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Lean-Agile Mindset
“In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.”
—Dr. Carol S. Dweck, Author and Stanford psychology professor
The Lean-Agile mindset is the combination of beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and actions of leaders and practitioners who embrace the concepts of the Agile Manifesto and Lean thinking and apply it in their daily lives.
This mindset provides the foundation for adopting and applying Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) principles and practices, as well as an enhanced company culture that enables business agility. It offers leadership the tools needed to support a successful transformation, helping individuals and the entire enterprise achieve their goals.
Mindset Awareness and Openness to Change
A mindset is the mental lens through which we see and interpret the world. It’s how the human mind simplifies, categorizes, and makes sense of the vast amount of information it receives each day.
Dr. Dweck’s quote reminds us that our mindsets are the foundation for achieving success and happiness in life. With the right mindset, anything is possible.
Our mindsets are formed through a lifetime of structured (classes, reading) and unstructured (life events, work experience) learning. Together, this learning resides deep in our subconscious mind; represents our long-held beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions; and influences the decisions and actions we make every day.
As a result, we are often unaware of how our mindset affects how we do our work and how we interact with people. But if a mindset is made from all this learning and experience, can a mindset be changed? The good news, according to Dr. Dweck, is that mindsets can, indeed, be changed.
The next question becomes, how? It begins with an awareness of fixed and growth mindsets. Some individuals may appear to have a relatively ‘fixed’ mindset, while others are more open to change and ‘growth,’ as Figure 3-1 illustrates.
Figure 3-1. Adopting a new mindset requires a belief that new abilities can be developed with effort
For example, many beliefs are developed from business school and on-the-job experience that are grounded in waterfall, phase-gated, and siloed ways of working. Approaching this situation with a fixed mindset says the organization is the way it is, and no matter what you do it will never change. A growth mindset says you can create change if you work hard, adapt to feedback, and implement strategies for personal development.
Put simply, Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t— you’re right.” Adopting a new mindset requires a belief that new abilities can be developed with time and effort. In this case, leaders must remain open to the possibility that existing mindsets based on traditional management practices need to evolve to guide the organizational change required to become a Lean enterprise.1 The next two sections describe the key elements of the Lean-Agile mindset we need to achieve.
1. Allen Ward and Durward Sobeck, Lean Product and Process Development. Lean Enterprise Institute, 2014.
Thinking Lean and Embracing Agility
To begin this journey of change and instill new habits into the culture, leaders and managers need to learn and adopt the Lean-Agile mindset (Figure 3-2).
Figure 3-2. The aspects of a Lean-Agile mindset
Thinking Lean and embracing agility combine to make up a new management approach, one that improves workplace culture by providing the concepts and beliefs that leaders need to guide a successful business transformation. In turn, this helps individuals and enterprises achieve their goals.
Thinking Lean
Lean was originally developed to streamline manufacturing.2 However, the principles and practices of Lean thinking are now deeply embedded and applied to the development of products, software, and systems. The SAFe House of Lean (shown in Figure 3-2) was inspired by the Toyota House of Lean, to illustrate these concepts simply.
2. James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos, The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production—Toyota’s Secret Weapon in The Global Car Wars that is Revolutionizing World Industry (Free Press, 2007).
Goal: Value
The ‘roof’ of the house represents value, and the goal is to deliver the maximum value in the shortest sustainable lead time, while providing the highest possible quality to customers and society. High morale, psychological and physical safety, and customer delight are additional goals and benefits.
Pillar 1: Respect for People and Culture
Respect for people and culture is a basic tenet of Lean. SAFe enables people to evolve their own practices and improvements. Management challenges them to change and may guide them on the journey. However, individuals and teams learn problem-solving and reflection skills and are accountable for making the appropriate improvements.
The driving force behind this new behavior is a generative culture, which is characterized by a positive, safe, and performance-centric environment.3 Leaders need to embrace this change and adopt it first, modeling the new ways of thinking and behaving for others to learn and follow.
