The Summer Series - Episode 1: State of Agility 2020: What community members say about State of Agile?

Since we have reached the summertime and we all deserve a dose of rest, relaxation and the associated uncontrollable wave of retrospective thoughts while our minds are wandering, I decided to offer you the resonate's Summer Series that is meant to be series of lightweight reflections on what we do on daily basis. Please enjoy with proper mental distance and hopefully a glass of Chardonnay in your hand.

Episode 1: What community members say about State of Agile?

When I started thinking about the year 2019 as of the last year of a decade and as such a natural time for a decade worth retrospective of Agile movement I started asking members of Agile Community about their personal reflection. There is lots of people who spent 10+, 20+ years pioneering in Agility and introducing it into organizations, so the experience we have accumulated is huge and throughout. As you will see in the below my subjective set of collected opinions, I found a wide set of reflections, starting from complete satisfaction and enjoying the comfort of the comfort zone, through moderate optimism to lighter or heavier frustration. As you can imagine those who were satisfied were not very creative in thinking about necessary improvements for the next decade of 2020s. On the other hand those who felt moderate optimism or were frustrated were actively contemplating the ways and opportunities to improve. Only a hungry artist is credible the proverb says. What I also observed is that the global Agile Community is, of course one may say, not free from confirmation bias and group bias and not any better in being able to building the objective perspective than any other group, say the poor waterfall guys at the dawn of "The Age of Agile". After all, we are all contained within the same system of evangelism for Agility. Yet, I must admit, I did not expect that much of self-satisfaction and in general that much of symptoms of the Warren Buffet's ABC of business decay (Arrogance, Bureaucracy and Complacency). And what is coaching about in the first place if not about the ability to transcend the barriers of the self. So I keep smiling to myself about this discovery and to my naivety that the global community of coaches can do better when it comes to fighting human built-in biases :) 

Anyway, The most interesting voices in my opinion, came from the practitioners, who spend their career plowing through the rocky daily reality.

Personally, as long as I am quite doubtful about the ability of the generation of Agile fathers to evolve (since they are not very hungry anymore and in fact became the dominating predators of The Age of Agile), I am very optimistic and pleased to see all the novel thinking and feeling arising in the younger generation of leaders empathizing with concepts beyond Agility. Clearly we have had enough time and learnt the strengths and limitations of Agility in practice and we know that both exist.

So I leave you to it - a non-representative, subjective sample of opinions on the State of Agility I collected between 2019-2020 during various Agile events and on social networks. My questions had a form of a typical retrospective questions in the context of the decade of 2010s: How would you compare the Agile world 10 years ago and at present? What has changed systematically? What do you think about this direction? Is the direction good? How close it is to your heart? What you would do differently? What are the obstacles to Agile adoption? What will be the systemic change in 2020s?

Enjoy and share your perspective!

p.s. This blogpost belongs to a series of blogposts under the title Tthe State of Agile on the evolution of workplace and future of work. The related blogposts I shared earlier on the topic are:

• Workplace 2020s - the current state and the aspiration for 2020s
• Aspirational vs Effective Influence of Agile community
• Obstacles of Agile Adoption and Aspiration for 2020s

The Davos Manifesto 2020 - spreading the good word and the original article

The original article is published here, I am copying it just to have a copy for myself really, so that I do not have to keep track of what happens to the original. My understanding is that the article can be copied under CC SA+BY+NC licence.

Davos Manifesto 2020: The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, by Klaus Schwab.

A. The purpose of a company is to engage all its stakeholders in shared and sustained value creation. In creating such value, a company serves not only its shareholders, but all its stakeholders – employees, customers, suppliers, local communities and society at large. The best way to understand and harmonize the divergent interests of all stakeholders is through a shared commitment to policies and decisions that strengthen the long-term prosperity of a company.

i. A company serves its customers by providing a value proposition that best meets their needs. It accepts and supports fair competition and a level playing field. It has zero tolerance for corruption. It keeps the digital ecosystem in which it operates reliable and trustworthy. It makes customers fully aware of the functionality of its products and services, including adverse implications or negative externalities.

ii. A company treats its people with dignity and respect. It honours diversity and strives for continuous improvements in working conditions and employee well-being. In a world of rapid change, a company fosters continued employability through ongoing upskilling and reskilling.

iii. A company considers its suppliers as true partners in value creation. It provides a fair chance to new market entrants. It integrates respect for human rights into the entire supply chain.

iv. A company serves society at large through its activities, supports the communities in which it works, and pays its fair share of taxes. It ensures the safe, ethical and efficient use of data. It acts as a steward of the environmental and material universe for future generations. It consciously protects our biosphere and champions a circular, shared and regenerative economy. It continuously expands the frontiers of knowledge, innovation and technology to improve people’s well-being.

v. A company provides its shareholders with a return on investment that takes into account the incurred entrepreneurial risks and the need for continuous innovation and sustained investments. It responsibly manages near-term, medium-term and long-term value creation in pursuit of sustainable shareholder returns that do not sacrifice the future for the present.

