A blogger and thinker whose perspective I value greatly, Henrik Martensson, has just published an enormously relevant and powerful post on agile and the enterprise.
Henrik reminds us that the principles underlying the Agile Manifesto are simply incompatible with command-and-control hierarchies, and any attempt to make agile thinking more compatible with the enterprise environment as it exists today will simply eliminate the stuff that really works and contains the seeds of real change.
In his final paragraph, Henrik writes:
The agile principles can be improved upon. The problem is that if you improve them to be more in line with science (physics, queueing theory, statistics, neuroscience, psychology, systems thinking), you make agile less compatible with most enterprises.
If you improve the principles for the purpose of increasing compatibility with enterprises, you will have to remove a significant portion of the scientific basis. You will also make agile less responsive to customer’s needs and desires.
The solution, I believe, is to redesign the enterprises. Most enterprises are built on old paradigms. Those paradigms have become obsolete. They are no longer compatible with the environments in which the enterprises exist.
I consider this last point to be exactly spot on, and I worry that in trying to help organizations try to improve performance on the team level, we are doing the affected individuals as well as the organization itself no favors.
If an organism needs to re-write its DNA to survive, and we prescribe a band-aid and two Tylenol (or even an angioplasty), are we really doing the right thing as practitioners?
