Agility for latecomers: Is it too late or a new opportunity?

Hint: there is hope.

It is easy to lose hope when necessary change becomes mountainous. Latecomers to agility often find themselves in this situation. But, as this article will reveal, there is a silver lining unique to those who are arriving late.

I have been absent from my blogging for most of the first half of 2023. My energy has been sapped as I work with many organizations warming up to “modern” ways of working. These organizations, along with many others, are late to the pursuit of agility.

I was speaking to a fellow coach about these late adopters a few weeks back. The conversation went down a typical path of pessimism for these latecomers.

She asked me if I felt agility was “dead on arrival” for these organizations.

My initial response came fast. Well, to be clear, I gave an immediate answer, but I have a different opinion now. This question keeps popping into my mind. I keep coming back to it, as my answer seemed too obvious and…perhaps shallow.

My experiences with these late adopters have been poor to borderline depressing. The significant change in front of them is difficult to fathom, and they have trouble making space for it. Also, the crowd of other agility chasers is often running down the wrong path and don’t represent good examples to follow.

So, from this reference point, I answered her question. As I reflect, this is not an answer I am proud to have said. Now, I have a renewed perspective, and my response would be much more nuanced.

In response, I said, “These organizations have been working in their current status quo too long. There is very little chance they will be able to make this leap.”

These words came out of my mouth fast and far too easily. I was blinded by the enormity and difficulty of the challenge for these companies. And I fell into the trap many fall into when it comes to big change.

I missed the one thing that should have been obvious; one that is now obvious in hindsight.

I’ll get back to my revised outlook for latecomers based on my missing puzzle piece. But let’s first unpack why I responded the way I did. And then, we will get back to how I would respond today if asked the same question.

Late adopters and the change mountains in front of them

It is easy for those late to agility to become disillusioned. While the courage to finally face change is great, they have difficult summits ahead. Even as an external guide to these organizations, I can easily feel defeated along with them.

Let’s explore four of the most difficult mountains I commonly see in front of latecomers.

Mountain №1: Hardened status quo

Most of the late arrivals to agility have been practicing their current status quo for a long time. Their behaviors and beliefs are more entrenched than earlier adopters. And with this existing behavior longevity comes a significant resistance to change.

Let me give you a flavor of some common status quo anti-pattern barriers they must overcome:

• As many as five layers between teams and their customers and stakeholders.
• An unwavering drive towards a rigid, up-front-defined scope. Even worse, it must meet a deadline and a fixed budget without the benefit of emergent learning.
• A stubborn sentiment to assume unlimited capacity. This drives too many in-flight efforts and enormous amounts of context-switching waste.
• A strict separation of business and technology into distinct teams.
• Locally optimized, specialized teams focusing on unintegrated parts and separate priorities.
• A top-down, hierarchical, command-and-control structure aiming at predictable output delivery.
• A lead time from concept to cash measured in years.
• No safety to raise problems.
• Many layers of status reporting optics, ensuring red always appears green.
• Rare improvement inspection events and even rarer improvement adaptation measures.

Where should they start to improve when faced with many or all of these issues at once? They have a broken system and there are no half-measures to improve it. The only option they have is radical change.

But the last thing these organizations want to do is change. The entire system they have in place is purpose-built to make the current system work.

The system itself is fortified and expels any attempt to thwart its existence. Change gets treated like a disease. And the organization’s immune system releases antibodies to attack it.

Mountain №2: Overwhelming piles of debt

The debt I mention here is not referring to financial debt. I am pointing out the compromises organizations make over time. Many times, corners get cut due to pressure to reach short-term objectives.

Financial debt, if not paid off, has interest that hurts future financial health. Likewise, an organization’s debt, if left unchecked, can pile up and wreak havoc on future efforts.

Debt comes in many forms. And late adopters tend to have many that have reached an unsustainable level. When this debt piles up, the organization’s value flow plummets.

Here are some of the common debt scenarios I’ve seen plaguing these late arrivers:

• Knowledge debt: Organizational silos create specialized knowledge banks. This local optimization prevents the cross-pollination of expertise. Autonomy to deliver value shrinks without the know-how or permission to take ownership.
• Technical debt: As compromises pile up, serious levels of internal quality cruft destroy future flow.
• Improvement debt: The system is so good at resisting change it has created a long list of improvements needed but not made. This leads to acceptance of the status quo, apathy, and stagnation.
• Innovation debt: When ideas get relegated to a select few, innovation slows and becomes less impactful. The innovative potential of the entire organization is held hostage.
• Decision debt: Decisions pile up as they wait in line for those in power to make them. All others lose ownership and purpose.