B. A company is more than an economic unit generating wealth. It fulfils human and societal aspirations as part of the broader social system. Performance must be measured not only on the return to shareholders, but also on how it achieves its environmental, social and good governance objectives. Executive remuneration should reflect stakeholder responsibility.

C. A company that has a multinational scope of activities not only serves all those stakeholders who are directly engaged, but acts itself as a stakeholder – together with governments and civil society – of our global future. Corporate global citizenship requires a company to harness its core competencies, its entrepreneurship, skills and relevant resources in collaborative efforts with other companies and stakeholders to improve the state of the world.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with our Terms of Use.

Written by

Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

State of Agility 2020: Effective vs Aspirational Zone of Influence of Agile Community at the dawn of 2020s

I am going to start this blog post by repeating how I started of my blog post back in April on the Obstacles to Agile adoption and Aspirations for 2020s: 

Instead of "doing" more Agile transformations and expecting to see different outcomes, get out of the hamster wheel and allow yourself for a deeper reflection. This reflection of mine on the Obstacles of Agile adoption and Aspiration for 2020s is an invitation to Inspect & Adapt the decade of 2010s, build on it and move forward in 2020s.

Staying in the above context, today I am sharing another 1000s words worth image that basically says: Hey, Agile Community, it is time to reflect as we have been investing our efforts sub-optimally and have been missing out a lot of unexplored potential for a bigger change in the dominating style of ways of working of today's companies. 

I initially planned to write a longer article about the situation and how the Agile Community actually engages in organisational transformations, what value we generate and what can be improved. Well, after sketching the below image I think there is no more need for writing anything more - the image is pretty clear where we are at the dawn of 2020s...

Scary? Challenging? Motivating? Join me in creating a more influential future!  

 

The Effective Work Environment framework v2.0 is publicly available!

The Effective Work Environment framework that I have been using since 2014 is now published on our website. I decided to publish The EWE under the Creative Commons license (BY+NC+SA) for your voluntary feedback and contribution. Feel invited to try it out and help me improve it! My intention is for the EWE to become a living documentary of the evolving image of the current landscape of companies. Let me know your experience with it.

The Effective Work Environment framework - The EWE, is a visualisation and a breakdown of all the aspects of the current landscape that companies exist in. As a result it defines how we, resonate, have been engaging in the transformation efforts. It helps us sense where a company is at the moment, its strengths and unmet needs, and start eliminating the gap between the aspirations and the current state. 

More information on the EWE Homepage.

Minibook: The landscape of Enterprise Agile transformations

Hey, this time I feel really proud - I have published a bigger piece the enterprise Agile transformations! It is a minibook really, so I do not want to put it here as a blogpost - it would be killing long to scroll down :) Instead please find it in the Resource library of the resonate website.

This minibook is the second of three pieces I have planned in a trilogy on Agile. The first one is The Evolution of workplace and Future of Work.

Brief

There is an ongoing discussion in the Agile community about the Spotify model and the rationale for copying it. The discussion goes as far as saying: “There is no Spotify model, there is only the snapshot Spotify culture”. This statement seems to have become the fragile consensus and the equilibrium state for many Agilists. In parallel, there also exists physical evidence that the entity called the “Spotify model” exists. Starting off from this widely known motif I share my personal experience with Enterprise Agile Transformations. 

Price

If you are willing to support me financially you can also buy the book online. Or you can decide after reading :) 

Feedback

Anyway, let me know what do you think as it is fuel for me to share more.

My "virtual interview" with Dave Snowden

Earlier on this week, Gene Gendel kindly offered an open session with Dave Snowden with an opportunity to ask questions upfront. So I asked my three questions. And David spent a section of his session on answering those. I wish I could provide even more context to David, so that he understood fully where I was coming from, yet still the answers I got are enough food for thought to at least start a good discussion.

Here go my questions:

What systemic change can you predict in the ways of working in the decade of 2020s (after agile delivery, product & customer focus, business agility in 3rd millenium so far) ?

The one thing you can say is that there will be more fads. There seems to be this desire for some sort of a universal recipe to come out every two or three years which everybody picks up on. I think what some of us are hoping is that complexity... remember like Systems Thinking replaced Scientific Management in the 80s, we can see some evidence that Complexity Theory is now replacing Systems Thinking.

