The Agile Leader: Leveraging the Power of Influence — Book Summary & Notes

If you want to hear some battle tested stories and if you are looking to learn more about leadership in these tough times, then the book “The Agile Leader: leveraging the Power of Influence” by Zuzana Sochová is a must read for you.

I went through the book in the previous month and I am back once again with a my summary and notes. Hope you like it similar to the previous summaries published earlier. If you love the summary and the effort, I will recommend you to buy this book.

The Agile Leader: Summary

CHAPTER 1 HOW IT ALL STARTED

In 2010, I was given three departments of software developers, software testers, and hardware designers and was asked to form one new department of engineering from them — a department with high collaboration and flexibility to build cross-functional teams across those three domains. The department would serve our customers better, with higher flexibility, creativity, and innovations, while keeping our technical excellence and living the company’s vision: “Added-Value Solutions.” The image of 120 people coming to me every day with their questions, requests, and approvals was overwhelming. I felt tired before I had even started.

Later that week, at the next executive meeting, I got the courage to present a very different structure based on a network of self-organizing teams with only Scrum Masters rather than managers and a new position structure of only team members instead of people’s original roles. I was both excited and nervous about my presentation of a flat team.

Our chairman was a typical traditional manager with a hierarchy hardcoded in his DNA. So, to gain their attention, I started the presentation by requoting the company’s goals first and introduced my idea of making flat teams later.

“With NO MANAGEMENT?” the chairman asked with raised eyebrows. “Yes, no management,” I continued. “No management actually enables the empowerment, motivation, and creativity we need in the department. It’s a natural continuation of the agile team structure with Scrum Masters we currently have in the development part of the organization.” “So you want to make us all agile?” he asked. “Yes . . .,” I said slowly, still puzzled by the turn of his mood. “Let’s do that,” he continued. “After all, we’ve chosen you because we need a change, right?”

I still don’t know why the chairman said yes to this crazy idea, as he was generally very conservative, hated experiments, and had been fighting this flat structure with emergent leadership almost every day. I think part of it was that I was able to link my plan with our strategic goals, which resonated with him.

It worked. It was a lot of work, and I’m glad I had this opportunity to learn and grow as an agile leader.

THE NEED FOR CHANGE

In most organizations, you realize that to bring about change, you first need to fight the pharaoh syndrome, where the shared feeling is, “We don’t need to change. We are a successful organization, and nothing can happen to us.” Such overconfidence stands in the way of any change. And agile requires quite a hard change in the way we work and in our mindset. The very first step of the eight-step process for leading change described by Kotter [Kotter12] is to create a sense of urgency.

Ask yourself:

1. Why do we have to change in the first place?
2. What is the need behind it?
3. What would happen if we don’t change?

And unless we can find a good enough strategic reason, maybe we should not even start. Remember, agile is not your goal — it’s only the best way to achieve your goals.

As Mike Cohn said in his keynote speech at Agile2010 in Orlando, Florida: “The goal is not to become agile; the goal is to understand how to be more agile. Agility is a result of a mindset, not a process. An enterprise will never fi nish ‘becoming agile’ because it will always find ways to improve its operations.”

CHAPTER 2 LEADERSHIP IS A STATE OF MIND

What does agile mean in the first place? Let’s first clear up some of the most common misconceptions and misunderstandings.

What’s Agile?

Agile is a mindset, a philosophy, a different way of working. It changes the way you think and how you approach tasks, teammates, and work in general. It’s not a process, method, or framework to be implemented, which makes it very flexible. It’s all about culture and changing the way you think about business. It’s based on transparency, team collaboration, a higher level of autonomy, and creating impact through frequent value delivery.

Modern Agile has four principles:

1. make people awesome,
2. experiment and learn rapidly,
3. deliver value continuously, and
4. make safety a prerequisite.

Making people awesome is a starting point for mindset change. It’s all about relationships.

Good agile needs all four segments. Imagine your organization. How agile are you according to the four Modern Agile principles? On a scale of 1 to 10, where do you see your organization?

1

10

People are taken as resources who do the job.

We care about making people awesome.

We follow processes and guidelines.

We experiment and learn rapidly.

We focus on task efficiency.

We focus on delivering value continuously.

Failure is only an opportunity to blame.

We make safety a prerequisite, and we learn from failures.

Ask yourself:

1. What makes your team or organization Agile?
2. What are the aspects you are missing?

Why Agile?

Agile is a response to new business realities and challenges. It brings flexible business models and allows organizations to succeed in today’s constantly changing world. Most of the modern management and organizational design traces its roots back to the early 1900s when the problems organizations were solving were very different. If you look at how business has changed in just the past twenty years and how many originally successful organizations failed to keep up and consequently went out of business, you cannot doubt that organizational change is a requirement for success.

Let’s take a step back and look at how the world has changed over the past centuries.

1. The Individual Era: Hundreds of years ago, in the individual era, the world was quite stable and simple. Every family had its own field. The businesses were local; people worked as individuals
2. The Industrial Age: The Industrial Age gave birth to management as we know it now. Taylorism was born. All the management practices oriented toward task optimization, planning, and control have their roots in this period. But the world was not static and continued changing even faster.
3. Globalization and the Internet Era: The new era ushered in by globalization and followed by the Internet completely changed not only the business world but our lives. Companies such as Google and Facebook created the new virtual business, which companies such as Uber and Airbnb took to the next level.

Similar to the public resistance seen at the beginning of the industrial era, we may not like this lean change, we may try to fight with it, but change is not stoppable. We not only can’t stop the upcoming new eras, but we can’t predict them either. We don’t know what’s next.

But so far, the trend has always been the same: significantly faster changes and more complexity. The transformation is so fast that products you used five years ago are old now, the lives we lived ten years ago were very different, and everything is changing, which makes planning almost impossible.

It’s time to change. Stop creating plans. Inspect and adapt

Currently, we speak about living in the VUCA world — the world with high volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The world that is unpredictable. Now is the time for a change. Agility offers the answer to the current complex problems and allows us to

Ask yourself:

On a scale from 1 to 10,

1. How complex is your business?
2. Where do you see your organization?

1

10

Simple, Predictable

VUCA World

If the overall results in your organization are:

• 1 to 4, there is no need for agility in your business.

• 5 or 6, you should start experimenting with agility; the situation is not yet urgent but might soon be.

• 7 or more, it’s high time to change the way you work and become agile now, or you might never make it.

After assessing your needs, think about your business.

1. What makes your business model sustainable?
2. What do you need to change so you can address the VUCA challenges?

What Is Agile Leadership About?

