The Agile Fallacy: Is ‘Doing Agile’ Different From ‘Being Agile’?
Introduction
Imagine walking into an ‘Agile’ organisation, expecting unprecedented levels of innovation, customer satisfaction, team engagement and a 15-minute sync, but instead experiencing an environment where you’ll see 45-minute status reports where team members just explain their activities to a project manager who’s taking notes.
This is exactly where the confusion lies.
Agile Theatre
The problem is here, “Agile Theatre” which refers to the performance of Agile practices without understanding Agile principles. When Nobody is listening. Nobody is collaborating. Nobody takes the initiative to solve the problems together. It refers to theatre and not teamwork at all. In the evolving landscape of software development and project management, “Agile” has emerged as a synonym of efficiency, flexibility, and adaptability. However, when you take a closer examination, it is revealed that there is a stark dichotomy between “Being Agile” and “Doing Agile,” a distinction that many organisations grapple with.
The Distinction
Doing Agile completely offsets the aim of being Agile. Being Agile includes embodying the principles and mindset inherent to Agile methodologies. It’s about creating an environment that encourages non-stop improvement, highlights collaboration, and adapts to change without much difficulty, while Agile usually consists of a superficial adoption of Agile methodologies. Being Agile refers to a type of culture and a way of thinking that is present in every level of an organisation, influencing decision-making, leadership styles, as well as the approach to work. Companies may implement stand-ups and retrospectives, but without a deep understanding or commitment to Agile principles. ‘Agile’ is treated as a set of rituals or a box-ticking exercise, and not as a fundamental shift in how a firm generally operates, rather than a foundational shift in how individuals and teams operate. There lies a very fine line between doing and being Agile. Even the smartest of people make mistakes while understanding this basic concept. In today’s world, you can’t afford such a meaningless mistake.
Although it entails a series of components from the 15-minute rule to the value velocity test, from the retrospective ROI to the Simplicity Principle, now all this might seem a little intimidating or complex, but in reality, it is all about the mindset and the way one grasps a concept. It becomes complicated when you make it complicated.
Are there any psychological barriers?
Understanding why Agile transformations fail requires examining the psychological barriers to change, which include – Control anxiety, which refers to the fear of managers of losing control when the teams become self-organising. They create oversight mechanisms that undermine autonomy. Perfectionism entails that the team prefers to plan everything perfectly before starting, as they refrain from facing the uncertainty that comes with adaptive planning. The team prefers predictable mediocrity to risky innovation because if not worked out, it leads to blame, and the behaviour of blame avoidance plays a key role in ensuring that the intended transformation fails. Last but not least, the status quo bias, which means feeling safe in the existing processes, even when ineffective.
Transformation
Now, one might wonder, how do you achieve the successful transformation from Agile theatre to true agility? Unfortunately, there aren’t any particular steps to achieve this; otherwise, it would have been a very easy and simplified task. True agility does not refer to following a framework perfectly — it’s about responding to change in a better way than your competitors. It’s about learning and adapting rather than executing predictably. You don’t achieve this by doing Agile perfectly. Embracing uncertainty, experimentation, and continuous adaptation are the core components that lead to transformation.
Agile teams work differently from chain-of-command bureaucracies. They are best suited to innovation, that is, the profitable application of creativity to improve customer solutions, business processes, and technology. To tackle an opportunity, the organisation forms and empowers a small team, usually three to nine people, most of whom are assigned full-time. The team is highly effective and includes all the skills necessary to complete its tasks. It manages itself and is accountable for every aspect of the work. Senior leaders tell team members where to innovate, but do not tell them how. The members hold themselves accountable not just for outputs but also for the outcomes.
Reason to step out of your comfort zone.
One of the most common questions that arises out of the argument is why transform? When the method is compared with the old or traditional one, agile offers many major benefits when done right. In addition to increasing team productivity and employee satisfaction, it helps in minimising the wasteful and redundant activities, which include repetitive planning, excessive documentation, quality defects, and low-value product features. Through helping in the improvement of visibility and a non-stop adaptation to customers’ changing priorities, agile plays a major role in improving customer engagement and satisfaction, bringing the most valuable products to market quicker and more predictably. The process of engaging team members from multiple disciplines as collaborative peers facilitates organisational experience and helps in building mutual trust and respect. This way, being agile dramatically reduces the time squandered on micromanaging projects, which can the ability to be handled by the team members, and this gives the senior managers the opportunity to perform higher-value work that they have expertise in. This includes creating the corporate vision, paying attention to strategic initiatives, simplification of the work and assigning the right employees the right task.
Agile in Consulting:
Now that the distinction is cleared, certain highlights of this conundrum include the core principles of agile consulting. Some say that the highest priority should always be given to the customers to satisfy their wants and expectations, and the changing environments to be welcomed as agile includes harnessing change for the customer’s competitive advantage. One of the key features of any organisation that succeeds in being agile is the environment provided to them, which consists of motivated individuals. In the consulting context, it does not simply mean working faster. One of the most important features is delivering incremental value. This can be done by delivering a series of small and tangible wins that would help in providing immediate value allow correction. The next step would be to focus on outcomes over outputs and take into consideration the actual business impact. It involves working closely with the client team and embracing change to move the project in the right direction.
The core Principles of Agile Consulting include:
Client collaboration should be prioritised over contract negotiation; this is a starting point and not a straitjacket solution. The aim is to solve the real problem. If a company prepares a certain chart for the flow of operations, it needs to have a certain amount of flexibility to mould it to the requirements, which is one of the most important aims of being’ agile. Just documentation and a lack of working solutions is a no-go, as it would certainly not help with finding a solution, but rather be an unnecessarily long, drawn-out process. Finally, the need for the quality of communication and relationships to be excellent remains unmatched.
The three main components include project setup and scoping, execution and delivery and client collaboration, as well as the feedback.
Can Agile success be measured?
If a company makes such a drastic change, the results need to be measured in order to know if the step taken is keeping in mind the need to be agile and not doing agile. The success can be accounted for in various ways, which include feature adoption rates, consumer retention and growth, cross-functional collaboration frequency, revenue impact of delivered features and technical debt accumulation.
Conclusion
In conclusion, ‘being agile’ is a long journey; you cannot predict anything for sure, command situations that are contingent or control any form of innovation. The method is challenging as it is rewarding. If any company is able to comprehend and apply the method of being agile and not superficially doing agile, there are no limits to what it can accomplish with just a change in the mindset.
Citations:
Doing agile right. (n.d.). Google Books.
https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=lVmnDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA199&dq=doing+agile+vs+being+agile&ots=jqbvI_g7Sy&sig=JMMu1O4GL
Mj20cXy4o5trH27GHo&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=doing%20agile%20vs%20being%20agile&f=false
Chaabani, M. A. (2024, July 2). Being Agile vs. Doing Agile. Genius Talks.