Welcome to the ‘AGILE THEATHER CHAOS’ meeting!
This is a typical situation at a large corporation or government agency that is trying to ‘finish doing agile by EoY, to check the box and claim a victory’:
- Lots of conflicting priorities, between people that sit above teams and give teams marching orders. Everyone selfishly seeks their personal success and is locally optimized around their own, respective deliverables. “Agile and Scrum is not working for us” – they shout. In the middle of the table, there is a huge bag of bonus cash that everyone wants to get their hands on. The need to compete with each other, by far, exceeds the need to cooperate. This is what subjective monetary incentives do to people.
- People that are reluctant to take a responsibility for deliverables (“this is not my job” experts) express lots of strong opinions, some of which, ironically, prevail.
- People that have a mysterious title “Agile Lead” (what was wrong with Agile Coach?) are very frustrated with their own inability to lead or control anything. Many of them are “agile” + ex_old_role (e.g. PM, BA), awaiting, with fear, for the next wave of RIFs.
- Outside the Executive Board Room, there are @GEMBA people, watching what is going on, in fear and confusion. They are not allowed to sit at the table, unfortunately. Suddenly, a product owner “flies in”, in distress and frustration, and tries to explain to everyone that things that everyone has “on paper” around the table, just do not add up at a team level.
- The *Operating Model* expert is zoomed out. He realizes that his home-grown sophisticated scaling methodology (suspiciously resembling its commercial relative) is not helping.
- The CEO is fuming. None of the local priorities, of other “agile theater players”, add up to his own strategic priorities. He has no idea what he is going to say to his company’s Board of Executives and stockholders next week.
Agile was “perfectly executed”, according to the script. What went wrong?
In just a few lines and one image, you’ve captured the chaotic status of many companies! The root of this mess? It all boils down to your first sentence: ‘people that sit above teams and give teams marching orders.’
This perfectly illustrates our reality, leaders believing they need to play the role of the ‘Order Givers,’ while team members sit back, waiting for their next command. Meanwhile, only a handful are actually pondering what our customers truly need!
It’s like we’re all waiting for the next Machiavellian prince to lead us out of the chaos… where’s the fun in that? Let’s break free from the royal decree and start thinking for ourselves!