State of Scrum 2017-2018: the future is Agile!

At the beginning of new year, Scrum Alliance, the largest certifying body in the Agile community, released State of Scrum 2017-2018, an annual report which summarizes Scrum and Agile practices and predictions around the world.

More than 2,000 Scrum professionals responded to the survey, representing 91 countries and 27 industries and the report this year shows Agile transformation firmly on the horizon for organizations all over the world.

Approximately half of respondents – 53 percent – report current involvement in an Agile transformation, and of those not currently involved in an organization-wide Agile transformation, 56 percent anticipate one in the future, which is not surprising.

Other key findings from the 2017-2018 report include:

• 97 percent will continue to use Scrum in the future. 
• 85 percent say Scrum continues to improve quality of work life.
• ScrumMaster is the most popular certification, selected by 84 percent of respondents.
• 78 percent use “Scrum and Other” approaches to Agile, and the diversity of frameworks increased from the previous year. 

Active senior management sponsorship and support is the number one motivator to undertake an Agile transformation, and enterprises look to executive leadership to spearhead Agile initiatives.

While many respondents anticipate change to come and suggest it is necessary to reach business goals including improved satisfaction with products delivered, better time to market, better quality and improved staff morale, 57 percent say organizational design and culture is what holds Agile transformation back.

This definitely resonates with my personal experience in coaching and transitioning enterprise departments: company culture can make or break an agile transition.
Yet few transitioning organizations do anything much to purposefully change their culture.
Culture is seen as fluffy and intangible, and changing it is risky. Having dozens of Scrum teams is very tangible and an easy KPI, but distributing authority to teams is a bit scary and also difficult to measure.
My experience tells me that this perspective is due to a lack of knowledge about:

1. what culture is
2. the strong impact it has on behavior
3. how you make it visible 
4. how you change it.

For instance most leaders say that their biggest problem is knowing and understanding what is happening on the factory floor. Yet very few leaders and few companies spend effort on actually observing people and their interactions.

If you want to talk and learn more about any of these four topics, I will be happy to help.

To learn more about Scrum Alliance and the State of Scrum, please visit http://info.scrumalliance.org/State-of-Scrum-2017-18.html

The 21st century´s paradigm to connect people and work to be done

Few days ago I had a phone call with a friend of mine. During our conversation she shared with me one of the challenges she is facing at work and wanted to check what I might think about.

Basically they have few issues when it comes to allocating people to work on a project they sold to a customer.

The challenges are multi-faceted:     

• Finding people with the competences which fit that specific project
• Finding people who are available to work on that project
• Finding people who are willing to work on that specific project

Now the sweet point would be: a reasonable amount of people with the right competences, who are available at that time and willing to take on the project.

Very hard! Almost impossible! So what is usually the second best option?
Right! Put together on the project just who is available at that moment in time and hope it will not turn out too bad until someone with the right expertise can join and save the boat.

Does it sound familiar? I am sure it does, if we live in the same world.

But I have a second question: any guess what my friend’s job is?

Well, if you are thinking about anything among Project Manager, Development Manager or SW developer, you got it wrong. 
She is an architect: not a SW architect, a “real” architect.

If the fact that an architecture office might have similar problems to any product development company sounds unexpected to you, you have not considered the fact that the nature of the work is substantially the same in both fields: solving new problems which have undefined boundaries and multiple possible solutions within a complex environment where multiple entities influence each other in unpredictable ways.

To me this is just another confirmation of a pattern that I have seen in all organizations coping with work of such a nature and trying to apply traditional patterns to solve this challenge in the current century.

Can the situation be slightly improved by applying those patterns more efficiently? Probably yes and the PMI might have few ideas around that.

However my experience tells me that the problem cannot be solved if we do not embrace the fact that a totally different paradigm is needed.

Why?

