simpler: cut through the jargon and “Agileese” and explain what we mean in plain, readily-understood terms.
One sunny day, in the summer before Covid, I was facilitating a Prosci workshop in London where, in essence, we explore what Agile means for how we do change management and what change management means for how we do Agile. Among my attendees were Agile Practitioners, Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Project Managers and Change Practitioners. At morning break, over flaky croissants and decent coffee, we got to chatting about how our different customers and organisations used and understood, and often mis-used and misunderstood, Agile terms and language. We concluded that, likely, this was a symptom of lack of awareness of, or confusion about, the central principles and values of Agile. As we reconvened our workshop, I handed each attendee a marker pen and invited them to capture on the flip chart Agile language commonly used in their organisations. To add to the challenge, I set a timer for 60 seconds. Following the exercise, we stood back and admired our handiwork. I selected three of the terms, at random, and checked that we – the “experts” – had a common understanding of what each meant; we did not (but you are not surprised to read that).
Of course, the Agile approach, and the frameworks, brands and applications it has inspired, have terms of art and idioms and when in widespread use in our organisations, it is natural that those of us practising Agile create our own vernacular. Our “end users” (itself a horribly impersonal expression many of us reach for far too often), organisational leaders, sponsors and line managers, however, often have no clue what we mean. And the craziness of this situation is that these are the self-same people whose involvement is vital to ensure design, testing, feedback on and proficient adoption of new capability is vital to our organisations’ success.
My Agile hack is to remember the “customer collaboration” value set out in the Agile Manifesto; widely-understood, plain language explanations of the central principals and processes of Agile are paramount to creating and maintaining collaboration.
Back to that pre-Covid workshop. As my attendees were undertaking some analysis of their organisational changes during our afternoon session, I quickly transferred the “jargon flipchart” to a slide, so I could share it with them. Here’s what they came up with, in just one minute.
What did we miss?
Need help balancing your change management practice with your Agile organisation? Attend one of our upcoming public, open-enrolment, one-day workshops, and discover how to best integrate the two disciplines.
At CMC Partnership Global we have been helping our clients with building change capability over many years, so if you would like to know more about how to go about it, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