The debt burden is heavy, especially since many of these are present at once with late adopters. It carries a massive cognitive load. Its weight stresses out employees and encourages disengagement.

And the more debt these organizations have, the more they tend to take on. After all, what difference does it make to throw one more item in the large pile? Believe me, it matters; debt load is one of the biggest predictors of future ineffectiveness.

Mountain №3: No space for change

Summiting the №1 and №2 mountains will take serious time, money, and patience for late adopters. As you can imagine, given the embedded status quo behaviors and the giant level of debt, slack is in short supply. No slack ensures no change.

This third mountain is harder to climb than you might think. Consider the obstacles that must be overcome to make space for change:

• Excessive existing commitments will need to be backtracked to drastically limit work-in-progress.
• Future commitments will need to be reduced significantly to match capacity.
• Behaviors will have to shift from a starting culture to a finishing culture.
• Interruptions will have to be managed.
• All involved will have to learn to say, “No,” or, “Not now.”
• Batch size will have to shrink to increase feedback loops and provide more chances to adapt.
• Corner cutting will have to stop; internal quality will have to take precedence.
• The act of setting deadlines up front at the moment of highest uncertainty will have to stop.
• Hand-offs will have to drastically reduce.

The existing status quo starts to seem comforting, like a warm blanket, when faced with all these changes.

The weight of the change hits home when these organizations realize this is not a simple effort. Deep change requires grit and long-term determination to see it through. And having the endurance to make space for it day after day is a tough pill to swallow.

Mountain №4: The early majority is often not worth emulating

You don’t have to look far to find an article espousing the sad state of agility as it gets practiced at large today. The agile movement gained popularity fast. And in a rush to jump on the bandwagon, many companies ended up with surface-level change.

Most companies are agile in name only, with no deep change to their cultural behaviors or beliefs.

I’ve seen this firsthand and watched many retreat to the perceived safety of prior behaviors. There are many reasons why change has not been deep with the early majority of agility seekers. Here are a few:

• Installation of frameworks as an attempt at a quick fix.
• Scaling before fundamental patterns of behavior are in place.
• Keeping existing hierarchical command-and-control structures.
• Changing titles without changing behaviors.
• Keeping existing functional silos and attempting to “coordinate” dependencies.
• Changing only one layer of the organization, such as the team layer.
• Modifying only one aspect of the organization, such as technology.
• Rolling out the change all at once with light-touch training and certifications.
• Performing incremental change on the broken system instead of fundamentally changing it.
• Nonexistent executive and middle-management support.
• Over-emphasing playbooks and standard ways of working rather than customizing to context.
• Sticking to a big, up-front, predictive, yearly budgeting process.
• Adding processes and working harder versus reducing and simplifying the system.

Late adopters fear changing when they look at the poor state of affairs of those that came before them. These other companies don’t look any better off than they are. The others often look worse than the late adopters do.

The leg up late adopters have

Feeling defeated yet? I’m sure you are; it’s easy to see how late adopters become discouraged. These change mountains are also why I responded to the coach’s question the way I did with such pessimism.

But we are all missing something. Late adopters have a critical advantage over those that have come before them. I’m not certain why I did not see this at first; it is obvious in hindsight.

Late adopters have the unique privilege to take advantage of the missteps and successes of those that came before them.

Let that sink in. Others that have come before did not have this position. Hindsight is a powerful asset. Late adopters can tap into the wisdom built up by thousands of organizations that have tried to be agile.

The wealth of knowledge can help these late arrivals avoid costly pitfalls. It can provide a foothold to gain confidence to try something new. The paths of others can reveal doors not visible within the confines of the existing status quo.

Standing on the shoulders of those that came before you is a great vantage point. It makes climbing the summit more achievable. At a minimum, it shines a light on a possible path forward in what would otherwise be darkness.

My revised answer

I started this article bemoaning my response to my colleague’s inquiry. She asked my opinion on the outlook of agility late adopters. And I responded with a defeatist reply.

But I reflected deeper on the late adopter dilemma, as well as their unique position to learn from the past. I have a more measured response. Here it is:

”In many ways, late adopters are better off than those that came before them. If they couple the learnings from others with a beginner’s mind, they have an advantage. They may be in a better spot than even the earliest of adopters.”

For this to be possible, we all need to make our successes and failures available to late adopters. This will make the wisdom of the crowd a reality. I have always benefited from others in the agile community, and I, for one, will continue to give back.

And who knows, maybe this sharing will help all and not just the late adopters. Perhaps the struggling early majority will benefit as well. We can all gain from each other and get back to focusing on the basic foundations of agility.

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