• Customer requests are more and more unclear: they do not know what they want. Problems are wicked: there is no pre-defined answer
• Market is becoming more volatile: new and unexpected needs are emerging which require flexibility in companies
• Professions are more and more specialized. Too many individuals I-shaped skills, which means they have deep knowledge and experience in just one area
• Work is done in silos: lack of holistic view by individuals, but also knowledge domain in many professions is so big that is impossible for a single person to know-it-all
• Having parallel projects competing for human resources is not sustainable anymore in the above context
• Having people working on multiple projects reduces their effectiveness and productivity: context switching makes people waste time and produces stress, which can reduce IQ by 20%

So what is this different paradigm all about?

• Understand the flow of value you create and setup stable, 100% focused, self-organized teams with a shared goal around your value flow
• Bring highest value work to teams instead of allocating (or multi-allocating) people to work
• Having the team as the atomic element simplifies allocation very much
• Focusing on getting the most important thing out as fast as possible instead of focusing on making people busy (flow efficiency over resource efficiency)
• Teams must be cross-functional: they must have all the competence needed to get work done
• The holistic view of the work is kept at team level
• It is too much to know for a single person. Individuals should better be  “learn-it-all”*
• They can act more effectively on new wicked problems to solve: diversity beats expertise in complex domains
• Move from I-shaped individuals to T-shaped or even X-shaped professional who can do more things, so that you can have smaller teams with all needed competences
• This can be partly achieved through synergies in teams, but also having the expert teaching to the others, to reduce the bus factor

Dare to take the journey? Do you have enough courage to address your own problems?

*In her book “Mindset”, Carol Dweck talks about the following concept: if you take two people, one of them is a learn-it-all and the other one is a know-it-all, the learn-it-all will always trump the know-it-all in the long run. See also what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an interview last year about his effort to overhaul the company culture.

Installing Scrum effectively: Upgrade your company´s Operating System!

Magic Wand by photophilde/CC BY 2.0

Scrum is simple but not easy!
I'm sure that those of you who had seriously tried Scrum can recognize what this sentence really means.
And being simple is definitely one of the strenghts of Scrum, but also one of its pitfalls: it is so straightforward to understand by managers than most fall into the trap of believing it can become a magic wand for the company problems.
Sometimes without even reflecting about what the company's problems really are!

Ken Schwaber, co-inventor of Scrum said once: “Agile development will not solve any of your problems – it will just make them so painfully visible that ignoring them is harder”.

Missing operating system_ {error message} by Karl-Ludwig Pogemann/CC BY 2.0

And that's where the tough part starts!
Scrum is not plug and play! It's not a simple upgrade of the SW methodology currently in use in the company! It changes some of the basic assumptions and thoughts about products get developed!
It's like installing an iOS 8 app on an IOS 4: it won't work! 


You need to upgrade the Operating System!

I would like to share with you what I learned to be three fundamental upgrades needed in the company´s Operating System to install Scrum effectively.

1. Cross functional teams self-organized around value delivered to customers

It is extremely important that development teams are organized so that they can deliver value to customer as fast as possible and not around technology or internal product structure.

You do not want to have unproductive teams overwhlemed by thousands of dependencies, right?
You do not want to create unnecessary coordination work and increase your overhead, do you?

So move away from micro-managed functional teams organized around your system architecture: you will heal your company!

Effective teams are cross-functional and have all the competences needed to transform a backlog item in a potentially shippable product increment within one Sprint.

They work together to remove waiting times and handovers, which represent waste of time and knowledge. 
This does not mean at all having a team of generalists. It means instead having a team of specialists with T-shaped competence, so that they can contribute in doing the work when necessary, even in knowledge areas different from the one they are specialized in. 
Cross-functional teams learn continuously from each other's skills and share knowledge inside the team and between different teams.

These teams must be self-organized: they are the ones who have the best knowledge and must be empowered to decide how to do the work and continuously adjust their process.
A cross-functional and self-organized team can have the possibility to look at the whole development process, find the weakest link or the bottleneck at hand and do whatever they see as necessary to fix it. They have enough visibility of the whole to avoid sub-optimizations typically happening in traditional environments.

