Phase and Harmony

In most organizations, the teams themselves are functioning relatively well as agile entities. They have the overall concepts and practices understood and internalized. Every iteration, they go through a number of motions following the patterns they have been taught. Unfortunately, they also carry a degree of cynicism that permeates their activities, some more than others. Mostly, this cynicism rises from the desire to bring about changes we (the individuals on the teams) feel need to happen in order to optimize our efforts. I have seen indication that attempts had been made initially but since the desired actions were felt to be outside of the individual spheres of influence, the they have given up trying to achieve the change and, worse yet, believing that the organization’s desire for change is only lip-service.

Basically, the teams have tentatively pushed out of their flow and into that of the enterprise above them and some of those irritating turbulent eddies have formed. There seems to be little attempt to understand the irritants in the next higher flow and so a defeatism has developed and fostered the cynicism. The result here is that the teams go through the motions with the agile approach, but no one is really embracing it as a way of doing work. Evidence of this is the total disinterest in improving their execution of the art, the value of transparency and the unwillingness to seek goal alignment between products and organization. Instead a resentment has been born between one group and the next as well between one layer and the next. From this dysfunction, mistrust becomes more and more entrenched and it becomes impossible to reach phase and harmony, forcing the teams to always operate well below their potential.

To add to this, the resentment tends to be redirected towards the change undertaken and redirected towards agile methods themselves. Since titles and responsibilities tend to be changed without specific care given to the roles themselves, middle management feels as if much of their power and ability to affect direction has been lost. Rather than retrenching and establishing leadership from mutual respect, most of the folks again tend to rely on position and title to direct the actions of their teams and people. Clearly a left over command and control trait, but it is one that seems to be more well respected by senior management (the next flow up) than the collaborative structures that we try to base the methodology on.