When organizations begin their journey toward agility, they think the business outcomes will become instantaneous. They expect the initial decision to lead to immediate success.
Moving towards agile from a more traditional way of working changes so many things about how we work. It changes who we interact with, and has us moving from building others solutions to becoming problem solvers. We’re creating solutions in a more integrated way, moving from predict and control to build - measure - learn - sense - respond. Agile teams need to learn new skills - both in domain knowledge and critical new ‘soft’ skills. Agile is a new game with new rules.
Tomorrow’s agility requires today’s patience to learn a new way of working.
I would like to leave you with 3 things:
1. Ensure your performance targets are outcomes that reflect the learning curve the teams are experiencing while they learn how to work cross-functionally, collaboratively, and iteratively.
2. Create an organizational backlog that contains organizational impediments the teams are uncovering while they are changing the way they work. Leadership needs to take active ownership and responsibility for the organizational backlog to enable the teams to achieve their performance and learning targets.
3. Learning must be a first-class citizen. Establish a way to measure the learnings found, experiments run based on those learnings, and how those experiments resulted in hitting performance targets. Have targets on these learning initiatives.
Every keystroke is precious so I will end here.
Lead how you would like to be led.
Dave
Twitter: @DDame
www.davedame.com
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Medium - https://medium.com/dave-dame
Corresponding Blog Post – https://medium.com/dave-dame/agile-and-patience-are-inseparable-b8ec76694a49