Of Hippos and Other Animals

I feel like I’ve been drowned in buzz words this week, since I attended two seminars on agile working methods and next week it will even continue in the “Scrum Master” course I’ll be taking.

So, two buzz words already, “agile” and “scrum”. (Scrum is an agile working method originally from software development that is spreading into other areas as well. The term comes from rugby, describing a big team effort to get hold of the ball again.)

All these methods are more or less desperate attempts to streamline our ways of working in order to be more effective or efficient depending on the philosophy behind it. There is a lot of talk that you need “self-organized” teams in order to survive in the VUCA world, with VUCA standing for “volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous” that our world has become since maybe the Financial Crisis of 2008 and 2009 (or did it start earlier? – maybe). VUCA is of course another buzz word and companies are looking for the holy grail of answers how to survive in our “volatile” market environment.

The best term I came across this week is Hippo – “highest paid person opinion”. Oh yeah! We got a lot of that in big organizations. The Hippo has the most weight (very befitting, isn’t it) and sits there fat and big in the middle of the organization. You can’t move it easily, but once it runs, it can trample you to bits. Even though its “solutions” might be wrong, there’s nothing much you can do about the power of the Hippo. Because of Hippos we are firefighting, break out into whatever “initiatives”, have to drop other tasks, since the Hippo suddenly prioritizes differently…

Yes, Hippos can be a mess, but there is another mess, which I think is even worse. Many people desire Hippos, because the Hippo sometimes also has to take the fall. They say that in every organization of a certain size there are roughly 20% achievers (engaged people) 60% followers (not engaged people) and 20% blockers (actively disengaged people (I just love that term)). The 20% achievers are of course often Hippos. The problem with the 60% followers is that they often don’t want to be responsible for anything, they don’t want to be “empowered” to use another buzz word. They want to be told what to do, to follow orders and to be able to lean back and say, oh, it wasn’t me, I’m not responsible…

So, in big organizations being “agile” has its limits in my humble opinion. You can be agile, networked, empowered and what not in a small startup environment that consists of mostly achievers, but in big companies you’ll always have the drag of the 60% followers, not to even speak of the 20% blockers who you’d like to fire.

I wish all of us big company members good luck with being agile. And, always beware of the Hippos!