The other day, on a call with a global innovation executive, I once again observed what I call the new reflex to the words “agile” and “transformation”—a huge negative visceral reaction. As someone who has built a career on those words, it’s unnerving, even if I understand why.
Most senior executives are done with the standard agile sales pitch of independent, autonomous teams solving problems. Nor are they interested in rigid, complex, and often misapplied frameworks for agile at scale. There are too many catastrophic failures, and they’re following behind stakeholders who were hung out to dry when they invested millions in a failed agile transformation.
Get real. Modern software is too complex for a single team.
In most modern contexts, the widespread mythology about team-level agile—where the team goes off in a protected room to solve problems—is a recipe for failure. We’re building large applications with numerous integrations and dependencies between pieces. We’re drawing from or building on top of existing software. Our problem spaces are big and complex and require complex coordinated solutions (e.g., 20-30 channels/platforms, global security challenges, broad functionality, performance at scale).
Taken together, this means an individual pizza-sized team can’t launch high-impact solutions into the market independently. What’s more, an “autonomous team” is operating in a vacuum, separate from the market, customers, deployment, monitoring and support, the data center, and efforts to convert customers from an existing application.
In a complex system, “autonomous” comes to mean “working without enough information.”
But don’t throw out the baby
It’s safe to say that the original gangsters of agile didn’t mean “go forth and solve problems without considering the real business context.” In fact, you can argue that original lightweight software development methods were beautifully aligned with how software was built at the time. Decades ago, we were building local applications on web servers or phones, deployed into a controlled environment. They weren’t the tightly integrated, distributed, broad applications we see today. In today’s product spaces, it’s important but insufficient to focus on the user experience and the code. We need to pay attention to the whole ecosystem.
But we know that a lot of inspiration for agile—in particular, the social psychology underpinnings of what makes teams great—still applies. In fact, ruthless prioritization, collaboration, transparency, and optimizing human interactions are crucial in an age of cognitive overload.
So what’s a change catalyst to do? How do you create speed and autonomy in pockets to create the conditions so teams can move fast, while also orchestrating all the different pieces to emerge in parallel so you can move to the market quickly with a new product? I won’t pretend to be an expert here — I’m discovering alongside you. This is the new interesting problem, one that should keep us all busy trying to figure out how to do it effectively in ever-shifting contexts. But here are some general principles that guide my work. I hope you will find them useful too.
How you know you’re aimed in the right direction
🚀 You’re focused on creating deep alignment on the problem to be solved.
We know enough about the psychology of teamwork and innovation to understand that we still need relatively persistent autonomous teams—humans work best in small trusted groups. But to solve big complex problems, we need these teams to work together in concert, with a clear focus and lots of interconnections. This means that broadly communicated inspiring visions, outcome-based roadmaps, clearly articulated problems to solve, and iterative and incremental plans are essential (and need to be flexible enough to allow for emergent knowledge).
🚀 You’re structuring your teams and processes around the problem space, not an abstract or aspirational idea.
All organizations are unique. Why would you implement a cookie-cutter process? As someone experienced in applying multiple agile frameworks and hundreds of related practices, I can tell you that introducing a process that doesn’t fit your needs is brutally painful and wasteful. Just don’t do it.
Take the time to assess your needs and find or grow the right countermeasures. Every organizational practice was originally developed as a countermeasure to a specific problem. Do you have the same problem? If not, it’s time to explore your options. You might start with a countermeasure that fits best, but then build in feedback loops to observe how it’s actually performing and then adjust experimentally.
To be clear, it’s unlikely that ditching agile and going backward to big upfront planning and project-based teams will get you what you need. Heavy-handed orchestration of linear plans and giant-batch deployments won’t get you the rapid, concurrent development you need to deliver rapidly. There’s a reason companies veered away from these older approaches—they’re just too damn slow, rigid, and filled with market risk. Any perception that “it used to be under control” is an illusion. It momentarily feels good to build a perfect plan, but it almost never plays out the way you hoped. (Rule #1: Expect the unexpected.)
🚀 You’re focused on putting the right conditions in place.
Adaptability may be enhanced with DevOps, cloud native environments, microservices-based architecture, innovation centers, etc. But these in and of themselves are also insufficient. While these approaches are central to modern development, we also need stable, persistent organizational structures that can adapt to the next set of problems. We need resilient and responsive cultures to energize those structures. Many ingredients contribute to that stability, including transformational leadership approaches, adaptive workforce management, intentional culture, continuous learning and knowledge sharing, and capability modeling.
🚀 You seek to understand what you’re capable of.
This means focusing on skills, behaviors, and knowledge that can be applied to your problem set: the capabilities of your product, the capabilities of your teams and organization, and most importantly, the capability to span gaps between where you are now and the strategic outcomes you desire. When you fall short of a needed capability (like automation or transparency), make it part of your strategy to build it.
🚀 You care about coherence, not conformity.
Coherence — the state in which parts fit together well — is needed to foster a collective sense of purpose and direction. This is profoundly different from achieving total consensus or consistency. The drive for “consistency” often fosters controlling behaviors and processes that suppress innovation and creativity.
Two thought exercises may help with this concept:
Imagine your system of work as a vital natural ecosystem. There are definite “rules” and guardrails that keep ecosystem elements moving — things like weather, water, nutrients, recurring phenomena, the drive for procreation, predator-prey dynamics, etc. But no one is there trying to herd all the plants, animals, insects, and bacteria into a mechanistic system. To do so would break the interactions that make the ecosystem work. What are the inherent motivators of your organizational ecosystem? How might you harness, amplify, or shape those to build a learning organization?
Imagine threads connecting people’s innermost values and motivations with the your organization’s values and strategic goals. Think of weaving these threads together. The innate energy of people’s personal drive has the potential to fuel your organization’s work — if you inspire, nurture, and encourage the interconnection.
Focus on discovering and amplifying common ground, shared values, and shared understanding. Embrace the idea that multiple, sometimes conflicting, values and truths exist. This is the best part of human messiness — the source of inspiration and creativity — and requires people to agree to disagree, a state called “healthy conflict.” To accomplish this, invest in those practices that create a dynamic, shared understanding—active listening, perspective-taking, cadenced reflection, and creating psychological safety.
Thanks for your eyes on my musings. I hope my experiences and perspectives help stir up some new thoughts, and I hope our paths cross as we navigate this world of work filled with gloriously messy humans.
I love hearing your genuine thoughts, responses, and reactions. Make ‘em messy, humans!