During the last 20 years, the agile movement that originated from the Agile Manifesto has gained momentum, even outside of software development. Most organizations report that their agile efforts have paid off in terms of speed, quality, value, and long-term growth. However, about half of organizations that undertake agile transformations fail in their attempts. If your team has yet to reap the rewards of agile, you need to understand what’s preventing you from delivering fast, frictionless and scalable solutions.

Successful agile teams

While agile processes and tools provide support, the primary mechanism is how team members interact.
Can team members interact with conflicting ideas, talk and listen, give and take, question and answer, analyse and solve? Or do they censor one another and end up withdrawing themselves?
If you drop agile tools and processes into a legacy culture where individuals are criticised, embarrassed, discouraged, or intimidated, they stop being agile.

Processes and tools are scaffolding

When organisations implement agile, they often revert to technical processes and tools because cultural considerations are difficult to put into practice. It's easier only to pay lip service to the human side and then move to processes with measurable and observable indicators that give the illusion of agile. Start by framing agile as a cultural rather than a technical or mechanical implementation. Be careful not to approach culture as the completion of tasks. Culture can't be completed.

Frame agile as a cultural implementation

Meet with your team to identify vulnerable behaviours they think are vital to success. For example, asking questions, giving feedback or expressing different viewpoints. Then, identify positive response patterns for each behaviour, such as thanking someone for pointing out vulnerable behaviour. Document the behaviour and response pairing and display them in your meeting room. Create a printed job aid of the list that team members can carry with them.

Develop, document, and display vulnerable behavior/response pairings.

When you've jointly created a list of vulnerable behaviour/response pairings, pick one to practice. If a gap appears between the vulnerable behaviour, the response it should receive and the team leader's own behaviour, the dissonance will breed cynicism and lessen credibility. If a leader tries to model the behaviours and publicly acknowledges mistakes, the team will make progress.

Focus on one behavior and practice cultural accountability

Set time aside in a meeting to review what went well and what could be improved. <ul><li>Discuss the quality of the team's interactions.</li><li>Identify potential threats to openness.</li><li>Ask if they felt included in the process.</li><li>What was the most vulnerable behaviour they engaged in?</li><li>How did the team react to it?</li><li>Did you hold back on anything because you didn't feel safe?</li></ul>

Formally evaluate your dialogic process

Scrum meetings are daily coordination meetings where team members review the backlog, identify problems, and prioritize tasks. They are short meetings used for reflection. For example, if a team faces a complex issue, they pose a question about the problem and ask the team to come prepared to the next scrum meeting to discuss it. This allows the team to clarify their thoughts and encourages divergent thinking.

Conclude your scrum with a “question/reflection"

Scrums and kanbans can’t help you if you’ve got a legacy culture that punishes vulnerability.

Stashed ideas

Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety

<ul><li>Scrum is the dominant Agile framework.</li><li> Kanban is a method for visualizing, managing, and continually improving a process' ability to deliver a service. </li><li>Metrics provide actionable feedback to guide Agile teams.</li><li>User stories shift the focus from writing requirements to addressing customer needs. </li><li>Product development must become customer-centric. </li><li>Test-first practices ensure that application developers build the right software the first time. </li><li>A key tenet of agility is that practitioners be open to learning new skills.</li></ul>

Core skills

<ul><li>In collaborative development, more than one team member works on a single feature or application at any given time. </li><li>Ownership and collaboration. Workstyle, attitude, and interactions with others impact success as much as any technical or professional skill. </li><li>Agile architecture. Traditional approaches to software architecture do not support an Agile development life cycle.</li></ul>

Value-added skills

<ul><li>Agile database management. Agile teams quickly find that database changes become a constraint that limits velocity. To increase the speed of delivery, cultivate database management skills to become more self-sufficient and reduce dependence on database administrators.</li><li>Scaling Agile. Expanding the validated success of Agile pilots to the broader enterprise is both challenging and rewarding for organizations. </li></ul>

Specialized/emerging skills

As agile adoption spreads, software and application developers need these skills to succeed.

12 Agile Skills for Software Developers

“The outcomes are not the responsibility of the leaders. Leaders are in charge of the people who are in charge of the outcomes. ““How’s the Josh?” was the day’s joke, which no one could have predicted. “High Sir!” would resound until the match’s final ball.Mother Nature’s sandstorm was the only thing that could stop the 4th match in the ending palindrome month of February 2022.On February 26th, 2022, we observed a sandstorm of this magnitude, which brought every firing cannon to a halt.Everyone on the ground witnessed a cricket match without a single mistimed or non-cricketing stroke.

