When President Barack Obama visited China, one of the things he did was go to the attraction that is the Great Wall. Its building is credited to the Qing Dynasty in 221 BC, but the reality is that it was constructed in phases, including during the Ming era in the 14th century, to keep out the Mongolian tribes who had been fighting the Empire endlessly. This prompted Reginald Love, his special assistant and personal aide, commonly referred to as body man, to ask how the Ming dynasty finally ended. “Internal strife, power struggles, corruption, peasants starving because the rich got greedy or just didn’t care…”
“So, the usual,” Reggie said.
“The usual.” President Obama nodded.
A Promised Land – Barrack Obama
The Great Wall was able to keep out invaders, but it is the internal jealousies that brought down the Ming Dynasty. In a society stratified on class, it is the personal habits of individuals that form the weakest link. Human beings bring their impulsiveness to every interaction—the degree of which varies by self-awareness or the lack of it. In a corporate set up the same is true.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wall_of_China
I am a strong proponent of Agile as an organizational culture, especially for companies that deliver IT products. ‘Agile’ is a framework that enables an organization to customize its Methodology. An organization can adopt the use of SCRUM, which is one of the most adopted Methodologies within ‘Agile’ to deliver customer-focused goals.
Source: SCRUM.org
Without getting too technical, ‘Agile’ ensures that resources are available equitably to all within the organization as compared to the hierarchical approach where resource people on a project have to be borrowed from a Head of Department. Now, various situational and implicit aspects of the organizational culture come into play.
Where departmental Heads don’t get along, for instance, the personnel or the project will suffer due to territorial, silo, or cartel-like demarcations. It is commonplace for departments to be territorial in a hierarchy-based organization for various reasons ranging from the personalities of the personnel in the organization or department and in most cases the personality of the departmental head which the underlings quickly pick on and either adapt to it or project it in their interactions with colleagues within and beyond the organization.
In ‘Agile’, projects may be ranked and approved by the Executive Team and Board based on their strategic benefits to the organization. Resources are listed ( for example, people and finances) then teams and ‘tribes’ are formed based on the listed projects. Individuals could apply to join the ‘tribes’ or teams or they could be onboarded based on a system that identifies their skills and availability (not tied up to many projects). Where resource people are missing due to skill levels or are tied up in projects longer than the due date for a scheduled task, external personnel can be brought in for the project, and upon completion, they exit. It has H.R. benefits.
To manage the projects, schedule personnel, and other multiple sub-projects within a unitary one, manage conflicting resource utilizations or allocations and ensure archiving of lessons learned, maintain the organizational standards for projects while keeping within the corporate culture enablers– a Project Management Office (PMO) should be in place.
‘Agile’ would do away with negative stakeholder influence especially where a particular stakeholder can bring their voting power down on Management and Operational levels at crucial points during implementation. Such stakeholders usually rely on the chain of command (Hierarchical systems) to tilt some things a certain way. It is difficult to introduce such stakeholder influence on an aspect of a project using ‘Agile’ without collapsing the whole project or multiple subprojects compared to the traditional mode where a simple decree from the HoD or CEO can alter Operations through a memo.
That said, deploying ‘Agile’ in an existing organization is no mean feat. It is much easier for an organization to adopt ‘Agile’ at birth than to do so after years of being in business. By its nature, ‘Agile’ spotlights individual efforts on a project or multiple projects, making it difficult for specialists in corporate politics to hide behind team effort. Such traits will be the biggest impediment during the implementation process. Studies by the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and others show that although the intelligence of individuals affects team performance, the team’s collective intelligence is even more important. An individual who brings down the collective intelligence of a ‘tribe’ or team for example will likely be shunned in subsequent formations.
It is important to note that ‘Intelligence’ has various composites like social intelligence, emotional intelligence, and even spiritual intelligence.
There must be a significant effort from the top executives to make ‘Agile’ a success. The top executives may likely be accustomed to a hierarchical structure that ascribes power to the silos they are used to controlling while ‘Agile’ focuses situational power to the team or tribe delivering a composite of a pre-approved project. This power shifts from periods ranging from a few hours to a few months but is never domiciled in one individual or team for as long as they are perched on the hierarchy. Buy-in is important but not necessary. The desire to deliver the ‘Agile’ culture must be demonstrated through a proactive process of eliminating cross-functional challenges, otherwise, the same top executives will deploy torpedoes in a bid to sink or disable the ship as they seek to abandon it so that their record at the helm becomes their saving grace and no other.
Alternatively, their efforts may be intended to stymie the Nautilus. For example, it is beneficial for the finance department to have a detailed understanding of the team’s plans and introduce financial systems that conform to an ‘Agile’ culture even when the finance team will be working in the traditional structure.
There is also the need for a focus on ‘outcomes’ as opposed to ‘output’. Output is always quantitative. Outcomes are both qualitative (for example an unsolicited tweet from a happy customer) and quantitative (ratings from happy customers on the organization’s feedback portal). It is possible then for personnel to influence positive ratings where the top executives see their dashboards lighting green but in the public sphere, the comments are less than flattering, and details of poor service are widely circulated creating the ‘watermelon effect’,– green on the outside but upon peeling the layer, a deep core of red is soon revealed. Shareholders usually receive reports of output in the form of dividends and rarely pay attention to the Corporate culture, which is a composite of outcomes, until it starts affecting their dividends. More on the composite aspects of Corporate culture in a future article.
In deploying ‘Agile’ a more customer-centric approach is needed. This calls for more channels to receive customer feedback and log them for action as compared to what many organizations are accustomed to– ignoring feedback that does not readily fall into the categories outlined in their feedback manuals.
Many organizations have adopted an adversarial stance towards customer feedback, believing the majority of customers to be serial complainants and those who air their grievances online as ‘trolls”. It is common to see corporate online accounts responding to what they perceive to be trolls with debasing or intemperate replies.
Psychologists have established that negativity bias is the phenomenon by which humans give more psychological weight to bad experiences than good ones. These will find their way to online forums and other public spaces more often than a good experience will. In adopting an ‘Agile’ culture, the teams must be open to this phenomenon and design their projects to capture such and address them iteratively until their occurrences are reduced or minimized. Using social media battalions to “clap back” at trolls takes away from efforts being spent to reduce negativity bias while ensuring a more meaningful engagement with customers.
An important aspect of ‘Agile’, from a customer perspective is that customer service ceases to be a department that responds to customer complaints and queries. Engineers will be required to engage with the users of their products and services to get to the problem quicker. You may have observed that the traditional, hierarchical model is replete with customer service tickets that take hours to be closed depending on the efficiency of the engineers and workload. Those who log the tickets are usually not the ones who receive the queries and in some cases, the description of the problem is not what the engineers understand to be the problem nor is the solution attributed to the problem hence creating the need for a new ticket and an unhappy client on the other end.
Some prominent companies that use ‘Agile’ include Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Spotify, Adobe, and AirBnB. Their products and services are well known and their corporate culture can be verified through videos and literature.
It takes a minimum of eighteen to twenty-four months for a company to complete ‘Agile’ transformation factoring planning, establishing performance baselines, increasing the risk-tolerance threshold as a culture, training teams, ‘tribes’, and personnel on the new roles, and implementing a change management program.
Bottomline, ‘Agile’ if implemented correctly, and there are steps to do it, can be very beneficial to an organization and its corporate culture going forward. It becomes the best defense against internal strife– unlike the Ming dynasty.