The less predictable the business is, the more organizations are failing with traditional leadership approaches, which optimize for repetitive tasks and consistency.

Agile leadership is the leadership of tomorrow.

Agile leadership is not about how to implement agile, Scrum, Kanban, eXtreme Programming, or lean principles. You have people in your organization who can do that. Being an agile leader is a state of mind. We build a world where 1 + 1 = more_than_two, a world that is not divided between winners and losers but where both can win and creativity can make a difference in the equation.

What Is the Difference between Leader and Manager?

First, all managers are leaders; however, leaders don’t necessarily need to be managers. In an agile organization, where hierarchy becomes less important, we put more focus on leadership than on management.

There is no positional authority given to a leader. Leaders gain their influence from their actions and behaviors and from their service to the people around them, and their power grows through the respect of others. Traditional managers, on the other hand, are often associated with decision-making and certain positional power that must be given to them. Having said that, leadership is a state of mind. Everyone can be a leader.

As an agile leader, you are fighting not only against your own habits but against the tempting positional power you have, which, if you use it, can temporarily make everything much more efficient and faster.

If I could have just told the team what to do on day-to-day tasks, I wouldn’t have had to spend hours helping people around me to understand the situation and make their own decisions. It was super time-consuming. I spent all my time at work talking to people and helping them to collaborate and take over the initiatives. I spent evenings at home catching up with my work. Telling them exactly what to do was so very tempting. But shortcuts never work well. If I had given up then, they would never have gotten a chance to come up with innovative and creative solutions. Persistence was key. In a few months, it paid off, and I was able to step back and enjoy the power of self-organization. The department was running by itself toward the mission of added-value solutions.

Why Is It Important to Be an Agile Leader?

Having a critical mass of agile leadership is crucial for any agile environment; without it, we are only creating another process and adding terminology, and all we get is “fake agile,” not business results.

Leaders need to change first. The organization will follow.

Nearly every corporation is willing to experiment with at least one agile project. As organizational agility grows, the gap between traditional management and the agile way of working is getting bigger and creates frustration on both sides. The teams are frustrated because management is not supporting them and the organization is not helping them on their agile journey. Management is frustrated because it doesn’t know how to produce agile leaders and grow the collaborative team-oriented environment.

When we speak with leaders about this kind of system, most agree intellectually that power, decision making, and resource allocation should be distributed. But making that happen is another matter. Their great fear is that the organization will fall into chaos. Though that is a common concern, I would argue that agile brings harmony. The well-functioning teams deliver value to the customers regularly, effortlessly, and with joy, which in turn provides motivation and energy within the organization to create innovative solutions and address the day-to-day business challenges.

Key Takeaways:

◽ Agile is a response to new business realities and challenges of a VUCA world.

◽ Agile brings flexible business models and allows organizations to succeed in today’s constantly changing world.

◽ Being agile is focusing on making people awesome, learning through experiments, delivering value, and making safety a prerequisite.

◽ Leadership is a state of mind, not a position.

◽ Leaders need to change first. The organization will follow.

◽ Agile leaders don’t need to use power but to leverage the power of influence.

CHAPTER 3 ORGANIZATIONAL EVOLUTION

Organizations are constantly evolving. They transformed significantly in the last century, adapting to the world changes by redesigning the structure, culture, and way of work. There are three different organizational paradigms, and none of them is right or wrong by definition; each of them can be a good fit for a particular time or business reality.

ORGANIZATION 1.0: TRADITIONAL

In the 1970s, the most common organizational structure was the pyramid structure. It was deep, hierarchical and full of power. Companies had strong bosses who led within that structure. Internally, their approach was based on command and control, bureaucracy, and standardization. The focus was on resources, and each individual had clearly defined roles and responsibilities.

The fundamental belief behind this type of organization was that the boss was always right, there was always some process that could address the situations, and the role of the boss was to improve such processes. Employees were there to follow the processes and not challenge them in any way. The management believed that the employees couldn’t work without pressure, so if the results were not satisfactory, the bosses were supposed to add even more pressure. The payment was directly linked to individual performance, and it was considered to be the only motivation for doing work. Everyone was expected to do their job and not think about it. As a consequence, most people were not happy at work. They took work as a necessary evil.

The positive side of such an arrangement is that organizations that still hold to the hierarchical structure are fast to solve repetitive problems. In a relatively static environment — such as a production line in a factory — it works pretty well. However, in a VUCA world, such an organization is like a dinosaur that is too slow in responding to changes.

ORGANIZATION 2.0: KNOWLEDGE

Twenty years later, in the 1990s, the trend in organizational design led to Organization 2.0, which focuses on knowledge. Organizations began trying to adapt to the constantly changing world and the increasing complexity of tasks and to respond with specialization, processes, and structure.

Companies adopted complicated processes, focused on deep analysis, and invested in experts. There was a lot of talk about managers, delegation, allocation, positions, career paths, specialization, defined reporting structure, detailed reports, and individual key performance indicators (KPIs).

The fundamental belief behind this type of organization is that complicated problems need detailed analysis and the experience of specialized individuals. Companies invested in learning and specialization. They began to grow. In the Organization 2.0 structure, work that used to be done by one person now needs several specific and dedicated positions, which requires exact synchronization. Specialized departments are created to deal with database, testing, analysis, documentation, customer segments, accounts, plans, and, last but not least, even chair purchases.

Practices such as employee of the month, performance reviews, and evaluations have become the core management tools. The pressure on individuals to be more successful, better, and smarter than others is huge. What if my colleague is going to be rated better in the performance review? What if I am not promoted in two years? It leads to a culture that emphasizes the individual’s goals over the organization’s goals.

The defined positions and roles are not as flexible as is needed in the modern world, but it’s still far better than the fixed hierarchical structures of the traditional Organization 1.0. But these organizations often operate in yearly cycles, with long feedback loops. Creativity is rare. Innovations take time.

ORGANIZATION 3.0: AGILE

The agile organization is a new paradigm, a new form of organizational design that is flexible and highly adaptive.

In today’s world, we need to create organizations that are not afraid of volatility and uncertainty but that are designed for complexity and thrive on ambiguity. And that is not simple. In an agile organization, we build on teams instead of individuals, on different styles of leadership, and on intensive collaboration through the dynamic network structure. We focus on helping others to become leaders and grow emergent leadership over the fixed management positions.

The fundamental belief behind this type of organization is that people are naturally creative and intelligent. They will solve any challenge if we create an environment with radical transparency and trust them to do the work. The consequence is that teams are more likely to come up with innovative and creative solutions, breaking the status quo and changing established habits. They put the whole organization into motion and are highly change responsive.

