Facilitative Leadership for Agility
Large scale software development and implementation is a new kind of human endeavor. Getting a hundred or more people to assemble complex ideas into an invisible machine that enables transactions, controls operations, and makes decisions hasn’t been done prior to the last fifty years or so. Humans have cooperated to design and build large complex physical structures for millennia, certainly back to the Pyramids or before. And they have coordinated in large-scale command and control endeavors notably waging war. But the realm of creating pure ideas and turning them into code that invisibly runs, thousands or millions of interlocking instructions, is a brand-new challenge. Purely intellectual collaboration that nevertheless demonstrably works or does not is quite novel.
To be successful in this new endeavor two leadership elements are crucial:
1. Leading teams of people to deliver valuable solutions, and
2. Enabling teams within larger organizations to succeed.
Agile itself, as represented in the Manifesto, has little to say about leadership -- it has an explicit anti-management perspective, emphasizing self-managed teams and largely undifferentiated roles. Scrum follows a similar line, with just a few roles defined (product owner, scrum master). These are great concepts and were exactly what the industry needed as we transitioned from our mis-adventure of turning creative software development into an reliable, predictable manufacturing process.
As agile and scrum age and we have experience in its successes and gaps, its become clear to me and to many others that there is something missing. Too many teams are falling back into the old trap of following a defined methodology and substituting tools and prescribed processes for judgement and engagement. This is a violation of the first agile value, People over Process. The cure is Facilitative Leadership for Agility.
The triangle above illustrates the leadership imperatives: rigor, alignment, and efficiency. We need to make good fact-based decision or else we are just doing the wrong things faster. We need to be aligned across the team so that the hundreds of decisions our team members make are informed by common vision, since we can’t and don’t want to control every step. And we need this all to be done efficiently, respecting the time of each team member and getting the most bang for the buck that we can. Good frameworks are the tools that help us be great leaders.
What do I mean by frameworks? Meetings and agendas, architectures with business process interactions, team and governance structures, A3’s for communication, as well as the now-standard scrum frameworks of sprint boards and backlog charts.
Learning and practicing to be better leaders is for everyone on the team. Organizational leaders, those in formal positions of authority and responsibility, have additional and special responsibilities. These are elucidated in the chart below in our rigor, alignment, and efficiency categories.
These obligations are explored in depth in People over Process. I’ll just point out a few interesting elements here. Leaders need to enable and demand rigor by ensuring teams are capable and that decisions are made based on options and facts. They need to support alignment by making sure information is available, input is enabled, and valuing consensus, but also being present to make decisions when needed (that isn’t in most agile methods!). The obligation to balance “agile” vs. “planful” approaches, based on an understanding of prescriptive and adaptive process control, is the foundation for efficiency. Establishing a culture of extraordinarily well-prepared meetings is another leverage point for efficiency.
Facilitative Leadership for Agility is fully explained and explored in People over Process. In addition to the direct exposition such as above, we see the fictional Pacifica Bank learn to lead from Mary O’Connell, one of our continuing characters from the first two Tales books. Leadership in action is demonstrated via architecture and business process simulation, project planning, team structuring and governance, scrum meetings, and much more. There is also an appendix describing some of the most useful frameworks for agility such as A3 and Failure Modes and Effects Analysis.
I’ve more recently done some thinking about structuring teams, taking some of the POP ideas on “silos and bridges” a little deeper. Kudos to Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton’s Team Topologies, and Marty Kagan’s Inspired for their thoughts! Here is a PDF of a presentation I’ve put together and shared a few times on Zoom. Structuring Teams.