Not that long ago I encountered a company that was fully invested in Empowered Product Teams (EPT’s). You know, the work that Marty Cagan and SVPG have been evangelizing, training, and consulting on. It’s essentially the culmination of the work that Marty shared in his Empowered book.
Full disclosure, I’ve not studied Marty’s work in excruciating detail. I’ve read it and I largely agree with his perspectives on modern-day product development team dynamics that lead to success. However, I’m not SVPG trained nor an expert in the approaches.
But that being said, the company I ran into illustrated a problem with EPT’s that I want to share so that others might reconsider the model and effectively implement it in the real world.
So, what did the company do? They—
I saw this post the other day from Geoff Watts exploring 20 Polite Ways to Say No and it struck a chord with me. Blog link – https://www.inspectandadapt.com/blog/20-polite-ways-to-say-no
Not that it was a bad article. It isn’t. Or that I disagreed with the many approaches to couch ‘No’ in a kind, soft, dare I say, polite, way. I don’t.
Basically, he provided an option to the ubiquitous “Yes, and…” that I hear so often in the agile community. It’s a “Yes, if…”. Here’s how Geoff explains it--
An alternative to "no" (and you might notice this a few times in the list above) is "Yes, if..."
Responding with "Yes, if..." can appear more positive, collaborative, and less confrontational. That doesn't necessarily make it better though. By opening yourself up to negotiation, there is still a good chance that you will take on more and more (and people may then start playing negotiation games!) so make sure the "if..." is enough.
My Concern
I guess my concern is why not simply say…No? Or, lead with a definitive and clear No, and then explain the rationale behind it?
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
I found this Forbes article by John Bremen entitled 2021 In Review: Leadership Lessons from Delta, Omicron, The Great Resignation, and Climate Impact.
In it, he shared ideas around the new focus for leaders. He describes it as being future-focused and defined ten aspects of that emergent posture.
Adopt a new mindset with risk.
Commit to elastic innovation.
Drive purpose AND profit.
Use flexibility as an advantage.
Get real about remote and hybrid work.
Focus on employee wellbeing and organizational resilience.
Lead with empathy, compassion, and transparency.
Understand that treating people fairly doesn’t mean treating them the same.
Stay focused on talent during crisis.
Support ESG and sustainability (environment, social, governance factors).
I have a colleague, agile coach, change agent, and friend who recently shared a story with me. It got me thinking about his situation from multiple perspectives.
But before I get into that, let me share a little context first.
Paul, not his real name, was leading an agile transformation in a company. He didn’t have a lot of positional authority, but he felt he was integrated sufficiently with senior leadership in technology and product to make things work.
He was unexpectedly invited to a meeting with his boss last week and he was fired. It was a complete and utter surprise.
The party line was that his role was being made redundant because they were taking another approach to their agile transformation (another model, framework, philosophy). But the abruptness of the dismissal belied that claim.
Paul felt that, in hindsight, he hadn’t been meeting organizational expectations around the transformation, but at the same time, nobody had had the courage to give him any clear feedback to that effect. Nor any mentoring or coaching to help him better achieve the organization’s goals.
If you’ve followed my writing, you know that I’m enamored with the wisdom often shared by John Cutler. Well, it’s happened again…
I found the following post on LinkedIn where John shared his thoughts around reframing retrospectives to be more positive. And that resonated deeply with my thoughts of late around the place for
In agile contexts.
I thought it was an interesting exercise to color-code them according to the following:
A few years ago, I promised myself that I wouldn’t write about (vent, rebut, defame, complain, rebuke, or otherwise whine about) SAFe any longer. It just frustrated me, made me an angry old curmudgeon, and significantly raised my blood pressure. And I realized that I needed to focus on more “positive” things in the agile community.
But dammit, it’s happened to me again. I’ve been SAFe’d…
Late last year I attended a meeting where a SAFe agilist and Fellow, presented a talk on finding purpose in SAFe. I’ll refer to them as Sam.
First Impressions
I don’t believe I’d met Sam before or at least not that I remembered. Sam seemed to be well-intentioned and principled. Sam was clearly a very smart and polished SAFe supporter and evangelist. And Sam also had a strong Kanban background and the lean side of that shined through the presentation.
I don’t want this to be interpreted as an opinion of Sam as a person. Instead, it’s an opinion (again) of SAFe and Sam representing SAFe as a Fellow.
Gustavo Razzetti put the following in a LinkedIn post recently—
Organizations have an accountability crisis.
Research shows that 82% of managers say they have limited to no ability to hold others accountable. 🤔
Rather than holding people accountable, promote a sense of ownership.
Create a culture where people feel they own their work.
Psychological ownership motivates people to go above and beyond – it increases job satisfaction, commitment to the organization, and performance.
Then he went on to attach the following lengthier article to the post.