2. Agile Leadership

In an environment where teams are empowered and self-organized, leaders stop taking project decisions or asking for review and status report.

They focus instead on removing impediments, aligning stakeholders, building a trust environment, coaching, providing feedback, developing people’s skills and building the capabilities of the organization: they basically create the conditions for the teams to perform at their best.
They cultivate skills of servant leadership, are empathetic and willing to help.

This is applicable with different flavors to managers, Scrum masters and Product Owners.

• Scrum is enabled by managers who build a culture of discipline and excellence, guide on principles and values instead of giving complex rules to follow, teach people not to cut corners, challenge people to high performance and lead by example. They empower people to choose how they want to work and give room for experiment and safe/fast failure. Good Agile managers stay close to the teams and Manage By Walking Around and Listening.
• Scrum is enabled by full time Scrum Masters who have a very good knowledge of Lean, Agile and Scrum and can coach the team to apply Agile values and principles. They teach and coach them to challenge the status quo and continuously improve, think and work as a team, collaborate and challenge each other to grow.
• Scrum is enabled by Product Owners who clarify the Why? and the What?, but not the How? Therefore they trust the team will work at their best. At the same time they challenge and support them to continuously improve. Good Product Owners paint the big picture for the team to take responsibility of the product as a whole and actively support the team to find ways to connect with the customer. They take the responsibility to act as a unique interface to the organization for any work request towards the development team and protect them from interferences.

It is a lot about being more than doing. See also 3 necessary management mindshifts in a fast changing world.

3. Well groomed backlog

People might be arguing about what a good Product Backlog is, but here is what definitely a good Product Backlog is not (but far too often seen around): a generic list of work items which are not user centric, not split end-to-end, not estimated, not even always prioritized.

A high quality Product Backlog is an enabler for iterative and incremental delivery of high quality potentially shippable product increments, which is the core of Scrum (Garbage In-Garbage Out theory applies in this case). It helps the team focus on the right things and build them faster.

A high quality Product Backlog is a manageable size, living artifact of Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable (INVEST) User Stories.

Such stories are easier to understand for the team, easier to plan and easier to work, so that the team can be more productive.

INVEST stories allow:

• Minimize the risk that the team does not deliver anything at the end of a Sprint. 
• Faster learning and faster development because the team gets feedback and finds problems earlier. 
• Better prioritization and defer decision due to a shorter feedback loop. 
• Deliver value more often and therefore can make customers happier. 
• Teams to be more focused and more motivated, because they feel a sense of velocity and accomplishment.

Where do you think you should start first in your OS upgrade?

The Mango Tree

I found out that I like the “gardening” metaphor a lot (see also my latest article).

Last Friday I met a colleague during a coffee break.

We were sharing some views about what had happened during the week, when he said: ”You know, this transformation we are all undergoing is like a mango tree. Everybody seems to want mangos, but no one seems to care about how juicy they are and to know how to get juicy mangos”.

Nice way to put it: don’t you think so?

Then we started building upon this metaphor and having fun taking it to the extremes.

And I think that, what we got out of it at the end, was really good way to explain what does it take to get a team or an organization become Agile or more generally to make a change successfully happen.

So what will a good gardener do in order to get the juicy fruits she wants to harvest in her garden?

1.    Decide what fruits or vegetables you would like to collect

The first step is definitely to define what kind of garden you would like to build and what fruits or vegetables you expect to get. Then you can go and buy the corresponding seeds to plant: of course you need to plant mango trees if you want to get mangos. On the other hand you will never get mangos out of onion seeds (for instance have look at this article from Lyssa Adkins to check out what to seed to get a high performing team)

2.    Work a good piece of land

Quality of seeds is essential to get juicy fruits, but so is quality of land. So make sure to have the right environment for the plant to grow strong. Plants growing nearby can also affect the taste of fruits and vegetables: for instance if you grow lettuce close to artichokes, it will probably get bitter. A good gardener knows that, same as she knows how air pollution can also be very detrimental.

