Agile is Fragile

I recently had the pleasure of seeing David Douglas and Raj Vaidyanathan presenting "Integrating into the whole...embedding agile processes into all aspects of S1's business model" at Agile Austin.  During that presentation, David was lamenting the fact that agile is fragile.  He related several experiences where, despite visible indicators of success, agile adoptions had ultimately failed to be sustainable.  This lack-of-sustainability pattern is certainly a familiar one, and we should look hard to find root causes so we can address them.

I think the lack of sustainable agility can be traced—in large part—to a loss of trust.  "The first thing to build is TRUST!", as Brad Appleton says.  Trust is critical to the proper functioning of an agile organization.  Where there is less trust, we see more dysfunction.  On the surface it can appear that everything is going well.  We all have a lot of real-world experience with putting on a façade of trust.  Ultimately the actions of the team will reveal how much, or how little, trust actually exists.

Trust is slow to build, and quick to destroy.  Since trust is a foundational element of agility, the fragile nature of trust makes agile fragile.  However, there is hope here as well.  Trust relationships exhibit a plateau behavior.  Once established, they achieve a degree of stability that allows trust to survive sort-term attacks.  A slow erosion of trust, or a catastrophic trust-breaking event, will still lead to dysfunction.  If you are feeling a loss of agility, it may be a good time to check on the level of trust in your organization.

Comments

[Jeff Brantley]

Dale,
I could not agree more. If you add to this the layer of mistrust that is often (unfortunately) already present between the product strategy folks (whether called product marketing or product management in your organization) and the engineering leadership and you have another huge obstacle to continued Agile success. This is worthy of another post of my own, but I place most of that blame on us, the product managers/marketers. Unfortunately, we cannot succeed and build trust by continuing to say the words "Trust me." Actions speak louder than words. It takes an ongoing, transparent and collaborative effort in the trenches (including so-called mistakes) that executives and product managers often do not have the stamina (or desire) to endure. Thanks for your post. More to come...