Kanban Week 2018: Lean Kanban North America / Kanban Leadership Retreat

How can I scale my Agile initiative without going down the rabbit hole of Agile methods?
Adoption of agile methods is not only driven by a legitimate need for increased business agility but is also driven by a less legitimate bandwagon effect. While this bandwagon effect fuels the agile industry, it also leads to change that is often not congruent with its purpose. This has resulted in isolated, if not competing, communities of practice organized around specific methods where the still dominant 20th century rational management thinking is insufficiently challenged and change often stalls or even regresses if not sustained by coaches that support the chosen method. The time has come to fundamentally challenge this state of affairs. More than methods with a narrow focus and a broad ambition, business agility requires an integrative, bridge-building approach. More than linear, imposed change that tends to stall or even regress, it requires non-linear, viral change. Rather than imposing practices, it needs to instill a new type of thinking.

In this presentation, we will report on our experience with new ways of teaching and coaching agility that explicitly aim to create viral change by instilling new ways of thinking not just changing practice. We will analyse the self-sealing logic of implementing agile methods to show 1) why change should be viral and how this differs from traditional or even evolutionary change, 2) why viral change needs new ways of teaching and coaching that go beyond the rational explanation of practices, and 3) why this new way of teaching and coaching is important to engage the entire organization. Consequently, we will discuss the importance of simulation as a way to address the intuitive as well as the rational brain. We will introduce integrative thinking as a way to overcome the differences between agile methods and to bridge the gap between organizational silos. We examine the role of networks, rather than hierarchies, as a way of organizing change that is congruent with 21st century business agility.