Common Pitfalls in Agile Transformations

In this episode of the Definitely, Maybe Agile podcast, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock explore the critical challenges they've encountered when working on agile transformations. From superficial leadership support to misdiagnosed organizational problems, these seasoned consultants share their insights on navigating the complex obstacles that can undermine transformation efforts. They also discuss the dynamics of working with strong-willed leaders, managing shifting priorities, and the importance of dedicated teams - all while highlighting the fundamental role of effective leadership in driving successful change. This episode offers valuable lessons for any organization embarking on an agile journey at scale.

This week's takeaways:

• Lack of leadership buy-in and support can doom an agile transformation effort, as the change agents lack the authority and credibility to drive the necessary changes.
• Fixing the wrong problem or focusing on ineffective solutions like training can waste time and resources, highlighting the importance of accurately diagnosing the root causes.
• Challenges with strong-willed leaders, constantly shifting priorities, and non-dedicated teams all require skilled navigation and a focus on addressing the underlying leadership and organizational issues.

By the end of this discussion, you'll understand why identifying the right problem is crucial for meaningful transformation and how organizations can avoid these common traps to achieve genuine progress.

Transcript

Peter: 0:04

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello, dave, how are you today? Peter, good to see you again, good to hear you. Yeah, good to see you, dave. So we were just having a little chat about what today's podcast would be about and what did we land on Things?

Dave: 0:24

that. We've seen that really. Yeah, nightmares in that working environment.

Peter: 0:27

Where would you start, uh, I think, um, well, let's start. We've got a few listed out here. I think there's one here that um is new to my heart, that leaders not being bought into the engagement. This is, uh, this is one where the you're coming in to work with the team, you've had it explained, but then what it is you're expected to do, you've got everything set up. You bring the right people to the table to get things done, and then you find out that, well, leadership wasn't really aware, or they're not really bought into it, or they're not really all on board with the engagement, and things go south very quickly after that.

Dave: 1:07

You don't have the authority, the credibility to go and effect change, so you can't get the conversations. You shuffle around the organization. Everybody, broadly speaking, avoids you as much as they can because, well, because there's no backing for it. So you can definitely build great personal relationships with a handful of teams, individuals, and you can maybe help them have a better experience. But in terms of that lever sticking into a, you know, pivotal point that you can lean on and change the organization and achieve some outcomes, you're really not able to get any traction.

Peter: 1:51

Yeah, you need leadership buy-in, you need senior enough people in the organization bought into what it is to the change that you're looking to make and they need to be supporting it. And if they are not, and if they're not a part of that, then yeah, it never goes well.

Dave: 2:04

Well, and so let's tease this one along just a little bit, because there's a verbal confirmation is not the same as being brought in.

Peter: 2:14

Yes, yes, there's that too. They may have nodded their head or had somebody go like do you mind if we go do this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, get out of my office. And then when the consultants turn up to actually do the work, it's like, huh, what are you doing here?

Dave: 2:28

yeah well, and I think that then there's another element to that, which is leadership are bought in, but they're bought in without recognizing what, the what, the like either. They don't recognize the problem, they're not bought into. They're bought into.

Peter: 2:42

Yes, we need support, but they're bought into the support focused in the wrong place yeah, well, and that that takes us to, I think, our second nightmare, which is that, uh, the organization is bringing you in because they're adamant that this is the problem that needs fixing and and that is the thing that needs to be done. And you, you get in there and you start to look around and you go, that's not problem. A problem You're looking in the wrong place.

Dave: 3:04

So we spend a lot of time. We have a strong reputation, I believe, around training and really kind of elevating education around particular things in organizations.

Dave: 3:16

Training is one of those things that so many times people think we have a problem, I know what we'll do, we'll train our way out of it and what. What that read? I mean it. There are things that you can definitely train and get better at directly, but when you're dealing with the sort of intractable, wicked problems that we're dealing with, they're not solved through training no, because the people, no matter how much training you give them, are not empowered to take action based on the new knowledge that they have.

Peter: 3:42

training is implicitly just a transfer of knowledge. You have to be able to apply that knowledge to the problem, and if the organization doesn't allow you to, then it doesn't matter how many times someone tells you how to fix it.

Dave: 3:54

if you're not allowed to, then you won't be able to, and I think that staying on that leadership track so we've talked a little bit about a couple of things around leadership, but there's another one that and this is this is really difficult, I think the other two that we've talked about there are some ways that we can kind of, you know, reshape the relationship in some way, but every now and again I've certainly experienced where I'm working with a leader who has bought in, we're solving the right problem, but they don't necessarily appreciate their role in the context and the challenge that we have and they're not self-aware. They're self-aware but in the wrong way. I mean that's that whole Dunning-Kruger effect. I don't know which way it's going on that one, but it's definitely like there's a lack of awareness about their impact on the problem or just how to go about solving the problem or whatever it might be.

Peter: 4:45

Yes, because very often in those circumstances they're unable to see that their behaviors are often part of what's driving or causing the problem. That needs to change. So they need to change and they're very often not willing to.

Dave: 5:04

Well, I'm certain. So we talk about being coaches, but coaching is a very personal, very specific type of relationship that you'll have with a leader and many times you just don't have that leader. You don't have enough time with them, you're not invited in. It's not that rude. So then you have these conversations about how do you draw attention to this, and these are those where you use the metaphor over here and you're kind of looking at them, going please be your connection into this, and no awareness at all.

Dave: 5:34

No, no, if I ever come across that behavior. Absolutely I would be all over it. And you're like, yeah, okay, yeah.