The downside of such an organization is that it needs a strong common goal that everyone believes in. Without it, chaos reigns. Also, the organization needs enough leaders ready for such a shift.

Organizations and societies can change, but change never happens overnight. To make the change stick, make the new way of working a habit — it’s all relative to the size of the segment we are changing. It takes decades in society at large. It will take years within organizations. It may take months at a team level. Take your time. The push will not solve it. Inspiration will.

Ask yourself:

1. Where do you see your organization now?
2. What is the major reason for that classification?
3. Where would you like to see it in the next five years?

Key Takeaways:

◽ The organizational design needs to match the overall environment complexity and need for adaptiveness.

◽ The agile organization is built on people and their relationships.

◽ The traditional organizations 1.0 and 2.0 optimize for efficiency, dealing with predictable issues.

◽ The agile organization is a collaborative, creative, and adaptive network designed to address VUCA challenges.

CHAPTER 4 The Agile Leader

Agile leadership is an ability to look at the organization from the system perspective, understand system dynamics, be aware of what’s happening in the system, embrace it, become an integral part of it, and finally be able to act on and influence the system with coaching in order to initiate a change. The new management paradigm is about collaboration and trust, decentralization, continuous adaptation and flexibility, and cooperation and teamwork.

Leaders Go First

Leadership in an organization that is still in transition on its agile journey can be hard.

I recall the story of a business leader at one of the major UK retail banks who had to juggle this change along with some serious customer-facing deliveries. The head of the department started by upskilling not only her people in agile and Scrum but also herself in agile leadership training. This was rare, as most leaders make the classic mistake of assuming they know it all and do not bother to invest in themselves. By taking this training, she inspired her staff to upskill themselves. She learned from this experience that when learning is required, leaders go first. With this training completed, she and her teams could make an informed decision on how they wanted to restructure the teams.

One of the team members made the decision to actually stop one of the products, as it was discovered it no longer brought any value to the customers and branch staff which saved the organization millions and allowed that investment to go to other initiatives that would create value. The win-win was only possible because the product owner was empowered to make that decision and the manager supported the decision through servant leadership.

THE SERVANT-LEADER

Being a servant leader is the first step on the agile leader journey. The servant-leader is an enabler of the flat(-ter) structure because it removes the hierarchy from leadership. Removing the hierarchy is necessary for agile cultures as they build on self-organizing teams where empowerment and autonomy are much higher.

Let’s imagine you are in the last four months at work before a long holiday of several months with no connectivity to the outside world. Your hope is that the organization will make it without you. You can’t prepare all of the personnel for every decision they will need to take, and you can’t let the organization simply carry on, unchanging, until your return, as the business is too dynamic, unpredictable, and complex. There is no single person who can naturally take over for you. You have a flat structure with self-organizing Scrum teams, which are ready to move on to the next level. You feel positive that they can make it and that the organization is ready for the next step.

This scenario is a good example of what is required for mastering servant leadership. It’s not about you, but about the others. All you need to do is focus on helping others to become leaders. Remember, your goal is not to be efficient, to advise, or to decide. It’s to cultivate the teams so they get used to taking ownership and responsibility for organizational challenges without your having to make every decision.

Think about yourself as a leader in this context. On a scale of 1 to 10, where do you focus the most effort during your day-to-day work?

1

10

Advising and deciding

Listening to others

Tasks

Relationships

Day-to-day focus

Long-term focus

Planning

Learning from feedback

Roles and responsibilities

Building communities

Efficiency

Growth of others

Positional authority

Emergent leadership

Doing the work

Helping others to do it

Workflow and results

People and collaboration

The more on the right you are, the closer you are to the servant leadership mindset.

Ask Yourself:

1. What would need to change so that you feel comfortable moving closer to the servant leader role?
2. What can you change in your focus?

THE LEADER-LEADER

Another useful leadership mental model is described by David Marquet in his book Turn the Ship Around, which shows his leadership journey as commander of the nuclear submarine Santa Fe, where he realized during a simple drill that giving orders might not always be the best approach. He said, “Leadership should mean giving control rather than taking control and creating leaders rather than forging followers”

A good first step is sharing the purpose with everyone so everyone knows where we are heading, increasing transparency so everyone knows what is happening, and creating safety where autonomy can grow.

THE LEADERSHIP AGILITY: FROM EXPERT TO CATALYST

The servant leader and leader-leader approaches are simple and sufficient in many cases. Nonetheless, in some situations, it’s useful to look at leadership agility from a different perspective, for example, using Bill Joiner’s concept described in his book Leadership Agility. It focuses on managers as leaders, showing a journey every manager needs to go through.

1. The Expert

This is a classical boss or supervisor — the person who knows best and therefore can advise and lead others by example, using his or her own experiences. Bill Joiner, in his article “Leadership Agility: From Expert to Catalyst,” estimates that around 45% of managers are currently capable of operating at this level, and around 10% are not even there yet. This is frightening.

Expert managers believe in decision-making, and they are task-oriented and tactical, often very directive, even micromanaging. They believe they are the best, they have very high standards, and if it were only possible to clone them, everything would be much easier. They take the entire agile concept as a set of practices, rules, and roles and often turn them into even more intense micromanagement.

The Achiever

The next level is the Achiever. Bill Joiner estimates that around 35 percent of managers are currently capable of operating at this level. Achievers are the key people who are already far enough on their agile journey that they can picture agile as a mindset and can feel a need for a leadership style change.

Achievers still believe in their own way of working, but unlike Experts, they can at least operate in one-to-many relationships. They focus on getting buy-in; they are strategic, influential, sometimes even manipulative in order to get their way. They use meetings to sell their points of view. Their primary focus is on results. They are very competitive, they like stretch goals and clear objectives, and they believe a good challenge is the best motivator.

The Catalyst

Finally, only around 10 percent of managers are currently capable of operating at the Catalyst level. The key focus of a Catalyst leader is to create a space, an environment where people can be successful. They care about the culture where many-to-many relationships emerge, and they focus on collaboration, transparency, and openness.

The Agile Leader Journey

While all the preceding concepts are useful, they are just mental models helping you to see how you can think about your transition.

Purpose

A good purpose gives energy to the system and motivation for others to follow it. The agile leader journey starts with a purpose, a higher sense of value without which the organization would never be as good. In the agile leader’s world, your purpose is not about “how.” The steps on the agile journey are flexible, cocreated by the teams around you, and they can change depending on the circumstances and feedback.

Ask Yourself

1. What is your purpose, and what do you want to achieve?
2. Why is it important to you?

Positivity

The agile leader journey needs a lot of positivity. Tell people around you that they are great. Acknowledge their work. Every day, every week, every year. You need to catch them at the moment of greatness and share that. The human brain is more efficient if we focus on successes instead of failures, and you need to switch that pattern in your brain in order to unleash people’s potential.

