A capital “A,” capital “T” Agile Transformation, from the perspective of employees, infers involuntary, mandatory change being done to them, whether they like it or not. The capital “A” denotes how they are going to change. The capital “T” tells them they have to change. Both of these words carry baggage. They suggest extrinsic (push) rather than intrinsic (pull) motivation.

The intentionally long list provided in the book and below is intended to help you get started. The principles themselves are self-referential. You are invited to use them, and there is no one size fits all. Your context and impediments will determine which are more important to encourage.

It’s not about “Agile,” or “Lean,” or “DevOps” for “Agile’s” or “Lean’s” or “DevOps’s” sake. Figuratively speaking, they are tools in a toolbox. Of course, they are much more than tools; they are behavioral principles, practices, and tools. The point is that you have a collection of bodies of knowledge to deploy optimally in context. A tool transformation, such as an “Agile Transformation,” is not optimizing for outcomes, it’s optimizing for the tool.

No one in their right mind is not going to want to improve on Better Value Sooner Safer Happier outcomes. There was an incentive to improve, without mandate and without targets. The optionality at the end is full autonomy and hence intrinsic motivation. Resistance dropped away as there was nothing to resist. I’ve learned that the words “convince” and “resistance” should not enter the vocabulary when improving on outcomes.

The world changed on June 26, 2018. It happened quietly. Few people even noticed. But that was the day that, after more than a century, General Electric, the last original member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, was removed from the index. GE was one of just a dozen firms that Charles Dow included in his list in 1896. 

In my previous post "A Sense of Urgency", I set the stage for what is at risk today. Now, in order to understand how to change, it is critical that we fist understand how we got here. How we came to have the traditional ways of working that are in place in most large organizations today.  

This is the number one lesson I’ve learned after almost thirty years as an agile and lean practitioner delivering business value through software in the Age of Digital, from leading Ways of Working at a large, old, global, regulated organization to working with many large firms across different industry sectors. Together as a team-of-teams, as servant leaders, we experimented, learned, and pivoted.

Given the importance of taking an optimal approach for the type of work, it is important to understand what agile, lean, DevOps, and waterfall are and their history. People, historically, have spent very little time thinking about or improving how they do what they do. This is the first in a series of posts adapted from the book Sooner Safer Happier addressing these different frameworks.