And by the way, I had a great privilege of teaching leadership with Peter Drucker on a series of executive seminars and one of the things we agreed on is that Complexity Theory and Scientific Management have a lot in common, and they both disagree with systems thinking. People condemned Scientific Management, but actually it empowered human beings to use their judgement. Scientific Management automated what could be automated but then it looked at apprentice models and lifetime employment for managers and supervisors [in which?] it recognised the need for human judgement. What Systems Thinking is being consistently trying to do since the 80s is to actually remove human judgement and reduce it to a series of spreadsheets and processes. 

And that by the way is the disastrous aspect of Holocracy. I mean Holocracy is a program written by somebody who does not want the responsibility of making management decisions and if you ever saw the need for management decisions going to the current crisis as a point where you have to do things differently. 

So in terms of predicting what will happen I am not sure. I mean I think virtual working has become easier but it is also creating more stress. For example if you spend too much time in Zoom, you are getting visual stimulation but the brain and the body aren't picking up chemical signals which they normally expect in a physical meeting so the stress levels go up. 

(...) I think it is going to be a mirage of different things as we come through. 

I think the attempt to move software development methods into business practice is doomed to fail. It will work for marketing and HR which has so short lifecycle projects, but the idea you can use Agile methods in strategy could only be devised by somebody who has never been in corporate strategy. And I have yet to find any of the people who advocated to spend any time in corporate strategy whatsoever, which is deeply political in its nature - it is not short-cycle like [method?] development.

There was a really bad paper which came out lately which said all the big tech giants were Agile and therefore they had succeeded whereas the other guys weren't Agile so they failed. And that is another example of retrospective coherence. There reality is that the big tech giants were the first into their markets, so they were apex predators. And an apex predator survives no matter how incompetent they are until the market conditions shift again. So there are massive inefficiencies in Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, it is just that they dominate their spaces so you do not notice the inefficiencies and this habit of trying to fit success into whatever your framework is, it's got to stop. If somebody adopted Agile consciously and then reported success I would believe it, but saying "this company was successful and I re-describe them as if they were Agile - that's [snake on sale?]". So I don't buy that.

How humanity should handle the "technical debt" of our civilization? i.e. unsustainability of the global ecosystem (extinction of species, climate change, exploit of resources, growth of population) and of human condition (life - work disintegration, mental condition,etc).

We are not going to do it without at least partial extinction. Let's get real on it. The global warming is serious and the major economic power in the world is not taking it seriously. And there is no way, I mean COVID is just a minor to what is probably going to come in my lifetime. I used to worry about my grand children, then I worried about my children and now I am worried about me, and I am 66. We are going to see catastrophic failures of the ecosystem which will make COVID what it actually is which is a chance to get it right for the worst thing coming. And I think that is what we have got to be careful to be honest - I mean we will survive as species, but what survives becomes key. So the technical debt is going to be recovered catastrophically. It does not mean that something good can come out of it. 

What is your view on the evolution model of the Spiral Dynamics, Clare Graves, Don Beck ? Is the business world / society model ever to become "Teal"?

This is one of the worst books ever published by the Agile movement. The other one is Lean Startup. Lean Startup and Reinventing Organizations are both by cult-like figures. They are both based on completely inaccurate use of cases. Lean Startup goes and studies a bunch of successful companies, identifies the things they did in common, and says "If you do these things you too will be successful". He did not study companies who failed. We did that when I was at IBM with Dorothy Lenner at Harvard. And we found that all companies that failed did exactly the same things as the companies that succeeded. What you have got is a market with high amount of entrepreneurs so some are bound to succeed. So it is not that his advice is bad, but it is not going to cause a relationship. The second, but the worse one is Reinventing Organizations. It is even worse because where you have got a guy with religious ideology who only reports the aspects of the cases supporting the ideology. He reports on use of Holocracy at Zappos and kind of like casually mentions, but does not really emphasize the fact that huge amount of people who were fired. He reports on self-organizing communities, but every single one he does was draconianly imposed by a centralised manager. It did not emerge naturally. So he is highly selective on the cases. He is also involved in this evolution model. I feel really sorry for Claire Graves. Spiral Dynamics originally evolved as an explanation of how societies progress, if you go back to the original theory. And it is very Western, liberal culturally specific view of the historical progress. It is neo-colonial in its nature. If you buy into this particular view of history, it is very good description of history: it talks about the stages you go through. You cannot take a framework designed to handle large movements in history and apply it to individuals or organizations. It does not move across. It also has the implication than the higher levels are better then the lower levels. I remember about having an argument about it with Beck at a conference, and I remember him saying "you do not understand my arguments because I am torquoise and you are just an angry blue or angry green" or something. And it is a classic: "I am in the elite so I do not have to account for myself". That is how cults work. Wilber is particularly bad at this - he does not tolerate dissent. I remember having badges made which had proud to have brown on them. And the next day I got accused of "why are you doing this - brown is not one of the Spiral Dynamics color". And I said "Well, that's exactly the point". The idea you go through this linear progression is just a very bad framework. And self-organization is something that only happens within constrains and it is only appropriate within certain contexts, and it is not a universal goal or achievement. I do not know of any examples quoted in this book where you could not tear his conclusions apart if you did just two days of ethnography in the organizations. The cases do not back up the theory in practice. And I will make this general point, and sorry to people in the Kanban movement and everything else: hierarchical models of maturity are very dangerous in a complex system, because they instantiate past practice, they do not actually enable new practice. And they focus people on achieving what was retrospectively seen to be good rather than what may be good in a more uncertain future, and so they only work in an ordered system. 

