The Future of Management Has Already Arrived – Part III: The Agile Movement

by Rod Collins

 

In February 2001, seventeen software developers gathered in Snowbird, Utah to pool their collective intelligence and formulate a strategy for radically transforming the practice of software development. Among them were Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, the co-authors of what has come to be known as Scrum, and Ward Cunningham, the originator of the wiki, which became popularized with the explosive growth of Wikipedia. These software developers were convinced that there had to be a better way to do their work that would overcome the intrusive and unproductive constraints of traditional management practices. The result of their efforts was the crafting of the one-page Agile Manifesto and the birth of a management movement that, with the adoption of Agile management structures by such innovative companies as Twitter, Whole Foods, and, most recently, Zappos, now extends beyond the realm of software development.

 The Agile Manifesto is a set of four management principles that outline a better way to align organizational work around speed, innovation, and collaboration. These management principles provide a compass for making value choices among four sets of paradoxical values:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan.

In approaching each of these choices, the selection of one value does not imply the dismissal of the other, but rather a balance between the two values with a clear preference for the values on the left over those on the right. This compass is a significant departure from the traditional ways of managing that have long preferred the values on the right, sometimes to the exclusion of those on the left.

Agile management methodologies call for doing work in self-organized, cross-functional teams. These teams generally work in two-to-four week iterative phases with clear deliverables at the end of each phase. The interim deliverables are assessed in facilitated collaboration sessions to make sure the work continues to meet customer expectations and to incorporate any changes that may have emerged during that phase.

In Agile software development, the role of the manager is radically transformed. Rather than being the overseer or controller who is directing and manipulating all aspects of project development, the manager’s principle role is to coach the collective team and its individual members, to guide the group in reaching its own conclusions about the state of the project, and to facilitate effective discussions in the cross-functional collaboration sessions.

Since its inception in 2001, this management movement has produced extraordinary results in hundreds of companies around the globe under the labels Scrum and Agile. Nevertheless, the way Agile teams achieve their success has remained largely “under the radar” because software developers are often fairly isolated from the rest of their business colleagues and their MBA counterparts do usually not perceive engineers as “real managers.” Despite its extensive influence on the practice of software development, this highly effective management system has been hidden in plain sight.

For more fifty years, we have known that participative management is far superior to traditional legacy management. Beginning in the 1960s with Douglas McGregor’s identification of Theory X and Theory Y and with Abraham Maslow’s penetrating insights into the higher reaches of human nature, we have understood that when managers involve employees in defining the work to be done, the workers are more engaged in their efforts and more committed to performance. Unfortunately, this knowledge has had little real impact on organizations. While the interpersonal skills of business-school-trained managers have improved when compared to some of the Draconian practices of the mid-twentieth century, the involvement of workers by traditional executives has been limited to selective consultation. When it comes to implementing the insights of the human relations discipline spawned by McGregor and Maslow, management’s accommodations have been far more about style than substance.

Nevertheless, with the company-wide adoption of Agile management methods by Twitter, Whole Foods, and Zappos, it is clear that substantive change is coming to management, and it’s not coming from the insights of the psychologists or the organizational specialists, but rather from the innovative practices of engineers. The Agile Manifesto was written by software engineers. It was engineers who created the wiki and founded Google. And it was an engineer who, in 1958, created W.L. Gore and Associates—a company clearly ahead of its time—in which there are no supervisors, and which has, over its fifty plus years, made a profit in every year as it has grown to become a $3 billion business with 9,500 associates in 30 counties around the world. The psychologists and sociologists may have provided the insights, but it’s the engineers who have found a better way to organize our work.

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).