Leadership lessons from cricket

Both teams played straight cricket, with their captains leading from the front. It is not every day that one sees anything like this.Both teams played straight cricket, with their captains leading from the front. It’s not every day that one sees anything like this.It was a rare moment when everyone, regardless of which side they favoured, gave the champions a standing ovation.In the end, cricket triumphed, capturing everyone’s heart.The main impressions from this event were the leadership behaviours and team efforts put out by every player.

The Sandstorm

A team is a group of individuals who collaborate to achieve a common goal. A team's players should, in essence, have similar aims and goals and think in a similar fashion.

Understanding Team

With a formidable total, the captains lead from the front with unflustered, gritty, heroic, and unwavering leadership. Apart from strategically positioning the right man at the right spot, they are giving their all in all aspects of batting, bowling, and fielding.

In-Charge to In Your Charge 

Players from all over the world participate in the team game. Some are making their first appearances, while others are competing for the junior crown for the last time. Every player, no matter how minor, plays a part.2.

Useless to Used Less

Not everyone is lucky enough to have a sunny day. While others may have their own set of black clouds. It is the responsibility of the leader to ensure that every cloud has a silver lining.

Trust the team

The first step is to bring everyone together. Keeping together is a step forward. Teamwork is a win-win situation. A group of people who have worked hard together stick together as well.

Determination

Learning from a Live Cricket Match played by our kids

“The outcomes are not the responsibility of the leaders. Leaders are in charge of the people who are in charge of the outcomes. “ “How’s the Josh?” was the day’s joke, which no one could have…

Leadership lessons from cricket.

When organizations take time to recognize the hard work that went into the completion of a release or even a bite-sized milestone, this helps employees recharge and stay motivated.

Big launches and milestone achievements deserve to be celebrated

Are these failures discussed? Do employees feel comfortable talking about what went wrong with their manager and team? Does your team take the time to reflect upon these situations through sprint retros or post-incident reviews? Does your team explore ways to overcome these mistakes in the future with a different path forwards or approach?

But what happens when a team fails? 

A psychologically safe work environment encourages team members to speak up with ideas, concerns, or recent failures instead of choosing to remain silent.

What is psychological safety?

e belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. It is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

Psychological safety in the workplace

Qhen employees work in a psychologically safe environment, the discretionary effort can improve up to 24%.

2017 Gartner Culture Workforce Survey

By having a psychologically safe environment, employees perceive risk as a good thing, and there is an understanding that employees won’t be seen as ignorant, incompetent, or invalid.

Psychological safety and high-performing teams

There is a tolerance for mistakesEmployees are open about the mistakes they made instead of avoiding them or, worse yet, covering mistakes up. Micro-moments of learning occur regularlyLeaders model curiosity by sharing their ignorance on a topic and asking questions. Employees are empowered to ask questions, poke at proposals.Space is created for reflection and reviewThe team takes time to learn from past performances to help with future improvements. Retrospectives allow teammates to discuss what went well and what didn’t go so well.

Evaluating your organization’s psychological safety

Employees voice radical business and technical ideas. They’re willing to take interpersonal risks by speaking up in meetings, voicing their concerns, and never settling without asking “why.”

Risk-taking is encouraged

Creating a workplace environment that promotes psychological safety is an art, and there is no silver bullet. There are unspoken agreements, company-wide values, leadership qualities, and technology to help support this ongoing work. 

Psychological safety is critical for high-performing teams

Agile ways of working originated in IT, proving their worth in technology and software companies. In the past decade, agile practices have spread to other sectors, resulting in enterprise-wide agility in banking, retail, healthcare, and insurance (see sidebar, “Organizations are on the move”). Here, we look at heavy industries: oil, gas, mining, chemicals, and utilities. Agile working can make these <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-impact-of-agility-how-to-shape-your-organization-to-compete">organizations faster, more efficient, and more resilient</a>.

The Agile Model Of Working

Agile approaches have long been shown to work well when the product or process weighs little or nothing, such as in banking, technology, and insurance. Agile thinking is being adopted by different players in energy and heavy industries, evidenced by advanced-analytics cases and the experience (and working practices) of frontline workers. But still, to date, while aware of the benefits of agility, traditionally heavy-industry organizations have been slower to adopt agile ways of working across their entire organization.