3. Accelerate: The 2018 State of DevOps Report. http://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/state-of-devops-2018.pdf
Respect for people and culture is also extended to relationships with suppliers, partners, customers, and the broader community; all of these parties are vital to the long-term success of the enterprise. When there’s real urgency for change, culture improves naturally. First, understand and implement SAFe values and principles. Second, deliver winning results. Cultural change will surely follow!
Pillar 2: Flow
The key to successfully executing SAFe is to establish a continuous flow of work that supports incremental value delivery based on constant feedback and adjustment. Continuous flow enables faster sustainable value delivery, effective built-in quality practices, relentless improvement, and evidence-based governance based on working solutions.
These principles of flow are an important part of the Lean-Agile mindset:
Understanding the full value stream
Visualizing and limiting Work In Process (WIP)
Reducing batch sizes
Managing queue lengths
Eliminating waste and removing delays
Additionally, achieving a faster flow of value requires shifting from a ‘start-stop-start’ project management process to an Agile product delivery approach, which is aligned to long-lived value streams.
Lean-Agile principles provide a better understanding of the development process by incorporating new thinking, tools, and techniques. Leaders and teams can use them to move from a phase-gated approach to a DevOps approach with a continuous delivery pipeline that extends flow to the entire value delivery process.
Pillar 3: Innovation
Flow builds a solid foundation for value delivery. But without innovation, both the product and the process will stagnate. To support this critical part of the SAFe House of Lean, Lean-Agile leaders do the following:
Hire, coach, and mentor innovation and entrepreneurship in the organization’s workforce.
‘Go see’ and visit the actual workplace (known as ‘gemba’), where the products and solutions are created and used. As Taiichi Ohno put it, “No useful improvement was ever invented at a desk.”
Provide time and space for people to be creative to enable purposeful innovation. This can rarely occur in the presence of 100 percent utilization and daily firefighting. SAFe’s Innovation and Planning (IP) iteration is one such opportunity.
Apply continuous exploration, the process of constantly exploring the market and user needs, getting fast feedback on experiments, and defining a vision, roadmap, and set of features that bring the most promising innovations to market.
The facts are friendly. Validate innovations with customers and then ‘pivot without mercy or guilt’ when fact patterns change.
Couple strategic thinking with local team-based innovations to create an ‘innovation riptide’ that can power a tidal wave of new products, services, and capabilities.
Pillar 4: Relentless Improvement
Relentless improvement is the fourth pillar of the SAFe House of Lean. It guides the business to become a learning organization through continuous reflection and adaptation. A ‘constant sense of competitive danger’ drives the aggressive pursuit of improvement opportunities. Leaders and teams systematically do the following:
Optimize the whole, not just the parts, of the organization and the development process.
Reinforce the problem-solving mindset throughout the organization, where all are empowered to engage in daily improvements to the work.
Reflect at key milestones to openly identify and address process shortcomings at all levels.
Apply Lean tools and techniques to determine the fact-based root cause of problems and apply effective countermeasures rapidly.
Base improvements on facts. Consider facts carefully and then act quickly.
Chapter 11, Continuous Learning Culture, will provide additional perspective on the importance of innovation and relentless improvement in achieving business agility.
Foundation: Leadership
As with any significant organizational change, the enterprise’s managers, leaders, and executives are responsible for the adoption and success of the Lean-Agile transformation. Their leadership is the foundation of Lean and is the starting point for individual, team, and enterprise success. Successful leaders are trained in these new and innovative ways of thinking and exhibit the principles and behaviors of Lean-Agile leadership.
From a leadership perspective, Lean is different than Agile. Agile was developed as a team-based process for a small group of cross-functional, dedicated individuals who were empowered, skilled, and needed to build working functionality in a short time-box. Management, however, was not part of this definition. But, excluding management from the new way of working doesn’t scale in an enterprise.