I strongly recommend watching the full webinar here as Dave touches on many interesting aspects. 

Evolution of workplace & Future of Work map assets made public

We have decided to publish the map under the Creative Commons license (BY+NC+SA) and open the map for your voluntary contribution. Our intention is for the map to become a living documentary of the evolving workplace. Let us know your experience with it. More information here.

Stakeholder capitalism and Conscious Capitalism

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

"Capitalism, as we know, it is dead. We’re going to see a new kind of capitalism—and it won't be the Milton Friedman capitalism, that is just about making money. The new capitalism is that businesses are here to serve their shareholders, but also their stakeholders — employees, customers, public schools, homeless and the planet." 

Marc Benioff,Chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce

New mental models of capitalism

All you dreamers out there - you need to be aware of this!

There are two new trends when it comes to the mental model of capitalism: Stakeholder Capitalism and Conscious Capitalism. I am currently not sure these are just two different names used for the same idea or sibling ideas. However both seem to be very similar and going in a direction that I personally would like to change the world!

Stakeholder capitalism is a system in which corporations are oriented to serve the interests of all their stakeholders. Among the key stakeholders are customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders and local communities. Under this system, a company's purpose is to create long-term value and not to maximize profits and enhance shareholder value at the cost of other stakeholder groups.

Conscious Capitalism is a philosophy stating that businesses should serve all principal stakeholders, including the environment. It does not minimize profit-seeking but encourages the assimilation of all common interests into the company's business plan.
I am delighted that these ideas are discussed both in the World Economic Forum in Davos 2020 and the Business Roundtable 2019. 

What do I think of these ideas? 

Well, first of all they both seem to be emerging concepts at the moment, with many question marks and space for fleshing them out more precisely. However, even in the current shape they constitute significant sign that the dominating mindset set by Milton Friedman back in 1970s has been challenged. At least by a fraction of the business world. 

On the other hand, the obvious shortcoming I can see when reading about these new ideas is that they do not say anything about 1) the structure and 2) the principles of shareholding. I believe that the new capitalism needs to, and will change the principles of who can become shareholder of a company. Shareholders as they are now: being arbitrary, random people and/or institutions looking for profit / Return of Investment, with extremely limited interest in what actually a company does, how it does it, and why, will simply be creating friction, if not be contradictory, to the new mental model of business.

Secondly, both ideas assume that the financial dimension and the notion of shareholding will still be in place when it comes to purpose of business. I guess this is a safe assumption for the next step in the evolution of capitalism since we assume evolutionary change. However I prefer to leave this gate open in long term, as it may turn out that the new mental model of capitalism, or business, or any kind of societal life of the future will need to challenge and replace this assumption. Getting to this stage seems to be a song of far away future now, however it is worth managing expectations straight away and framing it properly from the very beginning: none of the current assumptions and principles of capitalism is written in stone and unchangeable.


p.s. As a result of this finding I have updated my Evolution of work chart to contain both the Stakeholder Capitalism and the Conscious Capitalism as sub-entities contributing to emergence of "Companies as good citizens of the world" entity in the evolution.

Evolving to become truly yourself

We are all chasing for a meaningful life and becoming truly ourselves is a cornerstone of this effort. How many times have you found yourself in a situation where you felt that, in spite of your knowledge, experience, positive emotions and dedication, you could not achieve the impact you envisaged as possible and desired? Such moments are crucial for many reasons, including opportunity to reflect & retrospect, but most importantly, in the context of this article, such moments are crucial because they define who you become. Or even more precisely: the way you handle such situations are crucial to who you become.

