The one thing that is necessary to succeed with agile transformation
Agile transformation is really hard even though there is tons of information on the internet on how do it. There are agile coaches and POs all over the place and still most companies struggle with it. This blog post describes the root causes of why so many do not succeed.
Prerequisite: Open mindedness
The most fundamental thing for every kind of transformation process is that all participants are open minded. If we ask 100 people whether they are open minded probably 99 would say yes. The desire to learn and move forward is deeply seated within the human brain. Companies like Google are built around that desire.
Deciding to use techniques like Scrum, hire Agile Coaches, using containers and move to the cloud is easy. Companies do not struggle with the decision they struggle with execution.
The problem with open mindedness is our education. We have been educated by our school systems that learning means to read something and remember it. Why do we do that? Because we are afraid of getting bad grades that can destroy our success in life
It is a kind of a reflex that if we do not get the results we want we search for even more information and repeat that process over and over again until our brains are completely flooded. But even though we gather so much information it does not get us anywhere.
Open mindedness is a prerequisite but it is not the core problem. The educational system has distorted our perceptions.
Open mindedness is not enough
We have so much information in our brain that we exactly know what to do but we fail to execute. We exaclty know what others “should” do. But when it comes to execution we are too afraid of taking action ourselves.
Fears are part of human nature. We have to distinguish rational and irrational fears. Rational fears protect our lives and health. Irrational fears stop us from taking necessary action.
What we should have learned in school is how to overcome those irrational fears. What actually happened is that school reinforced irrational fears. The fear of not being enough. The fear of failing. The fears of what others might think of us. The fear of losing money. The fear of losing our job.
Obviously helping others to overcome their irrational fears is important to successful transformation. But if we focus on helping others we totally may miss out important part that is facing and overcoming our own fears.
In order to deal with our fears we have be willing to face them openly and that process induces fear itself. That is why we avoid that process and seek excuses like
“Others are doing wrong”, “I am not responsible”, “My employees do not need to know that”, “We should do xyz first”
Whether you are a developer, a CTO, an agile coach or DevOps Engineer. The only thing that is necessary to succeed is to overcome your own fears. Techniques may help doing that but they are completely useless until we know why we use them.
We can think with our brains but when it comes to understanding we have to use our hearts.