3.    Start growing small plants

So how do you think you can verify whether you bought the right seeds and you worked the land properly? Will talking about how the plant should look like help? Most probably not.

Instead a good gardener would start planting some seeds and grow some small plants. She would water the plant; she would ensure it gets enough sun (but not too much); she would fertilize it and protect it, so that it grows strong and can produce the first fruits.

4.   Taste the fruits and decide what to do

Finally she will happily pick the first fruits and taste them to check if they are sweet and juicy enough. Sometimes you will not even need to wait until the fruits are mature. It won’t be hard to see quite early if you’re getting the right fruits in the first place: you will pretty easily tell a mango and a pineapple apart. If you’re getting the right fruits with the expected quality, you can keep growing the same tree and maybe plant more of the same. Otherwise you can even remove the plant or adjust your gardening, trying a different type of fertilizer or dose the water differently. Until you get the wonderful garden you were looking for.

Does this remind you anything? Right, it looks like the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle from W.E. Deming.

BTW, gardening follows just an empirical approach, the same as Lean and Agile. 

Both gardeners and agilists don’t spend time talking about how things should be done in the best way, but they start doing things, just enough just in time, and most important they learn by actually doing, one experiment at a time.

So, what about your Agile transformation?

Are you actually planting seeds and tasting the first fruits?
Or are you just talking about how a good mango tree should look like, maybe even without having ever seen one?

The snowball

This week I host another article from Mauro Bagnato. Today he shares some reflections about his experience with enterprise Agile transformation and provides a concrete example of a management practice about leading self-organizing teams.

After almost three years working as Agile Coach, one of my personal take away is that the Agile transformation is like a rolling snowball.

Once you really walk this way, your mindset will gradually but inevitably change till the moment when it’ll be impossible to get back to your old way of thinking, just like a snowball getting bigger and bigger while rolling downhill.

A clear example of what I’m saying happened weeks ago.
After a complete re-organization, the management team decided to let people self-organize to form twelve brand new teams…and the snowball was thrown! The team setup was a great whole day event (if you’re interested have a look at my previous post).

Everyone had the chance to choose the team to work with, but we all knew that this was just the starting point.

How to select the Scrum Masters and the Product Owners? 

How to group the teams to form four development units? 

How to assign a manager to each unit? 

Those questions and many many others were on the table and needed a fast answer.

”Why not letting teams decide again by themselves?” said one of the managers.

"Did I get it right?": I thought.
The snowball was getting bigger and was still rolling…

So…after having given people all the support and information they needed to make a conscious decision, teams were asked to select their Scrum Masters and Product Owners and to give their preferences among the list of managers.

How did it go? I would say that the whole experiment was a complete success!

I’ve got this feeling not because I’m 100% sure that we found the best setup possible, but because of how much we learned out of this journey.

And now? The snowball keeps moving and we’ll see what happens!

An Agile Conference in the Heart of Europe

Last week I went to Agile Prague 2013 conference.

The conference was great and again I would like to share with you the most interesting take-aways I brought home from the sessions I attended.

1. The first one is from Scott Barber’s keynote.

He had a point that, regardless the fact that we talk about SW engineering, we are not very much learning from other more “classic” engineering fields. For instance in SW industry many still doubt about the value vs. cost of testing and there’s a spread tendency of considering SW development like manufacturing instead of R&D. That’s different in Classic Engineering, which is by the way a far more mature industry:

- No one questions the value of testing: how could you put a bridge in production without producing a prototype and testing it thoroughly?

- The Team is both responsible and legally accountable for quality/safety

- “Go Live” decisions are (relatively) easy

So we would be well served to study “other” fields of Engineering, consider real R&D practices for new software development and forget titles, but be responsible and accountable as a Team.

