The challenge at the heart of agile or ways of working transformation would seem to be providing enough structure to prevent chaos and ensure consistency while simultaneously fostering the autonomy and self-organization necessary for true agility.
If we teach the mindset and some practice ideas then allow teams to iterate to good ways of working then we fear it may take too long to get to high-peforming teams. Worse, we can get far away from what we were trying to achieve pretty quickly through either simple atrophy or well-intentioned problem solving that errodes agility.
Alternatively we define and mandate ‘best practice’ processes. But then process becomes the master, the goal and we’ve lost our way. We’re moving away from the desired state of teams being self-determining and self-organizing in how they work.
We fail to get the benefits we were initially seeking in terms of speed, innovation, empowerment and, well, agility. We end up with teams unhappily going through the motions of agile practice with no real agility.
The art of the transformation is to artfully balance between these two extremes. In the early days, give the teams enough scaffolding of mindset and good practice but then support them in iterating their ways of working with deep knowledge of the desired mindset and a toolbox of practices.
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