Your Agile transformation is stuck

An associate of mine also in the transformation field noted that agile transformations are extremely fragile. Truth be told, all transformations are fragile, but agile ones appear more so because we celebrate collaboration and transparency and so everyone’s contribution becomes more obvious and the collective’s progress more clearly visible – or not.

Any transformation relies on establishing sufficient momentum under the new processes so that the level of effort needed by the teams to keep them moving becomes minimal and sustainable. Once organizations get over the initial hump of learning, they should become fueled by the benefits: energy put in to use the new approach is dwarfed by the value received from using it. At least this is what we hope and expect will happen.

Occasionally, the change agent gets it all wrong and the local culture will not sustain the new methodology. More frequently the methodology used at one level of the organization is enough out of phase with the governance of the organization and the resulting discord does not allow the new methodology to ‘adhere’. A good analogy here are the stratified layers in any moving currents, such as layers of water or air. Wholly within the current the flow is smooth, but where the layers touch, there is a fair amount of turbulence. Indeed, experimenting with water or air where the different currents are colored shows that whenever a random stray from one flow gets ’loose,’ eddies form infectious pockets of turbulence that swell, fester, and eventually dissipate – but only after the currents in that area are well disturbed.