2. The second great insight was from Kevlin Henney’s keynote.

He started from the consideration that you’d better concentrate on what you can complete, because you learn by finishing things (as btw we are all taught by the Lean SW principle “Deliver as fast as possible”). So he introduced a theory from 1990, called Worse Is Better, of why software would be more likely to succeed if it was developed with minimal invention.

And yet we have not learnt this lesson in 2013!

The theory claims that it is far better to have an under-featured product that is rock solid, fast, and small than one that covers what an expert would consider the complete requirements.

This is all at the heart of Agile SW development, in contrast with the classical “The right thing” design philosophy and the failing ambition to define everything from the beginning. Ralph Jonson said: “Architecture is the decisions that you wish you could get right early in a project, but that you are not necessarily more likely to get them right than any other”. An empirical process control is what works best in SW development: properly gaining control of the design process tends to feel like one is losing control of the design process.

3. David Hussman in his provocative talk “Renaissance, Reformation and NonBan” urged the need for a Renaissance and Reformation of Agile back to its original spirit and practices from what sometimes now became only yet another process. We should learn again from masters like Ward Cunningham, Alan Cooper or Jeff Patton. What’s old is new again and very much necessary: storytelling, pairing, test driven. We need for instance better discussions, not better documents. What other reforms are needed today? He proposed NonBan: the least amount of process adopted by very skilled persons with the most real and measurable value. Interesting perspective, isn’t it?

4. Finally I found inspiring Andrea Provaglio talking about Dreams. He presented an organizational model based on 3 pillars: Dream, Order and Action. The Dream is about intent or vision, Order is about rules, functions and procedures, while Action is about production and skills. He mapped very nicely this model into Scrum: the Dream is the Product backlog, the Order are the Scrum ceremonies, while the Action is the Sprint, where a Dream-bit (a User Story) is actually transformed in a potentially shippable product increment. As counterpart of Dreams there are Needs, stuff that we need to do, like defects to fix. They fall into the backlog as well and it would be interesting to measure the Dreambits/Needs ration in our Product Backlog.

I gave my contribution to the Conference by delivering a session called “12 ingredients for a successful Agile transformation” which had quite a big audience and which is based on a series of posts I published on this blog (see Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3).

You can find all presentations stored at this link.

Videos from all sessions will be soon available at this link.

If you like to get info on the progress, follow @Agileprague on Twitter.

After my presentation I got an interesting question: "Do you think that signatories of the Agile Manifesto had foreseen that all in 2001?"
I answered: " I do not know if they had envisioned this when signing the Agile Manifesto, but I challenge anyone to demonstrate me that you can really implement Agile values and principles without all that is needed to transform the paradigma of an organization".

Does anyone feel like accepting the challenge? :)
What's your opinion?

12 secrets of a successful Agile transformation – Part3

As promised here I am to complete the list of 12 tips for a successful transformation towards enterprise agility. In the previous posts (from last week and two weeks ago) we talked about the first 8:

1. Why?
2. The approach
3. Training managers
4. The pilot project
5. Scaling up
6. The Transition Team
7. Create the new roles
8. Cross-functional teams 

Let’s complete the list with the last 4 then:

9. Technical Excellence

Scrum is not enough! Scrum is a very powerful way of organizing work, but doesn’t say anything about how to practically do the work. Instead the biggest challenge for a waterfall organization is delivering a potentially shippable product increment in a short iteration. This implies finding new ways of doing things, applying state-of-the-art technical practices and build teams of professional developers, who are able to find the right solutions to always new problems.

Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. – 9^th Agile principle

10. Cultural change

It’s not about doing Agile: it’s about being Agile, by embracing Agile values and principles. This means primarily focusing on value, on what really makes your customer happy and not your boss or the boss of your boss. Prioritize your work based on the contribution it gives to the people actually paying for the product and not because “we have always done like that” or in order to make people busy: busyness is not a good business.

