I'm a complex adaptive system. So are you. Every organization we have ever been a part of, including our families, are also complex adaptive systems. I have been talking about the properties of complex adaptive systems for years, and I have been yearning for a reference that would not only bring out the considerable theory of these fascinating systems but would also tie it to agile development. Now, I am happy to be able to point you, dear reader, and everyone else, who wants to know the bigger, broader story of agile, to this book that Sunil Mundra has written. He has done an excellent job of making what could be a difficult subject easy for all of us to understand and apply.
It's so easy to fall into the trap of believing that we can understand both ourselves and the environments in which we function. This is why I'm always suspicious of anyone who tries to explain the history of anything in a neat story. The truth is, we have been sold a bill of goods by teachers and philosophers. The pig in a poke we bought without hesitation is that things are modular, made up of pieces with clean interfaces, easily identified, easily extracted, and easily combined. Understanding these components leads to an understanding of the whole. It seems so obvious. It seems so right. But it was so wrong. It led us to take a simplistic view of change—both personal and organizational. We thought we could simply apply enough force and voila the result would appear. If we only had enough power, we could literally move mountains. No wonder all our change efforts failed!
Part of the reason for this mechanistic thinking that we now struggle to undo is the work of Frederick Taylor and his "scientific management." His contribution is often denigrated, but I believe we should celebrate his efforts. He was a well-intentioned, intelligent thinker who tried to bring what was at that time a new methodical approach to the workplace. He experimented. He measured. He learned. Sounds agile to me! I have the same reaction to those who disparage "waterfall." First, the current, incorrect, linear interpretation of Royce's original paper has caused the same disparaging of his work. For those careful readers of his article, the true meaning, an iterative solution to the then chaos that surrounded software development, will unfold.
It wasn't that far removed from where we are today and was certainly a very good step in the right direction. A dose of humility, realizing that we all are products of our environments and can only see what we can see, would serve us well. It's too easy to see the problems of the past and too difficult to see our current dilemmas. An ancient text admonishes, "How can you say to your brother or sister, 'Brother, Sister, let me take the splinter out of your eye,' when you don't see the log in your own eye?"
Fortunately for you, dear reader, Sunil doesn't take the high ground but, step by step, leads us forward, building on the great contributions of the past. And so on to what I consider the "heart" of the book—the discussion of complex adaptive systems. CAS for the rest of us! A CAS is well-named. There is nothing simple about it. The components, their interactions, the resulting, emergent behavior. It may be too much for our limited understanding, but the direction is clear, we have to begin to adopt this model if we are to survive.
As Sunil points out, this notion has been with us, in some form, from the beginning. We may not have applied it consciously, but it has been the key to our survival in a changing world. It is the answer to many of the big questions. How did we get here? How can we face our current reality? How can we get better? The answer is close to miraculous. It's exactly what we need. It's not prescriptive, it's adaptive. It's not stuck in the past, it's always about learning and improving. It's not about reaching a goal and relaxing, it's about always, always, always reaching and moving forward. The label "agile" insists on being applied.
The image of butterflies, so delicate and beautiful, helps us understand this. I'm a musician and occasionally play in a small ensemble for our local hospice organization. In the spring, a very special event honors those who have passed on during the previous year. It's a butterfly release. Families who have lost loved ones are given a small box that contains a butterfly. They stand with heads bowed, shoulders down, holding each other, deep in sad remembering. After a short service (with music from my group), each family opens its box and holds a drowsy butterfly briefly before it opens its wings and soars upward. The metaphor is stunning. What seems to be dead is alive. Regardless of your religious beliefs (and hospice espouses none), we all crave that feeling of hope in a time of despair. The feelings spread throughout the crowd as the butterflies appear overhead. The system has changed. People are now looking up, raising their hands, smiling, chattering to each other. What caused this? The butterflies? Some deep instinct in all of us for survival in difficult times? The beautiful spring morning and our love of being outside with flowers and others close to us? It's a system. It's a complex adaptive system that responds to small changes in the environment.
Those small changes change everything. It's wonderful to see that shift. This is the essence of our story, so we should pay attention. The larger system is sensitive to even the slightest probe. If we stand back, nudge, observe, and learn, that will lead us home.
This "probe, sense, respond" framework is often called "small experiments" by the agile community. Small, simple, fast, frugal, safe-to-fail "lever points" are the stepping stones in a fearless change journey. As Sunil points out (he has probably read Fearless Change and More Fearless Change) this is the secret to any kind of change—technical, organizational, cultural—small steps based on safe-to-fail experiments. I don't know how many times I have heard an intelligent, thoughtful executive declare: our organization will be agile by June! This sense that we can shove systems around, that all it takes is determination and incentives, is an unfortunate, widespread misunderstanding of systems theory. We often consider upheaval in the past as being a single event. It doesn't matter whether it's an uprising or an invasion, we somehow see it as an overnight phenomenon, when it took years of baby steps. Close examination of any significant historical event will reveal an intricate pattern of small efforts, some failures, with overall progress in a direction that eventually led to the attention-getting occurrence.
