How Can a Traditional Organization Become Agile?
Scrum experts describe what an agile organization fundamentally looks like, what they need to do to be an agile organization, and what you can do to transform your organization into an agile one.
From the book
From the book
From the book
Traditional organizations seek to be more responsive to changes in customer needs and competitor actions, but they struggle to achieve agility because they approach the problem in the wrong way. They think agility, or the ability to rapidly respond to change, is a process that their existing organization can follow rather than something that emerges from a fundamental change in their organizational structure and culture. They imagine that agility results from simply speeding up and streamlining their current organization. Agility requires a much more fundamental change that is impossible to achieve within the constraints of a traditional organization.
Why is this? In short, because in the traditional organization, too many people are involved for it to do anything quickly. Silos of professional specialization and long management decision chains make the traditional organization's decision-making ponderously slow, and its hierarchical status-reward system prevents meaningful change from the status quo. Breaking down functional silos and removing layers of decision-makers fundamentally threatens the structure of the traditional organization, making it fundamentally resistant to meaningful change.
So what does an agile organization look like? In short, the fundamental building block of an agile organization is the empowered, autonomous, self-managing team. Empowered in this case means that they are able to make decisions within their scope of responsibility without consulting others, and their scope of responsibility is for a set of customers and their outcomes. Autonomous means that they can work independently without being delayed waiting for assistance from the rest of the organization, and self-managing means that they are in full control of how they do their work so long as they deliver the outcomes that their customers need.
Most organizations are pretty far from this ideal, but agile organizations are continually seeking to improve their teams' abilities to perform to this ideal. Traditional organizations find this agile ideal anathema, and they find ways to dilute the agility of their "agile" teams to adapt to traditional decision-making and organizational structures. In doing so, they cripple their teams' abilities to rapidly respond to new information, and prevent them from achieving anything close to real agility.
Agile leaders have the responsibility to help their teams become more agile by helping them to continually become more self-managing and autonomous, while also keeping the traditional organization from destroying the agility of teams by making them conform to traditional ways of working. Agile leadership can be learned by almost anyone, provide that they are willing and able to let go of traditional organizational thinking, culture, and approaches, and open up to helping teams to become more accountable for customer outcomes, and more capable of delivering those outcomes.
For more on how you can transform your organization, read The Professional Agile Leader: Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations.