Classically trained musicians start by learning the most fundamental elements, scales. The tedium of learning scales can make it hard to stay motivated to continue. To excel and be truly great, a musician needs the benefits that are the direct result of the repetition. It’s muscle memory that allows them to go beyond the technical and play pieces of music with passion and spirit. Those who blindly move ahead without the benefit of the basics often take longer to mature as they unlearn bad habits while simultaneously learning the fundamentals. What do musical scales have to do with agile? It’s the repetitive fundamentals, which appear to be too rigid and stuffy for agility, that contain a key to successful transformation.
Agile adoption isn’t easy or quick. A training activity with Post-Its may lead you to think that agility is simple and easy to implement. Host some training, coach some teams and boom, job done. The reality is that day to day, the implementation takes time, patience, tenacity, and resilience. The last one, resilience, is especially important because it accounts and expects there to be setbacks. Thinking that an organization can be agile immediately after a training course is like thinking you can play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata after watching a few YouTube videos. That’s just not going to happen – unless of course you are a savant. The reality is, the real work is behind the scenes, obscured by an enviable result. We’ve all experienced someone telling us, “you make that look easy!” when more often than not, it’s been countless hours of repetition, learning, and practice that give the illusion of ease.
To truly transform, a musician, like an agility seeking organization must draw on the same things: persistence, practice, and habit. A musician must select an instrument, an organization must select an agile methodology, and stick to it until it is learned. Method selection, like instrument selection, shouldn’t be rushed. It should be carefully thought out, culture and organizational values must be considered, as well as the value that implementing agility will generate. Organizations often mis-step at this point, they will select a methodology and end up deviating from the principles that make the methodology work. This is why it is imperative that once the methodology has been selected, it should be practiced precisely as intended.
As with anything, all organizations will face struggles. When they do, they will often jump from methodology to methodology, or worse, pick and choose pieces of various methodologies. This happens because organizations think they’re smarter than the tried and tested methodologies, they think they’re unique. In taking either of these approaches when faced with setbacks, a growing sense of failure and resentment around the change arises. Eventually, when faced with pressure from the highest level of the organization, agility is abandoned in favour of command and control models. What’s worse, agility is often blamed as the reason the setbacks occurred. If only they’d stuck with a methodology and gone back to basics. Practice makes perfect right?
Organizations that succeed in implementing agile take the opposite approach. They engage in a persistent approach to the selected agile methodology, and they continue to apply it as intended. These organizations challenge themselves to evaluate their behaviour and reflect before acting whenever the temptation to move away from the guidelines arises. They understand that early on in agile adoption, a desire to deviate from the guidelines is not inappropriate, it’s actually an excuse made to maintain a comfortable status quo. By embracing the change, a healthy level of discomfort occurs, and in the end making them better. A musician who has mastered one instrument can often learn to play another with ease. Similarly successful organizations that have truly learned, practiced, and formed good habits from a methodology are able to adjust and tweak in the name of improvement as they grow beyond the basics.
The Moral: Master the basics of a method, then and only then should you improvise to create something even better.