Agile Complexification Inverter

What must an Agile Transformation initiative have to be reasonably assured of success? We "change agents" or Agilist, or Organizational Development peeps, or Trouble Makers, or Agile Coaches have been at this for nearly two decades now... one would think we have some idea of the prerequisites for one of these Transformations to actually occur.  Wonder if eight Agile Coaches in a group could come up with ONE list of necessary and sufficient conditions - an interesting experiment.  Will that list contain an "engagement model"?  I venture to assert that it will not.  When asked very few Agile Coaches, thought leaders, and change agents mention much about employee engagement in their plans, models, and "frameworks".  Stop and ask yourselves ... why? Now good Organizational Development peeps know this is crucial, so I purposely omitted them from that list to query. One, central very important aspect of your Agile Transformation will be your Engagement mod...

In the excellently written article   Dark Scrum:  The Case Against the Sprint , Ron Jeffries' does a wonderful job of explaining a common problem of Scrum's mainstay practice, the Sprint.  As I read the article I could only think of many managers I've seen over my years that didn't trust Scrum, the teams, or the coaching to deliver.  And feeling pressure to make deadlines imposed from little information (desire more than empirical evidence) had reverted to past heavy handed pressure techniques to make a deadline.  After all it was their career that was on the line. To summarize (and you would do better to just click the link and read it):  As an exercise in explaining the inverse of "Good Scrum", Ron uses the term " Dark Scrum ".  In this inverted world, Ron makes the case that the Sprint is a bad practice, because a manager expecting the common faster progress (Jeff Sutherland's statement “Twice the Work in Half the Time”) will demand that res...

How would you know if your organizations values that you and other leaders have worked so hard to propagate have become weaponized exclusion and status quo control devices? Certainly values are only positive - affirmations of our best selves. Could our values work against us? Yes.  And you may know it only after it is too late... your culture will turn toxic.  The rising stars you spend energy to recruit will say a few months, maybe a year or two and leave (happy to get out).  Or you will force them out within months, because they are not a "good fit" to your culture. This failure to "fit" is a sure sign.  Can the executives read the sign, does you HR department work to protect the status quo?  Hiring decisions use the "good fit" measure and then a few months after they made the mistake of hiring the employee they reverse the decision and fire for "bad fit." As a " journeyman " agilist I've made conscious decision to go into...