What is your agile adoption missing?
(Originally posted at journal.theoremone.co, posted here with approval and minor changes)
As companies navigate an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, many are turning to agile transformations to deliver higher quality products in shorter time with happier teams. While agile is a dominant philosophy for many organizations, many organizations fail to propagate an agile mindset throughout their leadership team, let alone across their organization. What makes transformation so difficult?
Psychological Safety Requires Commitment and Accountability
Bringing your whole self to work requires skills in emotional intelligence and cultural competence. Spaces where team members can be vulnerable with one another—where they don’t have to shrink to make others feel comfortable—are those in which thoughtful, powerful, disruptive work can take root and thrive. By embracing diversity as a core part of our agile practices, we can more clearly see, and describe, roadblocks to psychological safety.
Teams succeed together when members collaborate and rely upon one another for success. The more psychological safety cultivated, the more that process improves. Can your queer team members talk openly about being queer and the challenges they face being queer? If they can't, do they have psychological safety?
In our work, we coach and train diversity outcomes and commitments throughout the organization as a core competency in agile values. To make the most of your leadership and teams, it’s important to understand that each team member’s diverse experiences contribute to how they approach problem-solving, ideation, and execution.
Agile is about People, People are Diverse
On the surface, the core values of agile take a people-first approach:
People and interactions take priority over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change vs. following a plan
While simple, execution of these values requires an organizational commitment to first principles, systems thinking, and cultural competence, to deepen coaching objectives. To truly enable an agile environment, managers and leaders aren’t just trained on what diversity is; they are trained to be advocates for DEIBA practices. Leaders are held accountable for coaching their teams to build equitable experiences and opportunities to increase employee engagement—an outcome rooted in agility.
By using an inclusion-based agile mindset, we focus on outcomes that allow everyone to contextualize their work through their diverse experiences. While that cultural competence builds trust, how do you help someone “be agile” and not “do agile”? To meet such outcomes, we believe that building a foundational culture of:
Autonomy: Teams empowered to make decisions quickly
Systems thinking: Deconstructing hierarchical power structures
Sense of ownership: Partnerships instead of “vendors”
Psychological safety: Space for creative knowledge work
Cultural competency: Enabling and celebrating cultural value differences
In thinking about the relationship between agility and diversity, let’s explore how the two build upon one another:
Autonomy as empowerment
With agility, teams are empowered to make decisions independently, removing traditional hierarchical structures that relegate decision-making to those with organizational authority. When working in a distributed power structure, the best idea is the one that rises to the top, regardless of person, position, or department. Diversity, likewise, promotes systems thinking while deconstructing hierarchical power structures to enable psychological safety. By questioning systems and empowering individuals to bring their authentic selves and experiences to the table, we create opportunities to share insights and perspectives that fuel creative work and ownership. With an autonomous mindset, people can’t hide—one cannot simply put away their Blackness or queerness. Rather, this approach creates a space for psychological safety required for collaborative, creative knowledge work. Envisioning creative solutions and building innovative products can only occur in a space where people are allowed to fully embrace themselves and each other.
The feedback loop
The quality of your agile practices can be measured by the quality and speed of information. Agility relies heavily on a strong feedback loop. When new information arises, how do we respond to it? Consistent feedback from customers, developers, and stakeholders is vital for adapting to change within the iterative delivery process. The quickest way to reduce the quality of a product is to make feedback off-limits out of fear of upsetting someone. A product can’t meet the needs of the customer without being open to all feedback—even if it’s painful. Similarly, a culture of feedback must create a space for diversity feedback. By encouraging a mindset that values personal, intimate, direct, and challenging conversations, we set ourselves up to rely on a more diverse set of experiences and expertise. Honesty and candor help create better products and, importantly, open up a company’s ability to respond in the moment to collaborative solutions.
Rethinking biases requires continuous practice
Agile helps you understand that the process of delivery to production is difficult, simply because it isn’t always a consistent experience. Processes can be a struggle, something that requires work and effort. Agile challenges the inherent bias of processes and encourages teams to iterate on their practice. Similarly, DEI relies on continual practice to allow team members to fail fast and recover. A once-yearly training session doesn’t invite a better understanding of DEI in the workplace any more than a yearly release cycle produces satisfied customers. Rather, practicing and delivering every day creates an opportunity to reduce harm and rethink built-in biases. Recognizing the biases in power structures and encouraging a culture of continuous practice creates a space for better delivery of outcomes.
Starting with ‘Why?’
Agility and DEIBA: why are you focused on either? While we’ve highlighted the interconnectedness of agility and diversity, an organization may have several reasons for its diversity or agile transformation. Agile organizations deliver more customer and employee engagement. Likewise, diverse and inclusive organizations are known to outperform their less diverse peers in profitability. But a purely financial motivation will set up both your agile and diversity initiatives for failure.
One cannot address the concerns or create meaningful solutions without motivations rooted in people, inclusion, and empowerment. We know that human-based KPIs are critical to successful agile transformation projects. Likewise, a successful DEIBA program must start with the intention to create a truly diverse and inclusive organization. Rather than thinking exclusively about market success, an agile approach focused on developing a psychologically safe environment for employees to feel joy and be themselves is the pathway to innovation and progress. Intrinsically, agile and DEI won’t be successful without the other. To make the most of your organization and team’s approach, start with the right why to get an effective how.
Inclusive Agility
Now that you’re convinced that agility and diversity are tightly woven, how do you add inclusion to your agile transformation, or agile to your diversity initiatives?
First, communicate that ownership and accountability for practicing diversity and inclusion falls to everyone. For example, you can update your job descriptions to include DEIBA expectations. Second, ensure each team has the resources necessary to be able to grow their DEIBA skills. Help them identify metrics and goals, and make sure they have the support to meet those goals.
We believe that team-level agile coaches, or scrum masters, offer the best opportunity to integrate DEIBA efforts into improving team psychological safety. As servant leaders for the team, they are already structured to provide critical feedback, and facilitate uncomfortable conversations within a team.
Want to find out more or ready to get started? Head over to our scheduling page.