Ask Yourself

1. How can you increase the positivity at your organization?

Listening

To be a successful agile leader, you also need to have great self-awareness and awareness of the entire system around you. Listening skills are essential. The concept of the three levels of listening — me, we, and the world — describes the different things your mind can focus on during a conversation.

The first level, “me” listening, is the most common one. You listen for your own understanding and learning and so that you know how to react.

The second level, “we” listening, focuses on the other person or group of people and creates a communication channel between you and the other side where you are a great listener, helping the other side to express their feelings and raise their awareness about the topic. This listening channel is often used during coaching. You suppress any thoughts about yourself. It’s not about you anymore. It’s about the other person or the team.

The third level of listening is the “world” channel: focusing on what is happening around you. It’s all about the context and surroundings. At this level, you are aware of the conversation but mostly at the essence level. You feel the energy between people and concentrate on its change. It’s very useful during facilitation where, as a facilitator, you need to focus on the flow of the conversation, not influencing the content of it.

Ask Yourself:

Practice listening at all three levels. Be aware at which level you are listening to most frequently and which level is the most comfortable for you. Make notes from the practice.

1. What did you start noticing at the “we” level?
2. What caught your attention at the “world” level?

Key Takeaways:

◽ Being an agile leader is not a position but a state of mind.

◽ Agile leaders don’t need positional power but leverage the power of influence.

◽ The agile leader journey starts with a purpose.

◽ Organizational purpose is critical for autonomous teams.

CHAPTER 5 THE AGILE LEADERSHIP MODEL

The agile leadership model helps leaders to see the organization from a different perspective, to stay connected with the system, and to unleash its potential through these three steps: get awareness, embrace it, and act upon it.

Get Awareness

The first step of the agile leadership model is to “get awareness” of what’s going on in the system. You learn how to listen to the voice of the system [Fridjhon14] and how to see the current reality in all its diversity and colorfulness. Every organization is a system that constantly sends out signals. All you have to do is be aware of them, notice them, and listen to them. This first step helps you to choose a good view so you can see the entire system from the top.

At this stage, you need to be a good listener and observer. Suppress any urge for action. Acknowledge that you have enough time.

Embrace It

The second step helps you to “embrace it” and accept that whatever is happening in the system is what should be happening at the moment. Do that without an urge to evaluate the situation or solve any problems immediately. After all, who knows what is right and what is not? Events that look very bad at the moment might actually end up being good. For example, the bug that cost us a lot of stress and some revenue as the system was down for a day happened to be a good thing, as it helped us to improve our system and our products. The conflict that started by blaming one of the designers in the team was not good at the time, but eventually, it made us stronger than other teams in the organization.

Act Upon

The third step is to “act upon.” It’s about using the power gained in the previous step to influence things and change the system dynamics and behavior. It doesn’t have to be any significant change — a small impulse in the form of a coaching question or a small change in the environment may be enough.

There is an unlimited number of actions on the menu to choose from. As there is no right no wrong action to try, no matter what you choose, the system is constantly on the move. You might impact it in a certain way; however, every system is naturally creative and intelligent and will react in its own way.

Integrate It in a Circle

The next step is to get you back to the observation tower to get the awareness of what’s happening now, embrace the changes, and become ready for another tap.

Let me share a story from one of the companies I’ve been working with. The company is on its agile journey — it started with a single Scrum team, and a few years after that, the company increased the number of both ScrumMasters and product owners (POs). The executive team had seen the impact on the business and customers and started to look at different ways of leading the organization to support agility. Interestingly, they started with a bonus to the POs, saying that as they were a team, they should be able to take the money and agree on the split themselves.

Can you guess what happened? They were not a team yet, so they acted more as individuals and fought for their own gain. On Friday, they all agreed to split the bonus equally, as that was the only way they could possibly reach an agreement. On Monday, two of them came back and challenged the agreement, saying that they had worked harder than other people and so others should not get the same amount.

As a solution, they offered to return the remaining money to the organization rather than split it, as they insisted that it was not fair for everyone to receive an equal bonus. As you might guess, it got personal and ugly.

Applying the traditional leadership model, you might say the leadership team used poor judgment and that the whole thing was just a disaster. But if we apply the agile leadership model, there is no right or wrong, only different perspectives.

So, let’s see a few of them:

• The underlying problem of POs not helping each other surfaced, and conflicts that were hidden for years were discussed.

• The leadership team learned something about the difference between a team and a group of individuals.

• The affected parties were healing from the conflict for more than a year. In the long term, you might say that it made them stronger and it brought them together.

• The people who were accused of not performing got valuable feedback; they learned that they also needed to show their value to the rest of the team.

Those are just a few observations. Was what happened a bad thing? Maybe, maybe not. Who knows. In the short term, it may look that way. In the long term, maybe not as much. And that’s the core of agile leadership.

Key Takeaways:

◽ The system is an invisible part that builds on the social connectedness and relationships among people and teams.

◽ Agile leaders need to grow their Relationship Systems Intelligence, focusing on the group as an integrated whole.

◽ The agile leadership model helps leaders to unleash organizational potential through the three steps of getting awareness, embracing it, and acting upon it.

◽ In a complex system, it’s hard to know what is right and what is not. Everyone is right, but only partially.

CHAPTER 6 COMPETENCES

Great agile leaders have four core competencies: they can create a vision, enhance motivation, get feedback, and implement change. The Agile Leader Competencies Map is a good visualization tool that helps agile leaders to understand what they are good at and what they might need to improve.

VISION AND PURPOSE

The vision is the driving engine for success. It’s not necessarily related to the products but to the organization itself.

THREE LEVELS OF REALITY

The three levels of reality describe what the visioning process should cover. It starts in the sentient essence, where it’s all about feelings, energy, and spirit. That’s where the culture is born. As an example, you can ask some of these questions to explore the sentient essence bit more:

1. What attracted you in the very first moments?
2. What did you first notice/ feel/experience?
3. What are the metaphors describing your early connection?

The dreaming level is all about exploring possibilities and options. As the name suggests, it’s about what you want, your desires, and your dreams. As an example, you can ask some of these questions:

1. What actual dreams do you have?
2. What are your fantasies or hopes?
3. What are your fears?

Finally, the consensus reality makes the purpose real and brings it back to our day-to-day reality. As an example, you can ask some of these questions:

1. Who are we?
2. What do we want to achieve?
3. What are our values?
4. What are the circumstances?

HIGH DREAM AND LOW DREAM

One of the techniques that help to raise your awareness of your dreams is a High Dream/ Low Dream exercise. High dreams are your purest wishes, when all of your secret hopes come true, while low dreams are limited by your fears.

