The Agile Trojan War

The Trojan Horse is a story about war; and, in certain respects, that is precisely why it is such a good metaphor for Agile transformations. Agile tends to entail culture clash, a conflict of visions between executives on one side, wanting to make Agile into a Tayloristic intervention, a way to squeeze more blood from the stone of their teams, and the teams themselves on the other, who see Agile as entailing wholesale culture evolution, a transformation that leaders do not get to exempt themselves from.

In our version of the Trojan War the Greeks do not offer a gift and pretend to sail away. Here they work for Trojan leadership. Both the Greeks and Trojans agree to make the Agile Transformation Horse, but, as we have seen, both hope something different waits inside. After declaring the building of the Horse, the Trojans (of course) bring in the external consultants. The Greeks are still happy to help, but again, for their own reasons…and so it is already a conflict.

The Greeks feel the entire organization needs to evolve. They hope what hides inside the Horse is holistic culture change, bringing with it flatter orgs with agile finance and planning and new ways of leading enabling persistent teams to learn their way toward target outcomes, transforming old-school command-and-control push systems and all the old-fashioned approaches to PMing that feed into them. Trojan leadership, however, is not all that interested in self-transformation. Frankly, they’re not even all that interested in increasing team agility.

The Trojans instead see the Transformation Horse as a way to accelerate their command-and-control Waterfall, as a way to get more work out of people, which, if we’re really honest, ultimately boils down to getting work done with fewer people. (Why else do Agile transformations tend to come with layoffs?) This is, after all, how executives are paid to think. The standard Scrum bill of goods resonates with orgs that treat busyness as a proxy for productivity, cost as a proxy for value created, and output as a proxy for real-world consequences.

We are left with two groups using the same terms while speaking different languages and possessing radically different agendas. And we wonder why Agile transformations fail. The Trojans, recall, want the Transformation Horse to increase Greek efficiency, all while ironically ignoring that they—and not the Greeks—are typically the constraint in the system. Drucker was not wrong when he concluded “the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle.” If we can agree that: 1) Agility is best understood as the ability to easily change directions given new learnings; and, 2) Drucker is correct in his assertion, then, well, this has implications.

For starters, it means that real agility has less to do with product team efficiency and more with how decision authority is distributed in organizations. In their excellent book, Inviting Leadership, Mezick and Sheffield offer some important insights here. They would refer to our Trojans as an organization’s “formal authority”, the leadership as defined in the org chart. As they note, Drucker is not only correct, but dramatically so: An organization’s formal authority is often as much as 1000x(!) too slow to keep pace with most of the work going on around it. This means, by the way, that the formal org chart is not how most of the real work gets done.

This has another implication about culture evolution: Trojans should start recognizing, valuing, and protecting the informal networks from disruption. They are, as Mezick and Sheffield argue, the very emergent systems that keep the organization itself alive and functioning. And these are the very systems now repeatedly torn apart by recurring layoffs, a fact the formal authority ignores when it continually cannibalizes its own employee base and culture to squeeze out more short-term gains for its major shareholders.

Under such conditions, organizations increasingly have trouble even knowing what is going on internally, as there will typically be core functions randomly de-staffed, necessary communication channels constantly rebroken, and a never-ending leakage of vital expertise. It takes an organization’s informal networks years to recover from a large layoff. The result is they are typically just getting up from the last one when clobbered by another. They then plod along, understaffed, in an ongoing state of chaos and disarray, hoping more Trojans will begin to realize the folly.

Views here need to change. To me that is part of the Agile Trojan War. As executive coach Sharone Bar-David puts it, “Power isn’t what it used to be.” It’s not the 1980s anymore, and we need to stop pretending that it is. Mezick and Sheffield describe this in terms of what they call “legitimate” and “illegitimate authority”. The old-school attitude of, “Salute the office if not the person”, is increasingly a thing of the past. In today’s world, just because you’re in a position of formal authority does not mean anyone will consent to your leadership or even take you seriously. Today a leader’s legitimacy of authority must be continually earned, and that is a good thing. Formal authority, after all, only has power to the extent that the subordinate cooperate.

If you’re not making the connection back to Agile, I would argue this is in part what the Greeks have always hoped was inside the “Horse”—Agile after all has always smacked of a culture revolution, and this itself speaks to the perpetual impasse on the subject. It is a common political move to outwardly embrace what is positionally inconvenient to you in order to bring it to your side and turn it into something that benefits you. So, of course the Trojans will try to leverage all the buzz around Agile and subvert into getting more of what they want (faster Waterfall teams). And, of course, this does not mean the Greeks are wrong.

They’re not wrong.

As my friend Rob England puts it, Agile transformation, at its very core, boils down to new ways of managing. The Greeks are right—there is no real agility until Agile is driven all the way upstream, transforming leadership itself, evolving planning, finance, and ultimately redistributing decision authority throughout the entire organization. What is more, the Greeks know they’re right and are fully justified. This continually motivates them to help build the Agile Transformation Horse. Unfortunately, they do not yet have the formal authority to fill it with anything other than more hocus pocus about working faster.

It’s another Greek tragedy.  

Until next time.