FOREWORD
All models are wrong but some are useful
—George Box, 1978
You are special; you are a beautiful and unique snowflake. So are your family, your friends, your communities, your team, your peers, your colleagues, your business area, your organization. No other organization has the same collections of people, the same behavioral norms, the same processes, the same current state, the same impediments, the same customers, the same brand, the same values, the same history, the same folklore, the same identity, the same “this is the way we do things round here,” as yours does.
Your organization's behavior is emergent. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, the whole has unique properties that the individuals don't have. Acting in the space, changes the space. Individual and collective behaviors mutate and self-organize on a change-initiating event. Interventions are irreversible, like adding milk to coffee. The system changes. People don't forget what happened and what the outcome was. The system learns. Next time, the response to the change event will be different, either for the better or for the worse, reflecting what happened last time and based on incentivization. Not only are your contexts unique, they are constantly changing and changing how they change.
With this uniqueness, emergence, and adaptation, it is not possible to have one set of practices which will optimize outcomes for every context. One set of practices might improve outcomes for one context at one point in time. Over time, as the system changes with new impediments and new enablers, it will no longer be optimal. One size does not fit all. There is no snake oil to cure all ills. Your organization has tens, hundreds, or thousands of contexts within contexts, each one unique. Applying one size fits all across many contexts may raise some boats; however, it will sink other boats and hold back many more boats from rising.
How practices are adopted is also important, not only what the practices are. For lasting improvement and to apply an agile mindset to agility, the locus of control needs to be internal. People need to have autonomy and empowerment within guardrails to be able to experiment in order to improve on desired outcomes. High alignment and high autonomy are both needed. Not an imposition top down, which is disempowering, with the locus of control being external. With imposition, people will not take responsibility for what happens, and will knowingly do things which are detrimental, a behavior known as agentic state.
Disciplined Agile (DA) is designed to cater to these realities, the characteristics of uniqueness, emergence, and adaption. Disciplined Agile provides guardrails, guidance, and enterprise awareness. It is unique in this regard. It provides a common vocabulary, minimal viable guardrails, which in turn enables empowerment and autonomy for teams and teams of teams to improve on their outcomes how they see fit, with an internal locus of control. Not everyone should follow a mandated, synchronized, iteration-based approach, for example. In my experience, in a large organization with more than one context, synchronized iterations suit one context (e.g., many teams on one product with a low level of mastery and with dependencies which have not been removed or alleviated) and do not suit 99 other contexts. It is not applying an agile mindset to agility. Some business areas are better off adopting a Kanban approach from the beginning, especially if there is a pathological culture where messengers are shot. Evolution over revolution stands a chance of progress. Revolution will struggle; with a lack of psychological safety, the antibodies will be strong. Some business areas, with people who have been working this way in islands of agility for 20+ years and with psychological safety, may choose to take a more revolutionary approach, as the soil is more fertile, people are more willing, and failed experiments are viewed positively.
Disciplined Agile enables a heterogeneous, not homogeneous, approach across diverse, complex organizations. It includes principles of “Choice is Good,” “Context Counts,” and “Enterprise Awareness.” It enables the discipline that organizations need, while not forcing round pegs into square holes. It provides a common vocabulary and, with the process goals, it provides options to consider in your unique context with varying levels of mastery. This requires people to think rather than follow orders, to take ownership and experiment to achieve specific outcomes, not pursue agile for agile's sake. This is harder than following prescription or following a diktat, it requires servant leadership and coaching, in the same way as learning to drive, ski, play a musical instrument, or play in an orchestra or a team sport. As one size does not fit all, as there is no prescription (for example, it is a fallacy to copy “the Spotify Model” firm-wide, which even Spotify® says is not the Spotify Model), this context-sensitive, invitation-over-imposition approach leads to better outcomes and is more likely to stick, as it has come from within, the locus of control is internal, and it is owned. There is no one else to blame and no one artificially keeping the elastic band stretched. It starts to build a muscle of continuous improvement.
Within Disciplined Agile, if teams choose to adopt Scrum; a Scrum-scaled pattern such as LeSS, SAFe®, Nexus®, or Scrum at Scale; or adopt an evolutionary pull-based, limited work-in-progress approach, with a view that it will optimize outcomes in their unique context, they are free to do so. #allframeworks, not #noframeworks or #oneframework. Across an organization, DA provides the minimal viable commonality as well as guidance, which is needed for anything other than the simplest of firms.
The job you are hiring Disciplined Agile to do is to enable context-sensitive, heterogeneous approaches to agility, which will maximize outcomes organization-wide. As with everything, treat it as a departure point, not a destination. As your organization-wide level of mastery increases, keep on inspecting and adapting. This book is an indispensable guide for those looking to optimize ways of working in heterogeneous organizations.
Jonathan Smart @jonsmart
Enterprise Agility Lead, Deloitte
Former Head of Ways of Working, Barclays