Using the three levels of reality as a landscape to navigate through, do the following:

• First focus on your high dream for the organization. What is it? What does it look like? What makes it important? Make a few notes.

• Then turn your attention toward your low dream and think about what it may look like if things go wrong. What does it look like? How does it feel? Make a few notes.

• Then think about the factors that might contribute to making a low dream a reality and note them.

• Finally, think about what supports your high dream and what actions you can take so that the organization moves closer to that high dream.

BRINGING DOWN THE VISION

One of the best tools for helping an organization to re-create or reconnect with the original vision is the exercise called Bringing Down the Vision. It’s a method of facilitating a large group visioning process that uses the three levels of the reality model.

Phase 1: My Metaphor The whole process starts at the individual level, where every person is guided by the facilitator through the three levels of reality and creates a metaphoric image of the organization step by step. Always give people enough time to create that image in their heads and to reproduce it on paper.

Phase 2: Metaphor Sharing When people are done with their individual metaphors, they form small teams and share what kind of visualization they created and explain what it means to them. Teams need to be as cross-functional and diverse as possible to see different perspectives.

Phase 3: Team Metaphor Now, once people have introduced their images to one other, they start to see if there are any similarities or differences and to identify the organization’s strengths, challenges, and needs. From their conversations, they search for alignment. They try to create another metaphor that embraces important aspects from all of their individual creatures. They visualize it, investigate it, describe it, and are ready to share the outcome with the other teams so they can merge the essence of all the metaphors and dreams.

MOTIVATION

The second segment of the Agile Leader Competencies Map is motivation.

Theory X and Theory Y

One of the most famous theories about motivation, described by Douglas McGregor in 1960, is called theory X and theory Y.

Theory X defines people as lazy slackers who dislike working, avoid responsibility, need to be directed and controlled, and whose actions need to be traced. This is where classical micromanagement comes from. All the detailed timesheets, task assignments, and performance reviews are grounded in the theory X beliefs.

In contrast, theory Y defines people as enthusiasts who consider work as a natural part of their life, are motivated, always take ownership and responsibility, enjoy working in the company, don’t need many directions, are self-directed and self-controlled.

Here is the interesting paradox. Niels Pflaeging has been running an experiment at conferences for years. Imagine the whole conference room, about a thousand people, answering the first question:

“What kind of person are you? Write X or Y on a pink Post-it Note, and exchange it with your neighbor.”

No one believes himself or herself to be an X theory person. Pflaeging then asks them to answer the second question:

“Think about all the people in your organization — what percentage of theory X people are there? Write it on a yellow Post-it and exchange it with your neighbor.”

Now here comes the interesting point: the vast majority of people believe that theory X people exist, and that’s very dangerous. This belief that other people can be theory X is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a terrible prejudice, and judgment. We are responsible for creating the environment that generates theory X behavior, not theory X people; we do it through the way we work and through the tools we use.

I believe that theory X people don’t exist and have never existed. It’s only our having treated people that way for ages that has created this kind of behavior.

Ask Yourself:

1. What practices that stimulate theory X behavior do you have at your organization?
2. What practices that stimulate theory Y behavior do you have at your organization?
3. What can you do to improve the ratio between the practices that stimulate theory X and those that stimulate theory Y behavior?

FEEDBACK

The third segment in the top section of the Agile Leader Competencies Map is feedback. Agile leaders make feedback a routine, so it becomes a habit and they don’t even notice it. If you ask for feedback only once per year, it’s a big thing. It becomes something out of the ordinary, and that’s stressful.

Trust, transparency, openness, and regularity create good feedback.

Opening up for feedback is a long journey. It starts with small steps. First, open up for honest and candid feedback internally, inside of small teams, by running regular retrospectives and making them private to increase the feeling of safety. It takes time. Once the trust at the team level is established and people get used to it, they rely less on retrospectives and are able to give each other feedback on the spot.

At a certain point, the teams start to feel comfortable with cross-team sharing and learning from each other. They start to feel comfortable opening up and hearing the feedback from the other teams as well. That is when you start to discuss cross-organizational issues.

Finally, when you become strong internally as an organization, open to speaking up and giving each other feedback, you are ready to share your way of working with the outside world. Start inviting other people to see your way of working and give you feedback, speaking about it at conferences, organizing workshops for students in order to attract them, inviting candidates who are deciding if they want to work for you or to join you for a day to see who you are.

GIVING FEEDBACK

Sometimes, when your culture is not quite where you’d like it to be yet and a lot of toxic behavior exists, you might still need feedback, but the environment makes it hard to give and receive it. In such environments, the COIN conversation model is a good way to get the message across. COIN stands for context/connection, observation, impact, and next.

1. Context/Connect:

We start with context to connect with a specific time, event, or situation that happened in the past. When did it happen? What was the situation? What were the circumstances?

1. Observation:

The observation must be specific but neutral. Don’t take sides. Just describe what happened. Don’t evaluate, as evaluation in such situations usually comes across as blaming.

1. Impact:

The impact is very personal. It’s about your feelings, not about what is or isn’t right. How do you feel about it? What does it look like to you?

1. Next:

Finally, the next step brings us back to the action. Help people to see there was, and is, another way to react. What could have been done instead?

CHANGE

The last piece on the Agile Leader Competencies Map focuses on our ability to implement change. Change happens at three levels.

First, there is a change in yourself, your beliefs, reactions, approaches, behaviors, and habits — the way you work. Second, there is the ability to influence others. Make them part of the team, create an environment where they become the first supporters, and together create a snowball effect and change the organization together. Finally, the third level of change is at the system level. Focus on the entire organization, have the system perspective and internalize the agile leadership model.

Put Down Your Sword and Just Listen

Consider this story to see how to change when everyone around you is resisting it.

“I was an unofficial “change leader” for Scrum in a medium-sized telecom company. I had easily identified a few older guys, resisters, who would not come to my informal Brown Bag lunchtime sessions to learn a bit about Scrum. They didn’t seem interested in trying some small experiments to see if the new approach would work for them. They only seemed interested in pointing out what they thought wouldn’t work.

I thought they were hopeless. As a result, I tried to avoid them; I ducked around a corner and waited for them to pass. One day, as I was coming out of the cafeteria, I saw that one of the most resistant guys came up to me and started in — a litany of the problems with Scrum, why it wouldn’t work for our teams, how I didn’t know anything about “real” product development, how he and other older guys had lots of experience but no one really listened.