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. – 1^st Agile principle

Then let self-organizing teams to pull the work they are able to do. This is very much connected to why Agile. We’re in an industry with such high levels of complexity and uncertainty that we can no longer assume we can know or control everything goes on. So there’s no other way than building empowered individuals and teams who are able to take decisions autonomously using their best capabilities and judgments in the moment, respond to changes fast and reach a defined goal in the most efficient way.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. – 11^th Agile principle

11. Make your transformation self-sustainable

·         Build internal coaches who can teach and coach the new roles, support people to work as performing teams and be permanent change agents: if you’re really Agile, you’re never Agile enough.

·         Nurture Communities of Practice to give people a place where to meet colleagues who share the same passion or interest and learn from each other.

·         Adjust your HR processes (Performance management, career models, recruitment, reward and compensation) to support your transformation, instead of giving contradictory messages, and enable a collaborative environment of high level professionals.

12. Use an empirical approach

An Agile transformation is not a Change Program, you can plan upfront, set goals and KPIs, deploy it to the organization and track the progress. It simply doesn’t work like this. As you might have understood introducing Agile is complex: you’ve never done it before and you do not know exactly where you’re going, how can you define the steps to get there?

The answer is then to use Agile instead: yes, use Agile to introduce Agile.

So have a transition strategy and a transition backlog, but use an empirical, iterative and incremental approach.

Prototype and refine, make assumptions and validate them through baby steps, use fast feedback loops: it’s all about Continuous Improvement.

Of course using an empirical process control implies that you can observe your system to be able to inspect and adapt. Therefore enabling full transparency is a key success factor: make relevant information visible as much as possible from everybody to everybody to be able to really understand what’s going on and act accordingly.

Otherwise your transformation will degenerate into chaos.

So here are my summary on what it takes to have a successful Agile transformation.

Happy enough, my dear cheeky brother?

BTW, Happy Easter to everybody!

12 secrets of a successful Agile transformation – Part2

Following the blog post from last week, here is the continuation of the list of 12 tips for a successful transformation towards enterprise agility. We mentioned already the first 3:

1. Why?
2. The approach
3. Training managers 

Let’s move on with 5 more:

4. The pilot project

Since we’re talking about applying an empirical process, the starting point is to setup an experiment in terms of a pilot project. Scrum can help out with its framework to give some guidance and some practices which help understand the agile principles behind. A pilot project can provide objective information on the feasibility of rolling out Agile to all the organization. Craig Larman says that if an organization is not able to implement real Scrum with only one team, how can they succeed in scaling it in the whole enterprise? But be aware of choosing a proper pilot project. It needs to be important and critical enough so that people will consider it a serious try and a valuable success (it should be used to gain even more management support for the change), but not too critical to create a safe environment for possible failure. It should be end-to-end and therefore include all the stages that are needed to bring an idea into a product and it needs to be closely monitored and supported by senior management, ready to fix possible impediments.

5. Scaling up

Leveraging on the feedback from your pilot project and acting on the findings, you can start scaling up incrementally. This will allow better control and will enable the organization to build internal capabilities to help the teams that start later.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it on a large scale – Tom Gilb

However beware not to be too slow, to avoid the organization finding them in the ford for too long and losing momentum, sense of urgency and a clear direction about the change to make.

6. The Transition Team

Creating a successful Agile organization does not simply mean make a number of Scrum teams work: it means creating all the conditions around to enable those teams to succeed and get astonishing results. The Transition Team is an operative team, with the goal of helping and supporting the organization in implementing the Agile Transformation, by supporting teams, removing organizational impediments, training and coaching people, spreading the Agile values and Lean thinking. The team works as an agile team, driven by the so-called Transition Backlog populated top-down by the organizational transformation strategy and bottom-up by impediments from the team.