By contrast, in Lean, managers are leaders who embrace the values of Lean, are competent in the basic practices, and teach these practices to others. They proactively eliminate impediments and take an active role in supporting organizational change and facilitating relentless improvement. Chapter 5, Lean-Agile Leadership, is dedicated to this topic.
Embracing Agility
The right half of the Lean-Agile mindset (Figure 3-2) is, of course, Agile. Since it’s a critical element of SAFe, the rest of this chapter is devoted to the values and principles of Agile.
A brief history of Agile is helpful to understand its intent. In the 1990s, responding to the many challenges of waterfall processes, some lighter-weight and more iterative development methods emerged. In 2001, many thought leaders of these frameworks came together in Snowbird, Utah. While there were differences of opinion on the specific merits of one method over another, the attendees agreed that their shared values and beliefs dwarfed the differences. The result was a Manifesto for Agile Software Development4—a turning point that clarified the new approach and started to bring the benefits of these innovative methods to the whole development industry. In the years since the manifesto was first published, Agile has been adopted by domains outside of software development, including hardware systems, infrastructure, operations, and support. More recently, business teams outside of technology have also embraced Agile principles for planning and executing their work.
4. Manifesto for Agile Software Development, http://agilemanifesto.org/.
The Values of the Agile Manifesto
Figure 3-3 illustrates the Agile Manifesto and is followed by a description of its four values.
Figure 3-3. Manifesto for Agile Software Development
We Are Uncovering Better Ways
The first phrase of the manifesto deserves emphasis: “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.”
We interpret this as describing an ongoing journey of discovery to increasingly embrace Agile behaviors, a journey with no end. SAFe is not a fixed, frozen-in-time framework. As we uncover better ways of working, we adapt the framework, as evidenced by more than six major releases as of this writing.
Where We Find Value
We’ll discuss the values shortly, but the final phrase of the manifesto is also important and sometimes overlooked: “That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”
Some people may misinterpret the value statements as a binary decision between two choices (e.g., working software versus comprehensive documentation), but that’s not the intended meaning. Both items have value; however, the item on the left has more value (i.e., working software). The Agile Manifesto is not rigid or dogmatic. Instead, it embraces the need to balance the values based on the context.
Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools
Deming notes, “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, then you don’t know what you are doing.” So, Agile processes in frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe do matter. However, a process is only a means to an end. When we’re captive to a process that isn’t working, it creates waste and delays. So, favor individuals and interactions and then modify processes accordingly.
In a distributed environment, tools are critically important to assist with communication and collaboration (e.g., video conferencing, text messaging, ALM5 tools, and wikis). This is especially true at scale. However, tools should supplement, rather than replace, face-to-face communication.
5. ALM: application life-cycle management.
Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation
Documentation is important and has value. But creating documents for the sake of complying with potentially outdated corporate governance models has no value. As part of a change program, governance, often captured by documentation standards, needs to be updated to reflect the Lean-Agile way of working. Rather than create detailed documentation too early—especially the wrong kind—it’s more valuable to show customers working software to get their feedback. Therefore, favor working software. And document only what’s truly needed.
Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation
Customers are the ultimate deciders of value, so their close collaboration is essential in the development process. To convey the rights, responsibilities, and economic concerns of each party, contracts are often necessary—but recognize that contracts can over-regulate what to do and how to do it. No matter how well they’re written, they don’t replace regular communication, collaboration, and trust. Win–lose contracts usually result in poorer economic outcomes and distrust, creating short-term relationships instead of long-term business partnerships. Instead, contracts should be win-win propositions that favor customer collaboration.
Responding to Change over Following a Plan
Change is a reality that the development process has to reflect. The strength of Lean-Agile development is in how it embraces change. As the system evolves, so does the understanding of the problem and the solution domain. Business stakeholder knowledge also improves over time, and customer needs evolve as well. Indeed, those changes in understanding add value to our system.
