Steve Denning

Steve Denning, Contributor

RADICAL MANAGEMENT: Rethinking leadership and innovation

Leadership
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5/04/2011 @ 10:33AM |1,534 views

Innovation: Applying "Inspect & Adapt" To The Agile Manifesto


In the annals of innovation, the Agile Manifesto stands out. In 2001, Jeff Sutherland, Ken Schwaber, Kent Beck and fourteen colleagues got together in Snowbird and drafted the Manifesto, which became a clarion call to software developers around the globe to pursue a radically different and more innovative type of management.

The Manifesto inspired thousands of high-performance teams in hundreds of companies all around the world to produce software in a way that was more responsive to customers’ needs, more productive for the organization and more satisfying for the people doing the work.

The Manifesto remains a landmark in software development and indeed, for management innovation more generally.

This year, on the tenth anniversary of the Manifesto, there is good deal of well-deserved celebration of the success of the Manifesto and some reflection on its implications.  Given its historical status, there is a natural tendency to declare the Manifesto to be a timeless wonder.

Others have seen that it was a product of a particular time and place and have been willing apply the spirit of “inspect and adapt” to the Manifesto itself and explore ways in which it could be enhanced to reflect the realities of today’s marketplace in which “the customer is the boss”.

One such exploration is by Kent Beck in an entertaining talk entitled “To Agility and Beyond” captured on video here. His talk focuses on software startups, but his points are equally applicable to any organization starting a new line of business.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

The Manifesto states the following:

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

What’s Agile?

Beck was present at the creation of the Manifesto in 2001, but confesses that for much of the meeting he was ill and suffering from the effects of a weird antibiotic and so he doesn’t remember much of what happened at the meeting. He credits Jim Highsmith and Martin Fowler for pulling the pieces together. He says that the Manifesto was the least common denominator of the people in the room: these were the things that everyone could agree on.

He notes that the participants wanted to make the principles attractive to people. They picked the word, “agile”, because everybody wanted to be agile. In retrospect, one can see that when you pick a name of something that everybody wants, everybody will claim that they are already that. The result has been that a great many of the so-called “agile implementations” around the world are only agile in name, or what has been called Half-Arsed Agile.

In looking back, Beck finds that while each segment of the Manifesto was a giant leap forward in 2001, the language no longer reflects the challenge of launching successful innovation in the marketplace of 2011.

Team vision and discipline over individuals and interactions

Back in 2001, traditional management tended to think that if you had the right processes and tools, it wouldn’t matter who was executing. The idea that with the right processes and tools, you could have anyone writing the software and it would come out exactly the same turned out to be true, but the software produced in this way wasn’t very valuable.

In 2001, it was a big step forward in software development to realize that the people and how they interacted with each other mattered more than following some process. So the Manifesto declared that “individuals and interactions” were valued more than “processes and tools”.

Beck has found however that in developing software in new business lines, “individuals and interactions” are not enough. Each individual in a team in a startup needs to think, not about how good a job he or she can do, but rather, how good a job are we doing? The implications of that are sometime unattractive. This means that sometimes an individual may need to do less than what that individual thinks is the very best in order for the team to achieve more. So if the individual knows an esoteric technique that is objectively the best, but the rest of the team doesn’t understand it, that individual may need to set aside that technique so that the team as a whole can produce more.

Individuals interacting have a tendency to optimize their own performance.  Beck believes that team vision and discipline goes beyond that to discover how are we going to make the most progress together. (16.00-19.11)

Validated learning over working software

Back in 2001, traditional management had the idea that if everything was documented, things would work out fine. You wouldn’t have to talk to people. You could just open up the manual and read what needed to be done. The problem was that the documentation was always out of date. It was at best misleading, and often just wrong.

In 2001, the folks in Snowbird saw that working software should valued ahead of comprehensive documentation. Perfect documentation for a frozen system that solved a problem that nobody had any more is not as good as having some software that solved the real problems of now. In 2001, that was a big step forward.

Beck says that in a environment of a startup (or a new line of business), nine times out of ten, it’s not that you don’t know how to write the software. The central problem is almost always: how do you find customers who are going to pay for what you are building? Working software can be part of the way to answer that question but it isn’t necessarily the best way to answer it. The real challenge is to create an opportunity for learning by the organization as to what might satisfy or even delight customers so that they will pay for it.

As a result, Beck concludes that in 2011, in the world of startups (or establishing new lines of business), validated learning is to be valued ahead of both working software and comprehensive documentation. (19.25-22.35)

Customer discovery over customer collaboration

Traditional management tended to think that if you just had the right contract, everything would go smoothly. Equally, if you had the wrong contract, it didn’t matter what the software developers did: there was no way that the business could be successful. In a stable predictable environment, having a clear contract was generally a good idea.

It was a big step forward in 2001 to realize that in the rapidly changing and unpredictable world of software development, collaborating with customers was better than trying to nail down all the details of software development at the beginning.

But in a startup, or in a new line of business, collaboration with customers isn’t possible, because by definition, you don’t have any customers. In effect, you have to find out who your customer is.