Peter: 5:40

It wasn't working the way it did. Here's a mirror, and that is the difficulty between, like, when you're brought in as a consultant and what's really you need to then start applying coaching skills. It's very hard, if the leader has brought you in as a consultant, to then switch to acting in a coach's role and that's just a difficult transition to make because that isn't what's expected of you and it's a different type of relationship and so I mean you're. So that that is very, very key, I would agree.

Dave: 6:13

I've run into that on a on a few occasions so, and I wanted to like I'll do one last thing around leadership, because I think we've kind of tackled three, now we're just one fourth one is really strong personality and this is one of those ones where we both look at each other and go.

Peter: 6:29

I know exactly who I'm thinking of when you say that.

Dave: 6:32

I thought you were just going to say that I know exactly the consultant you need to work with and we'll both go. Hey, peter, you should go work with this guy.

Peter: 6:42

I've worked with lots of great leaders with very strong personalities and I enjoyed it on personalities and I enjoyed it. I always enjoyed it. But, yes, sometimes it can be a bit of a nightmare because they often they don't want to, they're not willing to be contradicted or to be to be tested or to be.

Dave: 7:01

And I was actually going to say when they're bought in and when they're excited about it. All of that makes it harder, not easier. Yeah, so, normally, the more bought in they are, the more on board, the more aligned with what you're trying to do, the easier it gets. But now you get that feeding into the excitement and that could be painful.

Peter: 7:23

Maybe you and I could introduce the ones that we both know. So there's a piece there as well, I think. Now, more systemically in an organization, the other problem that I've encountered on a number of occasions is constantly changing priorities.

Dave: 7:44

I'd almost say that's one of the most common ones is when you step into an organization where prioritization and delivery as a result is challenging, the many cases leadership are taking their own route to solve that, which which leads to lots of priorities coming in. And now we have priority churn, which is really disruptive and challenging to unpick and you can have the conversation, and this is exactly what we're talking about. All these leaders will nod their head and go absolutely thinking their behavior isn't the one.

Peter: 8:15

It's not their behavior, it's the fact that there's 10 of these leaders and it's like they've all got their different priorities and chaos ensues.

Dave: 8:27

For sure, for sure, that one's always interesting now what?

Peter: 8:30

about fixing the wrong problem yeah, I think, I think we had that down in here. We were talking a bit about that one. That's the, where we brought in to solve the wrong problem, and the. The other one is the uh, the, the non-dedicated teams.

Dave: 8:43

I think is perhaps the, the last one we have here, yeah, and I think it is so and maybe this is part of that, fixing the wrong problem in the sense that there's or buy-in I think there's so much that you get by having dedicated teams so much and somehow we've lost that on the wrapper describing what a dedicated team is, or we can't get that message across.

Peter: 9:08

Yeah, there's this kind of missing piece. It's when you you come in and ask, uh, um, so who's going to be working on this? Well, it's going to be 10 of that person's time, five percent of that person's time, 16 of that person's time, and you're like, huh, how's?

Dave: 9:23

that going to work, but yeah and I've I've always tried to um, when we encounter that there's, there's that adage or mantra of move work to people, not people to work, we'll sit down and go hey, don't worry about it, we can bring in through the backlog. But then you end up with this weird thing where you know, three months of work is lined up to this one individual and this other individual has that, this other individual has that.

Peter: 9:46

So all of a sudden, even though you kind of have a dedicated team, you don't, because no one's really got any collaboration or cross dependencies within the team, and I mean this, though, is a fantastic thing to identify, because now we can say well, ok, so now, now we know what skills you're limited and what capabilities you need to build. What are the ways we can solve that? But organizations, to your point, don't always look at it that way, and you end up with people getting completely overloaded, work gets scattered to the four winds, and we don't really end up solving the true underlying problem, which is there's one person in the organization who knows how to do this, and you need to solve for that. Now, to be fair, when it does end up being one person in the organization who knows how to do this, and you need to solve for that. And now, to be fair, when it does end up being one person, typically the organization is aware it's just they don't necessarily always do a good thing about solving it. Yeah, that's very true. So how do we wrap this up? How do we wrap this up? I mean, we could sort of run through the sort of general list of what we went through there, I think. So.

Peter: 10:49

I think the first one that we had was that, uh, the leadership isn't really truly bought into the, the engagement, or to what it's consulting engagements about, um, so they're not really on board with it. The there's the one around fixing the wrong problem. It's, like the organization's absolutely positive, this is the problem. But you come in and say I don't know, might be something else.

Peter: 11:08

The the third one was that the working leaders, who are a part of the problem but are not self-aware enough to realize that they are, so they can't, they're not willing to come to the table and be coached or to think about how they might be impacting the situation, how they might be impacting the situation. There's the really, really strong leaders, the ones who are very, very passionate and very bought into it, but that doesn't necessarily always lead to good results if they're running in the wrong direction. Then we had a priority churn, which is the constantly changing priorities across vast swaths of the organization and for a variety of reasons, and then we talked at the end there about non-dedicated teams. Did I miss anything?

Dave: 11:57

I don't think so. I think you kind of covered off and I think we started with that leadership and slowly kind of ended up closer to well. They're all leadership challenges, I think.

Peter: 12:07

I think so there's a lot of. It is leadership even within the teams identifying that that is happening. It's leadership are the ones who can generally solve for that and see about the ways of approaching it, and I think that kind of works to wrap it all up. So thank you, as always, and if people want to send us feedback, at feedback@ definitelymaybeagile. com, and don't forget to hit subscribe.

Dave: 12:31

Thank you again Peter, Always a pleasure, thanks, bye.

Peter: 12:34

You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.