Immediate behaviors

Let's see how the action flows in such situations. If you decide to frame such a situation in your mind as a case of hitting your head against a wall then your reaction can be twofold: you can either (1) become aggressive or you can (2) become passive. Such framing results in a limited set of options at hand: you quit, you decide to start over again or you accept the reality at the cost of becoming numb. No need to say that in all these options you are far from where you would like to be. Becoming aggressive means that you decide to fight for your point of view and opinions and let your frustration out even at a cost of sacrificing your relations. Then you have even more reason to quit. If you still believe your opinions will bring good, you start over again, investing even more energy to make things right this time. However the wall is still there and this particular reaction archetype will push you in the same framing: as a result the archetypes will loop you back to the same options: quit, start again or become numb. After so many attempts you are drained of energy, see no hope to change anything and either you quit or become numb. There is a probability that even when you start in a new place, the pattern will repeat itself. Aggressiveness and passiveness are the two archetypes of immediate reactions that our minds inherited from predecessors. These are both automatic reactions originating from the level of the automatic mind.

Situational Awareness

Now imagine that your situational self-awareness enables you find another alternative - you (3) act assertively. Assertiveness prevents you from burning out personally and lets you keep your relations in a good working condition. This is possible thanks to a skill to take time for a reflection. And a reflection lets you look at the situation in separation from the "I" perspective. You can actually look at the situation from multiple perspectives - you are now a cold-blooded external observer. You keep the archetypal behaviors under control and can have more objective, or at least less biased, view of the situation and choose your options consciously.

So what do you see detached from your own "I" perspective? You see an individual embedded in the Current Reality while dreaming of being embedded in the Ideal Reality and being stretched by the forces of tension in the Expectation Gap between these two realities. The individual can behave twofold: (1) s/he can be trying to get Current Reality closer to Ideal Reality, or (2) s/he can be leaning towards accepting the Current Reality. There are two currents in the Expectation Gap one can ride. The Creative Tension current that through Learning leads you to Meaning and helps you pull the Current Reality up closer to the Ideal Reality. You need psychological safety and allies to keep paddling in this current. And there is the Destructive Tension current that through Declining leads you to Numbness and keeps you imprisoned in the Current Reality. In the end the destructive current makes you accept the Current Reality, whatever it is, as your only reality. How quickly you drift there depends on the level of fear and isolation you are exposed to.

Reflection

How do you like this perspective? I do like the perspective a lot, because such framing shows that it is my decisions that create myself. This is where personal responsibility is born. This is where courage is born. This also shows that Meaning is Responsibility not a Need! Now the Cartesian question "What will happen if I do not act on the situation?" becomes striking and thus, through a scary vision of the future based on not acting, motivating to act! Now, after building the objective perspective on the situation, we are ready to explore all the options.

Options

Decisions you make on this level of situational self-awareness are the decisions that create yourself. Options expand on the continuum starting from baby steps of Continuous Improvement and ending at the big bangs of Discontinuous Disruption. The continuous improvement builds on the last stable state to transition to a new stable state adjacent to the previous one. Where continuous evolution is insufficient, discontinuous disruption can take a system further away from the current state helping to surpass being stuck in the local optimum and keep evolving further to a state less related to the current state.

Decision making

Remember that the goal of decision making is to expand your influence on the Current Reality. You need to expand what is under your Control and what you Influence while limiting the part of the Current Reality that you can only passively Acknowledge.

And finally, to ensure the decisions you make are of high quality, you need to look closer at how your decision making approach looks like. We human question, challenge and adapt how we make decisions surprisingly rarely. It usually takes a completely changed environment that we need to adapt to even if we do not want to. No surprise that going through change is difficult as the decision making process is one of these automatic processes that one does not realize without additional attention and awareness. According to the Double Loop Learning the decision making can be adapted twofold: (1) by adapting the current mental model of the decision maker and / or (2) by adapting the decision making rules.

Encouragement

We are all chasing for a meaningful life and becoming truly ourselves is a cornerstone of this effort. You would not be who you are today without mentally stretching yourself and learning in difficult situations. Be good to yourself and be patient, give yourself time. It has always been a journey and it always will be. Keep the Cartesian question in mind: "What will happen if I do not act on the situation?" and catch the Creative Tension current!

Special thanks to @Saranya Jeganathan at superpptdesigns for creating the poster based on my manual sketch.

Atlassian CEO: An obligation to act: The new social contract of business

“Many companies focus only on the Return on Investment and delivering profit for shareholders. But times have changed. As business leaders we should listen to the views of the workforce; focusing on our impact on society delivers a return of its own. It’s now on us to respond” said Scott Farquhar, co-CEO and co-founder of Atlassian.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200309005313/en/