What can we learn from all this? In his instructive section Implications for enterprises, Sunil offers us concrete suggestions that we can all use to better understand how we and our organizations change, learn, and grow. The key is resilience, a technical term in psychology that refers to the ability we all have, to some degree, to recover from difficult times. It seems to be the defining characteristic, more so than the actual circumstances or genetic qualities of an individual. For those who are resilient, the world is less daunting. The good news is that, like many other important attributes, it can be learned. That's not only true for individuals, it's also true for organizations. That's the good news. And for you, dear reader, that's hope. We are lucky to have discovered Sunil's handbook. We are lucky that he has taken the time to document his wisdom, and, finally, we are lucky that we have resolved to apply it and get better.
Dr Linda Rising
Co-author of Fearless Change and More Fearless Change
As I pored over the manuscript of this book at a coffee shop near my home, I could see the big "Going Out of Business" banner in the window of the store across the road—Carson's. This American chain of department stores was established 160 years ago, not so long after the first industrial revolution. It survived two world wars, the big depression, mass automation and scaling in manufacturing. But it couldn't survive the information age; it recently filed for bankruptcy.
Carson's story is depressingly familiar. Its 50 stores are but a small fraction of the estimated 2,500 stores being shuttered across the US retail sector this year. And that's on the back of 5,000 stores closed in 2017. The shift to e-commerce and online retail has resulted in a perilous decline in foot traffic at malls up and down the country.
Reflecting on the closing sign, as I sipped my coffee, I wondered if the leadership team at Carson's would echo what the Nokia CEO said, as he announced his firm was being acquired by Microsoft: "We didn't do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost." Such sentiments would probably resonate with Kodak, Borders, Blockbusters and other companies crushed by the digital age.
Like it or not, we live in an age of rapid changes, and the pace of change is still accelerating.
Take a look at what's happening at our biggest companies. According to a 2016 study, in 1965 the average tenure of companies on the S&P 500 was 33 years; by 1990, it was 20 years. By 2026, it's forecast to be just 14 years. To put that in context, it means around half of the current S&P 500 will be replaced over the next 10 years.
At the heart of this disruption are digital technologies. The rapidly decreasing cost of computing, storage and data transfer are creating network effects driving the growth of even more exciting technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual/augmented reality, voice/facial recognition, natural language processing, and self-driving vehicles, just to name a few.
But we are not fine-tuned to deal with accelerating changes. The majority of the human history has been defined by linear and incremental changes. Even today, our organizational designs and management theories are based on a relatively stable and consistent environment, where certain competitive advantages can be protected for decades.
That's not to say that our preferred state is complete stasis. Every enterprise has some level of agility and can deal with gradual changes. But in an era of accelerating change, enterprises need to be more agile than ever before: agility is becoming as important as, if not more than, vision and strategy.
There have been some successful attempts bring more agility to various industries—notably Lean Manufacturing and Agile Software Development. But scaling Agile to the entire enterprise, regardless of function, unit and geography, remains the business world's greatest challenge.
Many books have tried to address enterprise agility at scale, mostly from a component perspective—technology, process, people, culture, and so on. But in trying to encapsulate Agile practices, some of these titles given the mistaken impression that there can be a one-size-fit-all solution. The danger of such an approach is that enterprises jump on the Agile adoption bandwagon without truly understanding how to derive value from Agile.
This book brings a fresh perspective to scaling Agile at the enterprise level. Sunil's favorite metaphor compares an organization with a human body, and agility with health. The first implication is that it's not about "doing" Agile (as doing health), but more about "being" Agile (as being healthy). Being Agile stems from the organization's mindset, culture and leadership behaviors, rather than anything mechanistic.
The second implication is that Agile is less about transformation from state X to state Y; it's about continuous improvement, becoming a learning organization. Every organization is unique in certain ways. Agility also means something different from organization to organization. Sunil distilled his observations on Agile teams (both successful ones and unsuccessful ones) in different context into patterns (enablers to agility) and anti-patterns (inhibitors to agility). While they are organized through six different categories—organizational structure, process, people, technology, governance, and customer—for easier navigation and mental model building, they are never meant to be a catalog of tools to be applied separately.
If you want a cookie-cutter style roadmap for Agile, this is not the book for you. Instead, what Sunil's provided is a framework to enable you to create your own roadmap, one that's tailored to your own unique organization and situation. This book guides you through assessments you can undertake to identify the inhibitors to agility, as well as enablers you can introduce to enhance agility. It helps you plan for change based on your own business context, to prioritize and execute. Working with CEOs and senior business leaders, I am often asked questions like: "Should I copy the Spotify Squad framework?" (or whichever the latest "success story"). I am glad that I can now offer Sunil's book illustrating the path to a customized roadmap through understanding patterns and anti-patterns.
Sunil has years of experience of working closely with Agile teams in large organizations, and he's used that wealth of knowledge and learning from the coalface to produce a book that offers practical advice and encouragement.
We all know that the next two decades promise to be more challenging than ever, as the pace of technological advance increases. And we can't promise that Carson's, Nokia and Kodak will be the last companies to be caught out by the pace of change. But I wholeheartedly believe that those business leaders that follow the advice laid out in Sunil's book—and embrace Enterprise Agility as a core competence—will be well placed to thrive in this hyper-competitive environment.
Guo Xiao
CEO, ThoughtWorks