Agile Working For Other Sectors

Enterprise agility cuts across the organization, digital and nondigital. We see impactful examples of agility in, for instance, <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/digging-deep-for-organizational-innovation">procurement</a> or continuous improvement, or analytics. Agile practices give autonomy to cross-functional teams (outside any digital initiatives) in any part of the organization; it can accelerate improvement programs of any sort that create business value. Heavy industries are highly technical, so they benefit even more from a model that focuses on effective cross-discipline working and bringing in a minimum-viable product (MVP) mindset.

Myth 1: The Value of Agile Working is limited to IT/Tech, Software, and Digital Products

Agile ways of working and thinking can apply not only to changes in equipment design but also to measurement and analytics. In a collaborative effort involving people inside and outside the organization, virtual “go and sees” were conducted with leading global mining companies and agile squads were institutionalized to drive change management. Advanced analytics were then used to deploy ten predictive models and two linear optimization models in an agile manner to achieve cost savings of approximately $3.5 million.

Seeing Is Believing

Any process run by people can be improved upon and can benefit from an agile approach of fast learning and high levels of ownership and accountability in teams. This applies across core run activities, such as production delivery or maintenance planning and execution. Introducing and maintaining agile working is worth not only the initial push but also the longer-term effort. At first, the language of agile can indeed be a block, but each organization already has its own terms of art (one might say jargon), and the language of agile working can match those terms.

Myth 2: Agile Working is Unsuitable for Regular Activities And Difficult to Introduce

Lean and agile ways of working complement each other, and the magic is in the combined recipe from both. In reality, both systems have been successful across a range of environments, and both share a similar set of foundational objectives: <ul><li>Transparently connect strategy and goals to give teams meaningful purpose; </li><li>Discover better ways of working to continually learn and improve; </li><li>Deliver value efficiently for a customer; </li><li>Enable people to contribute and lead to their fullest potential.</li></ul>

Myth 3: Agile and Lean are Different or Exactly the Same. Can they work together?

Lean organizations identify and eliminate activity that is not valued by the customer or end user. This systematic analysis of processes and value streams can reduce waste, variability, and inflexibility; it boosts performance in cost control, product quality, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement—often simultaneously. Lean thinking represents a mindset of continuous improvement and flexible working in which all employees contribute new ideas; the organization becomes better over time. Freed from non-value-generating tasks, people can focus more on what matters to customers.

What Lean Organizations Do

When run together, lean processes bring the holistic view and basic principles, while agile processes bring the ﬂexibility of short-cycle implementations (sprints) for continuous improvement. The lean approach tends to be more applicable to continuous improvements, providing directions or outside-in solutions to the value stream as part of the daily operational routine. The agile approach can bring the alignment and transparency of objectives to combine the expertise from the shop ﬂoor with short-cycle improvements.

Lean Plus Agile

Heavy industries have to manage multiple time horizons; that is, everything from problems solved over decades to problems solved in minutes. So while they have long capital planning, building, and maintenance cycles, they also have imminent demands. As agility combines dynamism with stability, a backbone of the right processes in governance, coordination, and transparency can exist alongside agile practices in planning, executing, and interacting with customers and suppliers.

Myth 4: Agile Working is Too Short Term to Add Value to Operations

Within each stage gate, agile thinking can accelerate and clarify a process; so within a design or planning cycle, an agile approach can shorten decision times and—by being inherently flexible—address and overcome delays.

Agile Works In Multiple Time Horizons

Safety is critical. Agile’s emphasis on transparency, ownership and reduced handovers is especially important and relevant. Successful efforts here engage employees and build a strong safety culture, which has always been—and should continue to be—at the heart of asset-heavy companies. Combined with greater empowerment, that culture could forge real safety ownership in the front line, led by strong role modelling from top management down.

Myth 5: Safety-Oriented Cultures Cannot ‘Test and Learn’

At the team level, where safety practice and culture is played out, an agile mindset means a continuous cycle of team learning and adaptation (learn fast) while managing risks effectively.   Any set of decisions can be made more transparent and more linear by an agile approach: decisions can be attached to a given point in time so that a series of small decisions becomes clear; these can be implemented in short learning cycles, reducing risks, correcting mistakes, and increasing the chance of success.

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RELATED TOPICS

IDEAS ABOUT #agile

Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety

12 Agile Skills for Software Developers

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Leadership lessons from cricket.

Psychological safety is critical for high-performing teams

Five agility myths in energy and heavy industries

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

#agile

TOP STASHERS

RELATED TOPICS

IDEAS ABOUT #agile

Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety

12 Agile Skills for Software Developers

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!

Leadership lessons from cricket.

Psychological safety is critical for high-performing teams

Five agility myths in energy and heavy industries

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career