What the (Lean-)Agile scaling frameworks don’t always give you

[Minor edits 2020-12-11] 

Not a gratuitous provocation but putting it out there for review. The text below comes from the last chapter of the forthcoming 2nd edition of Agendashift; it’s a quick first draft (written today) and I want feedback! The chapter is new to the 2nd edition; it is titled Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation and the excerpt below comes at the end of a section called Scaling up.

What the (Lean-)Agile scaling frameworks don’t always give you

Not everything identified in this reconciliation exercise [between Agendashift and the Viable System Model (VSM)] is addressed well by the scaling frameworks. If you’re looking one of those as the basis of your Deliberately Adaptive Organisation or (somewhat equivalently) as a model of business agility, here are five things that you may need to attend to yourself.

1. Meaningful experimentation

A worthwhile proportion – perhaps even the majority – of your delivery capacity will need to be devoted to objective-aligned insight generation. There is nothing adaptive about ploughing through backlogs of requirements and hoping for a good outcome. Random experimentation isn’t adaptive either; whilst it flexes some important muscles and can be a useful source of innovation, unless the bulk of it is meaningfully aligned to shared objectives (and driven from them in a way that creates meaning for the people doing the work), it’s unlikely to take you very far.

2. Meaningful negotiation between levels based on trust and transparency

If you’re not careful, cascading hierarchies of objectives end up as backlogs of requirements to be ploughed through, and we know where that leads. Dressing it up in Agile terms – saga, epic, feature, story, etc – doesn’t change that.

Remember that what’s asked for, what’s needed, what’s possible, and what’s sensible are four different things. Moreover, each [organisational / VSM] layer will have its own language, its own way of looking at things, and its own measures of success, and it’s not helpful when one layer projects (or worse, imposes) theirs onto another. Instead: trust-building transparency, then mutual understanding, then alignment.

3. Containers for multi-level, multi-loop learning

I’m referring of course to your framework’s equivalent of the Outside-in Service Delivery Review (OI-SDR) and VSM system 4 more generally. How does your framework help you build and evolve shared models of the system and the world outside? How do you monitor progress towards objectives? How strong are the expectations of learning that it creates? How does it ensure that intelligence and insights are shared quickly across the organisation?

4. Meaningful participation in strategy

Let me say it again: It’s a funny kind of autonomy when strategy is something that happens to you. Now let me add that it’s a funny kind of adaptive strategy if it doesn’t know how to listen. What we have here are two organisational antipatterns that Agile – scaled or otherwise – has done little to address. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect that it would, but when it is sold as an organisational model, some scepticism is in order.

5. Meaningful self-organisation at every scale

Not just who does what (better described as self-management), but self-organisation of a more structural kind:  who collaborates with whom, at whatever scale, and with what implications for future organisation. How do you 1) encourage that to happen, and 2) ensure that it’s done well?

How well does your scaled (Lean-)Agile implementation demonstrate those five things? If the answer is “not very” or “not at all”, well you know what to do! And if you’re thinking of embarking on a framework-based scaling initiative, I would suggest that it may pay to attend these issues first. You’ll then be in a much better position both to understand what the frameworks might have to offer and to make whatever further changes seem necessary.

Related:

What I really think about Scrum (August 2020)
What I really think about SAFe (October 2019)
Right to Left works for Scrum too (July 2018)


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