Thus in a startup or a new line of business, customer discovery has precedence over both customer collaboration or contract negotiation. (22.35-24.05)

Initiating change over responding to change

Traditional management tended to believe that the way to do software was to make a plan and then follow the plan. In 2001, recognizing that things change too much to be following a plan was a big step forward. Reality diverges from the plan. Reality is much less flexible than the plan. Reality bends a lot less than the plan bends. So the Manifesto recognized that responding to change was more important than following a plan.

But in a startup or a new line of business, nothing is changing. Nothing is moving. You have to establish momentum first. Development in a startup requires initiating change, not just responding to it.

This is where people’s anti-responsibility hackles start going up because people (and bureaucracies) don’t want to be responsible for risky endeavors. But there’s no choice. It’s up to you to initiate change because if you don’t initiate change, you don’t have anything. You are not even moving. This is where leadership comes into the picture: a leader stands up, assesses the potential and the risks and initiates change.

Beck notes that the military has the great concept of the initiative. One side has the initiative. That side is acting and the other side is reacting. Good leaders seize the initiative. You don’t wait for the other guy to smack you. When you have the initiative, you are exposed but you have the advantage that the other guy is busy worrying about you are going to do. He doesn’t have time to think about what he is going to do to you.

In the Civil War, a reporter asked General Grant what did he think Robert E. Lee was going to do next. Grant replied, “I don’t care what Lee is going to do next, I’m going to make him worry about what I’m going to do next.” That was when the Civil War turned around.

So in establishing new lines of business of the world of 2011, initiating change has to be valued ahead of responding to change or following a plan.

Beck’s Beyond Agile Manifesto

As a result Beck’s Beyond Agile Manifesto comprises:

  • Team vision and discipline over individuals and interactions (over processes and tools)
  • Validated learning over working software (over comprehensive documentation)
  • Customer discovery over customer collaboration (over contract negotiation)
  • Initiating change over responding to change (over following a plan)

_______________________

Steve Denning’s most recent book is: The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace For the 21st Century (Jossey-Bass, 2010).

Follow Steve Denning on Twitter @stevedenning

Want to learn how to make the entire organization Agile? Check out the innovative three-day workshop in Washington DC on May 21-23, 2012

 

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  • solingen solingen 11 months ago

    Hi Stephen,

    Great post! A colleague of mine has drafted the ‘MoreAgileManifesto’ some time ago (http://www.moreagilemanifesto.org/). This was motivated by his experiences in corporate Scrum deployments where focus on software development only does not bring the value that Agile can bring. Mainly because the manifesto itself is focusing on software and to achieve real value you should focus on flow in the complete chain, not just agility in the software creation part of the chain. I see that the beyondagilemanifesto does something similar.
    I think however, that the Validating Learning misses the point of: Value. After all, any efforts in organisation are done to create value. Delivering this value should not be postponed, just as delivering working software should not be postponed.
    Wouldn’t ‘Delivering Value over Working Software’ be a better enhancement?
    What do you think?

    Rini van Solingen

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  • Kent Beck Kent Beck 4 hours ago

    Rini,

    The audience I was speaking to (entrepreneurs) don’t know where value lies, hence the emphasis on learning. When starting a company, creating a profitable business model de novo is too big a task. You can, however, learn something each day as you move in the direction of a sustainable business model.

    If I was to speak to an existing business my emphasis would be on improving margins and noticing those times when small parts of the organization needed to hive off into startup mode.

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  • Author
    Steve Denning Steve Denning, Contributor 3 hours ago

    Dear Kent,

    Thanks for your comment and also for your great talk.

    Naturally the advice for established firms would be different to some extent from that for a startup. My inclination would however be to go a bit further than “improving margins and noticing those times when small parts of the organization needed to hive off into startup mode.”

    Once the firm is in the mindset of improving margins and in effect milking and protecting its existing cash cow, then the opportunity for hiving off parts for real innovation will tend to be small indeed, or even non-existent, thus exposing the firm to the risk of disruptive innovation from outside.
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/04/05/clayton-christensen-and-the-innovators-smackdown/

    Organizational survival depends on a mindset that is closer to that of a startup: how do we keep on adding more value to customers and delivering it sooner? Unless the firm is willing to cannibalize itself, someone else will. The length of time that firms can go on milking their cash cows without worrying about this is getting shorter and shorter. The life expectancy of firms is declining sharply. The loss of the startup mindset is often the first sign that the firm has begun to die.

  • Author
    Steve Denning Steve Denning, Contributor 11 months ago

    Dear Rini,

    Thanks for the insightful comments and the link to the MoreAgileManifesto. Very interesting.

    My article was reporting on how one of the “founding fathers” of the Manifesto is “inspecting and adapting” it to fit today’s world. This is particularly welcome, given the reluctance in some quarters to do any rethinking.

    I agree with you that “deliver value” would be an improvement on “validate learning”. My own preference would be to go even further and spell out: value for whom? Value for shareholders or value for customers?

    You will see in my book and articles that I come down very firmly in favor of “delighting customers” as being the true object of any organization in 2011, given the reality in the marketplace that the customer is now the boss. In the world at large, beyond software development, we are looking at the end of “shareholder capitalism” and a new era of “customer capitalism”.

    Aligning Agile with this marketplace reality will help secure its future.

    Steve

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