John Kotter wrote a Harvard Business Review piece in 1995, over 25 years ago, entitled Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. In it, he listed eight failure patterns or errors that often undermine organizational change and transformation efforts.
Now, at the time, agile ways of working were in their infancy and this was ~5-years before the writing of the Agile Manifesto. But when I came across it again, the article made me reflect on how many of these errors are still relevant and active today?
Error #1: Not Establishing a Great Enough Sense of Urgency
Error #2: Not Creating a Powerful Enough Guiding Coalition
Error #3: Lacking a Vision
Error #4: Under-communicating the Vision by a Factor of Ten
Error #5: Not Removing Obstacles to the New Vision
Error #6: Not Systemically Planning for and Creating Short-Term Wins
Error #7: Declaring Victory Too Soon
Error #8: Not Anchoring Changes in the Corporation’s Culture
Many of you know that I often like to begin an article with a musical connection if I can.
The band Queensryche is a fairly well known heavy metal band who had a song Resistance. It’s not my favorite song of theirs, that’s probably Best I Can, but it’s a good one. And it was running through my mind as this topic rose up in my thinking.
But moving on…
I was hosting a Coaching Clinic at the Agile Online Summit this week (late October 2020). In our Monday and Tuesday clinics, about ten people were looking for help in overcoming resistance within their agile contexts. Leadership resistance and team-level resistance were neck-in-neck as being problem areas.
As I was facilitating the coaching sessions, it made me think about resistance. And I remembered an old (mature, but still relevant) article written by Dale Emory on resistance entitled—Resistance as a Resource. It was published in 2001, so about 20 years ago. Dale also used to share on this topic at conferences.
I’d read it several times over the years, but I read through it again. And as I did so, it resonated more with me now than it ever had before.
Something came up on the September 20th Kazi stream about how to maintain your energy level as a change agent, which is incredibly hard at times. And, on a related note, the challenge of knowing when it’s time to leave.
Change Agency is…HARD!
The harsh reality is that every Scrum Master and Agile Coach in any instance, situation, or context is a CHANGE AGENT. You are in a role that is trying to guide folks along a change curve to a new state.
And being a CHANGE AGENT is, in a word, HARD!
There’s no other way to say it. In many ways change agency reminds me of the Energizer Bunny in that you/we need to “bring it” every minute of every day. We have to bring enthusiasm, energy, positivity, engagement, and a can-do attitude every day to our work.
If you find yourself lacking on the energy front for too many days in a row, you have to seriously reconsider your choice of jobs. It’s that simple.
I once worked as a coach at a large financial firm that had been “going Agile” for quite awhile. They were one of the worlds largest firms, so the teams and the projects were often distributed.
They had invested in a relationship with a Ukrainian firm to outsource a significant part of their software. This had been going on for a while, so there was integration between internal and outsourced agile team members.
I was pulled in to help the outsourced teams with their understanding of agile practices. You see, even though they “said” they were agile, their behaviors were really suspect and more indicated cowboy and self-centered development.
