Today, we dive into Chapter 1 of Great Big Agile, An OS for Agile Leaders by Jeff Dalton. I am mentioned in the first paragraph of the book. Being mentioned by someone you hold in high regard is humbling but it is not why I like this book. Here’s a true story, I actually skimmed the first chapter during my initial read and missed the reference. It wasn’t until later when the book hooked me and I dug in that I saw it. Jeff starts the discussion of great big agile with a call to action highlighting the idea that how people behave is a truer reflection of culture than written or spoken words. In many organizations, there is a disconnect between the real culture and the stated culture which is one of the leading reasons organizational change fails. The mind shift of becoming agile exposes gaps between the real and aspirational culture that, if not addressed, cause pain as long as the institutional memory exists.
One of the things I enjoy about Jeff’s rhetoric is the use of coined terms. In a recent appearance on the Software Process and Measurement Cast, Jeff used the term “hopeium, to describe a wish that the mismatch between information security and practice would just go away. In Great Big Agile, Jeff uses the term cagile, corporate agile, to describe organizations that bring their own habits, culture, and bureaucracy to agile yielding a weak hybrid. The book contrasts the “the rules of men” which yield hierarchies with command control structures to “the rules of nature” that yield more distributed and diverse systems of organization.
Before the author lays out the Agile Performance Holarchy (APH) later in the chapter, one of the key takeaways is the idea that agile without self-organization isn’t agile at all. Anyone that has been in the business of helping guide organizations toward agile has seen this issue. There are also sorts of names for organizations that do the practices and even identify agile sounding roles but don’t address the philosophy. Many of the terms that are used are rude and some make me uncomfortable so I will not use them here, BUT we have all heard these terms more than once. Without self-organization command and control structures have to stay in place. Self-organization pushes decision making down closer to the work and allows teams and groups to react faster based on fresher information. Jeff also points out that pushing decision making down empowers leaders to deal with strategy rather than day to day work.
The APH framework to address organizational agility leverages three layers of models:
- ‘Why’ models, which include values and guiding principles;
- ‘What’ models deliver the roles, frameworks, methods, and artifacts, and
- ‘How’ models describe the behaviors, actions, and outcomes.
Holons, popularized in the book The Ghost in the Machine, are the mechanism to describe and use the APH. Holons are “self-reliant entities that possess a degree of independence and can handle contingencies without asking authorities for instructions.” The discussion on page 11 (I read it several times) is critical to understanding how the next several chapters fit together. My mental model uses the human body as a metaphor for a group of holons interacting with other holons to deliver something that is larger than the sum of the parts.
At its highest level, the APH is comprised of six performance circles. They are:
- Leading
- Crafting
- Envisioning
- Teaming
- Affirming
- Providing
The next six chapters dive into each circle. Of note in chapter one are the user stories crafted for each using the classic as a/I want/so that format. This user story format is a great discipline for honing in on who the circle is for, what the outcome of the circle is, and the benefit.
The composition of each performance circle include:
- one-to-many holons,
- a set of objectives and outcomes,
- actions (behaviors), and
- techniques.
The structure of the performance circles ties to Jeff’s why/what/how the structure of models discussed earlier in this chapter.
Chapter 1 introduces the APH and the structure for each performance circle. During my initial read, I glossed over this chapter to get to chapter 4 (I had a specific need) and paid the price by having to return and spend more time on the foundation. Hmmm…perhaps I just proved the need to progress from beginner to student and then to master as a continuous cycle.
Remember to buy your own copy and read along!
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