I stood there, nodding and replying in monosyllables, “Oh? Really? I didn’t know that. I can see how you would feel that way.” Then a strange thing happened. At the end of his angry outburst, he paused and said, “Okay. I guess my team could try it.” I was dumbfounded. I realized I hadn’t argued with him. In retrospect, I see now that I “listened” him into agreeing to try Scrum. I allowed him to have his say. I was polite, respectful, really listening. I have since learned that many resisters are deep-down looking for someone who will care about their point of view. They are, after all, smart people who want to do a good job. Give them a chance — that’s what I learned. It might help all our organizations move forward.”

Key Takeaways:

◽ Metaphors stimulate the vision; don’t be afraid to explore your high and low dreams.

◽ Great visions are created by walking through all three levels of reality: the sentient essence, the dreaming level, and the consensus reality.

◽ People are naturally creative, take ownership and responsibility, and are self-directed and self-controlled.

◽ The only true collaboration starts with shared responsibility and ownership where we can all work together.

◽ Facilitation and coaching are critical skills for agile leaders.

◽ Start with yourself: be a model of an agile leader.

CHAPTER 7 META-SKILLS

Sometimes it’s good to take a high-level look at your skills. Meta-skills fall into three domains: Me, We, and the World.

THE ME DOMAIN

The Me domain is internally driven. It allows you to choose a stance and decide whether you want to approach the situation with curiosity, playfulness, respect, or patience.

1. Curiosity is the key ingredient of the get-awareness step of the agile leadership model. It stimulates you to search for different perspectives and listen to the voice of the system.
2. Playfulness comes into the picture when you start enjoying the agile leadership model and start looking for innovative ways to understand the system. It makes the second step of the model — embrace it — enjoyable.
3. Respect is the core ingredient of the embrace-it step. It helps people to internalize the situation and accept that the voices of the system are diverse, neither right nor wrong, just different.
4. Finally, patience is needed to avoid rushing through the steps of the agile leadership model and to take your time to embrace the situation. At the system level, you have unlimited time. There is no rush. There is no perfection, but there is always a better way of doing things.

THE WE DOMAIN

The We domain comes from the environment and drives the way we work together. As you can in the Me domain, you can choose to focus on the meta skills collaboration, trust, openness, or diversity.

1. Collaboration is the core agile meta-skill for every team, as, without it, the team becomes just a group of individuals. Collaboration enables the co-creation spirit, and nurtures innovations and creativity.
2. Trust is a prerequisite of any collaboration. If there is no trust, there are just individuals protecting their own positions. No one would openly share their ideas, and the entire environment becomes overly self-protective.
3. Finally, openness and diversity add variety and depth to the environment. An open environment shows much higher responsibility and faster learning than a closed environment. Diverse teams tend to be more creative and innovative than homogeneous teams. Nevertheless, diversity is much more than taking care of team composition. It’s a diversity of perspectives.

THE WORLD DOMAIN

Last but not least, there is the World domain, focusing on what attitude we show to the world: commitment, focus, truthfulness, or courage.

1. Commitment is the driving force behind an agile transformation. Without it, no change will happen, no issue will be solved, no case will be closed.
2. Focus is an enhancement of that driving force. It has the potential to create the flow, a state where things are happening almost seamlessly.
3. Truthfulness creates integrity. Are we truthful in what we say? Do we also act that way? Or are we pretending and hiding things to make the current situation easier?
4. Finally, courage is a game-changer. Are we courageous enough to experiment? Are we changing the game, or do we prefer to follow the established practices and processes?

Ask Yourself:

1. What does that meta-skill mean to you?
2. How do you know it is missing?
3. What would be different if it were significant instead?

Key Takeaways:

◽ Curiosity is the key ingredient in searching for different perspectives.

◽ There is no perfection, no end state, just the certainty that in a complex system, there is always a better way of doing things.

◽ Trust is a prerequisite for collaboration.

◽ Diverse teams are more creative and innovative than homogeneous teams.

◽ There is no leadership without courage, and there is no agile without courage either.

CHAPTER 8 BUILDING AN AGILE ORGANIZATION

The agile organization is like a star on the horizon — you can never reach it, but you can come closer, step by step.

INSIDE OUT

Any sustainable change needs to start from the inside out, with a change in values. If you care for sustainable agility, the only way to achieve it is to go from the inside out — start changing the values and build that shift of the mindset from the inside.

The most common reason for failure that I see in the organizations implementing agile is having agile as another process and a goal by itself, which almost never works. It usually starts with the same request: “We need to train X number of people in agile.” And when everybody is trained, the “agile transformation” is done. But there is no change of structure, culture, or values, nor is there any clear expectation of the outcome.

Ask Yourself:

1. Which values need to change first in your organization for it to become agile?
2. How do you know you are getting there?
3. What processes, practices, or frameworks can help you to achieve agile?

EMERGENT LEADERSHIP

Unlike in traditional organizations, where leadership was mostly positional, in agile organizations, we rely more on emergent leadership.

The core prerequisites for emergent leadership are radical transparency and frequent feedback — nothing that wouldn’t have been in the agile environments already. Anyone can come up with an idea, share it with everybody and ask for feedback, while the people around them make sure the idea is worth following. In the beginning, you can start with a small initiative. Later the initiatives may grow and become wider.

Let’s consider a real-life example:

Team Forming in a Corporate Environment

Our international telco corporation was undergoing a massive transformation toward becoming an agile organization. Some parts had been using agile for ages; other parts had just started or were about to start. We opened the discussion about how to approach forming our future agile teams within the organization. Pretty quickly, we came to the conclusion that we would do an experiment: let our colleagues form teams themselves. What we laid down were some conditions to be met by the to-be-created teams. We also let the newly established teams select their ScrumMasters. Also, it was up to Product Owners and these teams to agree on who would perform the Product Owner role toward which teams.

One day, we met with the team in an offsite session. After some initial hesitation, physical moving around started — we could observe how people were grouping with others, how names were being added or crossed out on team flipcharts representing team rosters. The intensity increased as we approached the time limit. Then a feedback round via the thumb up/thumb down sign told us whether we were satisfied with the result or not.

Once teams were created, we jointly reviewed all upfront submitted nominations, modified the list on the basis of ideas from those present, and proceeded further with selection. Within half a day, the teams forming, and the other roles voting experiment was completed in real-time and transparently. In our huge international — and still very hierarchical — corporation, it was at least a bit unusual. We were glad that we were brave enough to put the program-level roles into the game as well. In my view, it was a demonstration of not just spoken but lived transparency, empowerment, and shared leadership.