7. Create the new roles

In order to scale up you need to build new skills and behaviors for people to fill the new roles of Scrum Master, Product Owner and Scrum Developer. This is best done by means of a mix of training, mentoring and coaching and is a typical item in the Transition backlog. Understanding that we’re talking about new roles, you cannot find in the existing organization, is a critical success factor. One of the worst (and yet easy and most common mistakes) is to create a mapping between existing and new roles, like System ArchitectàProduct Owner or Project ManageràScrum Master. They are totally different jobs and you need to realize this and prepare to help individuals who are willing to learn and challenge themselves to fill the gaps needed to move to the new roles.

8. Cross-functional teams

Cross-functional teams who can deliver potentially shippable product increments at each iteration are a key element in a successful Agile enterprise. So one needed step is to change your organization, remove functional silos and have self-organized teams of 5-9 people with all needed competences working together permanently. And this might imply changes in the office logistics as well, to create the right environment to enable team collaboration.

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development  team is face-to-face conversation – 6^th Agile principle

It’s probably enough for today: any comment?

Let’s have a date for the next blog post to talk about the remaining secrets for a successful Agile transformation. 

Cultural transformation through deliberate practice of behaviors

This week I was at LESS2012 conference.

The conference overall was really interesting and I would like to start right away to share with you the 3 most inspiring things I brought home with me from the sessions I attended.

1. The first one is from Jurgen Appelo’s keynote.

The whole performance rocked as usual, but I'm sure you will agree that the following concept is really great. He said that the verb “Manage” come from Italian “Maneggiare” and from French “Menage” which originally meant “drive and take care of horses”.

So Management is actually driving and taking care of organizations as they were living beings and they are indeed. That’s why management is too important to be left to managers: we must all lead.

2. The second great quote is from Beyond Budgeting track hosted by Peter Bunce (Chairman of BBRT) and Bjarte Bogsnes.

They echoed Steve Jobs saying: I discovered that sometimes the best innovation is the company, the way you organize the company. 

We need a more self-regulating way of management. We all agree in principle with this, but the problem is bringing this to practical consequences.

Most companies say or write that, but the problem is what we do, not what we say.

There are most times gaps between what we say and what we do and this gap is poison for the organizations.

3. Last reflections come from the other 2 keynotes.

Christopher Avery pointed out that traditional managers are always looking for single point of accountability, but collaboration does not work with single points of accountability.

Esko Kilpi added that from a social business standpoint, the individualistic view is fundamentally misleading: there's co-creation. So is the sense of personal responsibility. The new competitive edge will come from openness, transparent information and collaboration.

Awesome, isn’t it?

On the last day I held my workshop Learning to be a manager in the age of Agile.

The question I put was just the following.

If all the changes above are needed in 21^st century management, compared to current mainstream management (still focusing on the very same practices invented more than 100 years ago with totally a different goal than making our companies responsive, adaptable and innovative), what is a feasible path to get there?

The proposal I made is based on 3 steps:

1. Challenging current management beliefs
2. Challenging your actions in the light of Agile and Lean principles
3. Deliberate practice of functional behaviors in line with the principles

The idea is to break the maps wired so far in our brain by all experiences and beliefs in our life and which we follow naturally like a river bed to interpret the reality. Then build instead, drop by drop, new side river beds, which could allow us to see the reality with new eyes and act accordingly.

After the conference I had the pleasure to discuss this approach with Dawna Jones, who very well pointed out how just focusing on behaviors allows to achieve only short term and not permanent cultural changes.

I agree this is very true and indeed in line with the approach I suggested. Deliberate practice of behaviors (like deliberate practice of technical skills) and continuous self reflection are just ways to understand the values behind. This will allow behaviors to become habits and enter deeper in our brain and heart to create new beliefs, new assumptions, new structures and ultimately a new culture to provide different responses to our evolving reality.

It’s the management Shu-Ha-Ri!