If you are somebody who has been coaching agile teams or leaders, it is very likely that you would have run into team members, managers or business customers, who resist movement to agile.
Personally I have run into customers who do not want to even hear the word agile. There are various reasons, here are some that I have come across
- They have had poor experience with agile in the past
- Due to the poor experience, there are set of beliefs formed which are myths about agile
- Agile transformation is being undertaken without understanding the challenges that people or organization is going through
- One of the agile frameworks – SAFe or Scrum or any other framework is being pushed on teams and businesses as a top-down approach by IT managers.
- People are afraid that they may lose jobs, thinking that their position may not be needed or that they lose advantage at their job because they do not have experience in agile.
- People are afraid of letting go control, especially the ones who rely on delegating, monitoring and control as a way to manage the compilation of work
- People are afraid that agile will make them work more than they otherwise have to. Somehow the idea of daily scrum or daily stand-ups also give a sense that they will not be monitored on a daily basis, which clearly can be seen as micromanagement.
I am guessing that anybody who has led any kind of change in any organisation would have experienced resistance of some kind. In my experience, what I have found insightful is that resistance itself is not a problem, how you respond to resistance is what decides the course of transformation.
What did not work while leading agile transformation?
Let me start with sharing what has not worked for me
- When I have seen my customers’ resistance through the lens of “right” and “wrong” – any kind of judgement of the resistance has made things worse. When I have been in the space of right and wrong, most of the time my response has been to correct by teaching or telling people what I think is “right”. This has failed terribly because most of the time, individuals have had their own version of right, which is usually different from mine.
- Teaching or Telling – When you have a team or set of team members, who are already convinced with agile and they want someone to teach them how to adopt agile, teaching or telling works great. But when you are tasked by management to teach agile and the team members are not quite on board, you get to see two kinds of responses to one’s teaching – people either submit or rebel. Out of the two, rebels are still better because you know them and you can work with them directly but the ones who submit create a voice of resistance very silently like a grapevine and they tend to create larger problems later on.
- When I have pushed Scrum or SAFe top-down – Leadership buy-in is crucial to change however pushing a framework on teams as a top-down approach many times turns into another set of processes being imposed on teams. One of the values of agile is individuals and interactions over processes and tools. When a specific framework gets pushed from top-down, I have more often seen it turned into another set of processes to follow. People who do not agree with the new processes, either comply or resist.
- Pushing change harder under pressure to prove – This has happened more often than I would have liked it to happen. I must confess that pushing teams too hard, most of the time made things harder. While in the near term it felt that we managed to deliver, in the long term the team actually slowed down. People either moved to other teams and/or the team ownership dropped and/or people became more insecure and started to play politics and/or quality of work decreased and/or people stopped being transparent.
What worked while leading agile transformation, when I have run into resistance?
- Engage teams/customers NOT with an intention to change but to CONNECT and understand – Most changes run into issues because we start with the agenda of changing people or organisations before connecting and understanding people and the problems they are dealing with. Strong intention to connect with people and understand their challenges helps build the relationship that lays foundation for change.
- Empathy for resistance – As an agile coach or scrum master, I have found empathy as one of the most powerful ways to convert resistance into an enabler of change. Most people have a need to be heard and understood, when they have a perspective on change. As leaders, when we take care of those needs, we increase trust and the likelihood of people responding to the change more positively.
- Build a shared agreement to reflect on a regular basis – When it comes to any change, including agile transformations, people look at it through multiple lenses. There are always multiple perspectives at play. Whether one agrees for a change or not, it is usually easier to connect with people on “intention” or “goal” of where as a team we would like to be. Goal works as a great lever for change and in order to get to the goal, continuous reflection at regular intervals becomes extremely valuable. Teams may not agree with agile or a specific agile framework however once we share a common goal, we are usually open to reflecting at regular intervals, in the interest of the common goal. Building this agreement with teams, customers and leaders, helps build awareness and drive change.
- Use agile principles and values to ask questions to stimulate change – questions such as
- What would be the highest priority features for business and how can we deliver them as early as possible, so we improve customer satisfaction?
- What value in terms of working software have the customers received so far? How do we improve working software delivery?
- How do we go to market as early as possible? What would the minimum viable product look like?
- How would you split the bigger requirement into smaller features? How would you prioritise them? What are the must haves, should haves or good to haves?
- What does the workflow look like? How can we optimise the workflow such that customers get their working software as early as possible?
- How do we improve team ownership in delivery, so we have better quality and throughput?
- Empower individuals to drive the changes – you as an agile coach may sure have loads of experience in transforming teams to agile however when teams drive the changes, it is not just fast, they actually ensure that it is successful. As a coach, work with them to prioritise the changes and allow them to come up with strategies and to roll-out the changes iteratively. One of the challenges I have noticed coaches or scrum masters run into is to – “how to NOT take charge yourself and start deciding for teams and customers”. Yet ensuring the teams adopt agile mindset by empowering them to take charge
- Support the transformation journey – Teams need all kinds of support through the journey of agile transformation. Supporting an agile transformation journey may involve training, coaching, observation, reflection or facilitation. Initially one may need to work closely with teams to implement certain agile practices, build agile mindset awareness across organisation and work with leaders to support teams who may run into hiccups through the transformation.
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