CULTURE

As Edgar Schein said in one of his books, “The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. If you do not manage culture, it manages you, and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.”

You just need to remember two very important lessons when it comes to creating an organizational culture:

1. Too Tight a Structure Kills the Mindset
2. Too Open a Structure Can Create Chaos

COMPETING VALUES

The competing values framework is based on research of the major indicators of an effective organization and provides a different perspective on agile organizations. The top competing values are:

1. present internal versus future external drive
2. flexible versus fixed processes orientation.

The competing values will result in four different culture quadrants — control, compete, collaborate, and create. The very traditional organizations have a cultural mix in which control and compete cultures are dominant, while agile organizations have a mix of mostly create and collaborate cultures.

Key Takeaways:

◽ The agile organization is like a star on the horizon: you can never reach it, but you can get closer, step by step.

◽ There is no specific framework needed to become an agile organization. All you need is to practice agility at all organizational levels.

◽ Sustainable agility is only achievable from the inside out. Start by changing the values and shifting the mindset from the inside.

◽ In a well-functioning agile organization, leadership is nonhierarchical but is spread around and decentralized.

◽ If enough people change their mindset, the culture changes and the organization becomes an agile organization.

◽ Green and teal organizations optimize for adaptiveness, have a higher level of flexibility, and are better at dealing with VUCA challenges.

CHAPTER 9 BUSINESS AGILITY

Be open and have the courage to experiment with agility at the organizational level.

What is currently a hot topic is the agile organization. We talk about different organizational structures and cultures that operate under different premises. They are value-driven, customer-centric, cross-functional. They care about people and create team-oriented cultures built on self-organization, autonomy, and decentralization. They change the way they work with people and invest in a different leadership style. In these organizations, all functions have become agile — agile finance, agile marketing, agile HR.

Ask Yourself:

1. What benefits would you see if all parts of the organization were operating in an agile way?

AGILE AT THE EXECUTIVE LEVEL

One important step companies often skip during their agile transformation is getting top management on board. Executives deeply need their own experience with agile and Scrum. They can’t just read about it.

The goal is not a speedy transition to agile; it’s to get hands-on experience with this different way of working.

Where on a scale of 1 to 10 would you place the executive team of your organization currently?

1

10

Group of individuals

Team with one goal

Have no own

experience with agile

Acting as an agile team

Decide on agile

and leave teams to

implement it

Become agile

themselves to help

the organization

embrace it

The farther on the right you are, the higher chance your organization is going to be successful with agile.

THE CEO IN AN AGILE ORGANIZATION

No matter how desperately you are searching for a CEO experienced with agile leadership, this is still just a small obstacle. The real need for change starts only when most of the organization already has an agile mindset. Since organizations have changed and agile is no longer solely the domain of IT, and since business agility has gained acceptance in nearly every department, the need for a change at the top level is inevitable. Why do we need a CEO in the first place? Why don’t we go one step further and change the top to become a role model for the entire organization?

When you think about it, having an organizational ScrumMaster and an organizational Product Owner fits the way we work much better than having a single CEO, as it supports the right organizational mindset, transparency, and collaboration, and it is consistent with who we are.

From a legal perspective, it is perfectly possible, and it’s not that much work either. You might need to change the bylaws a little, but there is no reason why you can’t do it. From a hiring perspective, it’s much simpler, as you are not looking for that superhero personality who can effectively interact with both internal and external sides. All you need is courage. And that’s one of the Scrum values anyway. Experiment, and then inspect and adapt.

AGILE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Are you wondering why you should be agile while your board of directors is not? There is no reason why the board of directors should not act as an agile team. However, as is true for people at every level contemplating a new way of working, change is scary. But it can be achieved with persistence, transparency, and vision.

Flexibility over Fixed Plans and Budgets

The more we are responsive to changes through collaboration, the higher the need for adaptiveness in the organization. Agile organizations are moving from yearly fixed budgets toward the Beyond Budgeting principles and toward purpose-driven continuous planning over annual top-down fixed plans. You will see more volunteer-based virtual teams over fixed departments and, at the board level, more transparent and collaborative committees.

Anyone should be invited to join when they have something to add to the purpose of the event. Keep it transparent, inclusive, open. All you need is an iterative process with regular feedback and an opportunity to inspect and adapt.

Strategic over Operational

A good board of directors should be focused 80 percent on strategy and significant business issues and only 20 percent on reporting. Nothing new, right? It’s the same old 80/20 rule we often use in agile product ownership. Agile boards are going through a significant shift, refocusing on the strategic over the operational.

Reporting is part of transparency — an almost unnecessary part because transparency makes all of the information available to everyone at all times.

The board wouldn’t have to meet to get a status report. They should be meeting to discuss strategy, understand one other, have creative conversations and visionary sessions, give feedback. The boards should meet frequently, every one or two months (that’s their Sprint time), and should focus on communication and work between meetings.

Key Takeaways:

◽ In agile organizations, all functions have become agile: agile finance, agile marketing, agile HR. It’s a whole new world.

◽ In order to succeed with agile, you need experience with the new way of working at every level, including executives and boards of directors.

◽ Agile organizations work better with organizational ScrumMaster and organizational Product Owner roles than with the traditional CEO role.

CHAPTER 10 AGILE HR AND FINANCE

The more organizations shift toward agile, the more they need to redesign how they work internally.

AGILE HR

Agile HR changes the focus in the agile organization to the overall employee experience; it supports the culture shift, choosing the employee-centric approach over the governance role typical of traditional HR departments. To do so, HR needs to gain the trust of the employees, make them the center of HR’s focus, enhance their overall experience, and be agile itself. HR staff need to become servant leaders who care deeply about making people awesome so that they can deliver value to the entire organization, are not afraid to experiment and try new practices, and make safety a prerequisite.

Supporting the Culture Shift

To visualize how typical practices align with the expected culture shift in an agile organization, it is helpful to use the competing values framework, as it nicely shows the shift from control and compete cultures toward create and collaborate cultures.

If your current culture is very deep in the control quadrant, then going to an organization with no positions might be too big a step to take in one go. Similarly, going from individual key performance indicators (KPIs) to self-evaluation and coaching might be too much. On the other hand, when you have a mostly agile organization based on self-organized cross-functional teams, neither individual KPIs nor objectives and key results (OKRs) help you on your journey.

Agile HR practices need to be aligned with the culture

Recruiting

In an agile organization, knowledge and skills are no longer the key factors we are looking for. Past experiences are also applicable only to a certain extent. It’s more about having an open mind, being able to learn new things, and collaborating with others to deal with complexity and unpredictability than about being an expert with deep but narrow specialization.