Of course, the manifesto phrase “over following a plan” indicates that there is in fact a plan! Planning is an important part of Agile development. Indeed, Agile teams and ARTs plan more often and more continuously than their counterparts using a waterfall process. However, plans need to adapt as new learning occurs, new information becomes available, and the situation changes.
Agile Manifesto Principles
The Agile Manifesto (Figure 3-4) has 12 principles that support its values.6 These principles take those values a step further and specifically describe what it means to be Agile.
Figure 3-4. The principles of the Agile Manifesto
6. http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
Most of these principles are self-explanatory. They need no elaboration, except for a discussion of applying the Agile Manifesto at scale, which is covered next.
The combination of values and principles in the manifesto creates a framework for what the Snowbird attendees believed was the essence of Agile. The industry is better for the extraordinary business and personal benefits made possible by this new way of thinking and working. We are grateful for it.
Applying the Agile Manifesto at Scale
The brief document that launched this massive movement is more than 19 years old. Since then, not one word has changed. So, it’s fair to ask, given all the advancements in the last 19 years, is the Agile Manifesto still relevant? Or should it be treated like a historical document that has long since served its purpose?
What’s more, Agile was defined for small, fast-moving, software-only teams. That raises other valid questions: Does the Agile Manifesto scale? Does it meet the needs of enterprises developing the biggest and most complex software and systems? Does it serve the needs of systems that require hundreds of people to build them and have unacceptably high costs of failure?
Rather than judge the ability of Agile to remain relevant on its own, what better way to assess the manifesto’s practicality than by asking the people actively engaged in building these new systems? Specifically, we routinely ask SAFe students to do an exercise in class, as described in Figure 3-5.
Figure 3-5. Agile Manifesto class exercise
The typical response is that principles 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 12 ‘work as is.’ The conclusion is that most Agile principles scale without requiring any rethinking, and indeed, most need even more emphasis when applied at scale. The other principles typically foster a little more discussion, as highlighted here:
Principle #2—Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage. The comments here are, ‘It just depends.’ In some cases, the cost of change for some types of late modifications may create situations that are not feasible. For example, can we change the optical resolution of a geophysical satellite a few months before launch? Probably not, unless it’s driven purely by software.
Principle #4—Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. Most are certainly willing to comply with the spirit of this concept. However, there are limitations on the economic practicality and convenience of daily on-site feedback from customers though we fully agree with the sentiment.
Principle #6—The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. Everyone agrees with the intent of this principle. SAFe addresses this point, in part, with Agile team iteration planning and periodic face-to-face Program Increment (PI) planning events. Such events meet many of the needs for efficient communication at scale.
Principle #11—The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. Nearly everyone agrees with this principle—depending on how you define a team and the subject and scope of the decisions! Everyone agrees that when you consider an Agile Release Train (ART) as the team, the addition of some architectural and other governance can absolutely create the best requirements and design.
The conclusion from this exercise is that the Agile Manifesto does indeed scale. However, many principles require increased emphasis at scale, while others require a more expanded perspective. The Agile Manifesto remains as relevant today as ever, perhaps even more so. We’re fortunate to have it, and it plays a vital role in SAFe.
SAFe integrates the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto and Lean throughout the framework. Lean-Agile leaders advance their adoption by first gaining in-depth knowledge through self-study, training, applying what they learn, and discussing breakthroughs and challenges with their peers. Leaders also support their teams as they embrace the Lean-Agile mindset by providing training and coaching and by being a role model for others to follow.
Summary
Mindset drives people’s behavior and actions. Moving to a Lean-Agile development paradigm will typically require a change in mindset. Not only are the practices different, but the entire belief system—including core values, culture, and leadership philosophies—is different as well. To begin the Lean-Agile journey and instill new habits into the culture, everyone must adopt the values, mindset, and principles provided by SAFe, Lean thinking, and the Agile Manifesto. This new mindset creates the foundation needed for a successful Lean-Agile transformation.