"Agile in the Wild"

One reason that I started the podcast was to help folks understand how to improve their practice while working under compromised conditions in an agile environment.

It's what we call Agile in the Wild.

Many years ago, leadership gave a directive to their staff. It was simple: "Let's do agile"

Managers assembled their people, assigned roles, got their folks trained and certified and said "Start sprinting!".

The consequence was that accountability was left out of the actual roles that people assumed, they didn't understand how to connect behaviors to outcomes and only focused on managing the work the best they knew how. But it was happening in roles that had names only without fully understanding or adopting the spirit of agility.

Confusion set in because quality was tossed, "North Stars" were expected, and teams were "assembled" but nobody really knew the expectations. Mid-level managers didn't necessarily attend or adopt the training but expected "Sprinting" as the actual outcome.

"Sprinting" is part of the process. It's not the outcome.

Large agile implementations and roll outs have become less effective over time and that is why people say "Agile is dead".

Agile is not dead, nor is Lean Agile Development.

As I have regularly pointed out, there is a flow that provides work efforts to reach impact.

Input => Process => Output => Outcome => Impact

So the problem all along has been Input. We all know that dirty data in equals dirty data out.

As I said in a previous episode, Agile is a mirror. Scrum is a mirror. It's a mechanism for us to understand and check what we see, feel, touch, smell or taste.

Sure, we want to leverage all the good guidance that is available to us, but we have to practice the fundamentals of managing work and adopt values and principles first. Without that, we find ourselves in this never-ending cycle of producing outputs that others believe will reach goals.

The advancement of coaching and training has usually helped professionals achieve certification, but there was something missing. That missing link was helping people overcome the adversity from within the 'command and control' organization by practicing a 'lean toward progress' mindset.

Helping folks navigate and journey through agile in the wild is exactly what I help folks with by sharing thinking patterns that improve your practice of "Agile in the Wild".

I'd like to hear your stories and experiences from your journey through "Agile in the Wild"!

ScottyG