Google is a good example of this approach:

For every job, though, the №1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they’re predictive. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership.

The Interview Process

Once we had changed whom we were looking for, we needed to change the interview process as well. As the traditional curricula vitae (CVs) look into years of experience and hard skills, they are not very useful. Companies can get creative here.

They can ask candidates to write an essay about why the company should hire them, create a short video on the topic, design comics showing the company how they imagine the work, or write a company press release about hiring them for the position. One good practice is to do behavior interviews and simulate scenarios to see how the candidate would respond. It tells you much more about the candidate than any hard skills test can tell you.

Evaluations and Performance Reviews

In a traditional organization, it was pretty simple. Each employee was assigned a task, and each task could be evaluated and linked to a particular KPI.

The simplest practice used in agile environments is to set a team goal instead of individual goals. There is still a risk that the goal becomes obsolete during the year, but at least you support the team collaborative culture. A slightly better option is to break the year cadence and create shorter goals. An even better practice is to let teams design their own goals.

AGILE FINANCE

Like agile HR, agile finance is crucial for organizational agility. Changing the finance department is hard, as finance people usually like yearly planned budgets and fixed forecasts. In the agile finance arena, the concept of Beyond Budgeting has been the most successful. “Beyond Budgeting means beyond commandand-control toward a management model that is more empowered and adaptive.”

Many of the twelve Beyond Budgeting principles are not new to agile, but they are still useful to remember in the context of finance:

1. Be a purpose-driven organization.

2. Govern through shared values.

3. Focus on team culture.

4. Trust people.

5. Give them autonomy to act.

6. Be customer-centric.

7. Keep the rhythm.

8. Be dynamic.

9. Set directional ambitious goals.

10. Allocate resources as needed.

11. Encourage peer feedback.

12. Reward shared success over competitions.

Key Takeaways:

◽Agile HR supports the growth of the agile culture.

◽ Agile HR = agile leadership + system coaching + large groups facilitation.

◽ Agile organizations decouple salaries and positions and make the roles emergent.

◽ Rolling budgets are flexible, dynamic, and keep the rhythm.

CHAPTER 11 TOOLS AND PRACTICES

SYSTEM COACHING AND FACILITATION

Two of the most important skills for the agile organization are system coaching and facilitation. We don’t stop at individuals; we need to be able to coach teams and larger systems. As agile at the organization level is still very new, unfortunately, there are not many coaching programs that focus on systems.

The more organizations rely on collaboration and forming networks, the more facilitation of large group workshops, conversations, and brainstorming becomes indispensable. Facilitation brings neutrality and helps people find alignment and mutual understanding. They own the process, while the participants own the content.

OPEN SPACE

The Law of Two Feet sets the foundation for Open Space. It allows everyone to take responsibility for what their interests are, and if they find themselves in a conversation that isn’t holding their interest and to which they are not contributing, they must use their feet and go to another topic circle where the conversation is more interesting or relevant to them. This is probably the key to Open Space’s success. Just imagine using this law at work every day. How many meetings would you stay at? The conversations you attend would be much more interesting and let’s not forget how much more time you would have for them.

Creativity cannot be planned, and our task is to not limit the flow of creativity. Therefore, in an Open Space,

● Whoever comes are the right people.

● Whatever happens, is the only thing that could have.

● Whenever it starts is the right time.

● When it’s over, it’s over.

Diversity of Roles

Every individual has different preferences, and flexible formats such as Open Space need to accommodate diversity and make it a guiding principle. That is why, besides the facilitator nd the participants involved in discussion circles, Open Space defines two roles — Bumblebee and Butterfly.

Bumblebees fly freely from one group to another. They always listen to a piece of conversation and then jump to the next group and conversation. It often happens that the inspiration they have acquired in one group is transferred to another and makes a bridge between conversations.

The second role is the Butterfly. In contrast to Bumblebees, Butterflies are not participating in the planned conversations but create new opportunities to connect and learn. Sometimes they overhear something, and they need to keep their thoughts straight, so they sit somewhere alongside active conversations and take the time to reflect.

Open Space’s flexible format accommodates any idiosyncrasies in your preferred way of thinking, learning, and conversing. Consequently, it’s a great tool for addressing complex problems with creative and innovative ideas.

BUILDING COMMUNITIES

Agile organizations have their basis in self-organization. The community is a free, inclusive, volunteer-based entity with a common goal to achieve. Once the goal is achieved, the community can be disbanded or can continue working toward another goal.

The idea is that the community is vetted by the rest of the organization, and if no one joins, it’s a signal that the issue is not interesting enough for others to spend their time working on it. If people are interested and find regular time to meet and work on the task, it’s a signal of its importance to the organization.

Nowadays, communities can also be active online, over Slack or social media, especially if you create a community that extends beyond the organizational boundaries. Agile organizations are built on the enthusiasm and energy of communities. They share the way they work with others, they collaborate with external parties in wider networks, and they sometimes even do most of their business through volunteer work. Engaging communities is in some cases a more powerful way of achieving the common vision.

Key Takeaways:

◽ Radical transparency is the key enabler of agility.

◽ Agile organizations are built on the enthusiasm and energy of communities.

◽ Modern organizations build networks of supporting teams that are aligned around the same purpose.

CHAPTER 12 SUMMARY

Here are the key takeaways from the your agile journey so far:

ORGANIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Agile moves the focus from individuals to teams and shifts the culture from control and compete quadrants to the collaboration and create quadrants of the competing values framework. You may not see it on the first day you decide to go for agile, but collaboration, people, and creativity are what drive the leadership shift. The competing values framework doesn’t tell you which culture is right or wrong for your organization. At the end of the day, who knows what is right and what is not?

AGILE LEADER PERSPECTIVE

Agile leaders are guides for the organization on its agile journey. From the meta-skills perspective, you need patience, as such change takes time. Even if your current state is far away from your dreams and desires for the organization, you need to be only one step ahead with the practices and not push too hard for the change.

Don’t push the change — let it grow.

Organizations need to invest in system coaching, large group facilitation skills, and agile leadership development. Business agility is not just about applying some framework; it’s a total shift of organizational values and culture, and such change always needs to happen from the inside out.

Agile leaders are the key success factor to organizational agility success in the VUCA world.

How would you assess the level of the following aspects in your environment on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is low and 10 is full?

● Agile leadership

● Autonomy

● Creativity

● Engagement

● Emergent leadership

● Experimentation

● Fun

● Purpose-driven

● Team spirit

● Transparency

Ask Yourself:

Becoming an agile leader is not hard — you just need to start. Choose a few things you can do to improve your environment.