Large corporations are increasingly longing to be like startups, but the road to Agile success is lined with failed projects, frustrated employees, and more.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Large corporations are increasingly longing to be like startups: Flat hierarchies and the absence of formal procedures result in unseen productivity; doing without restraining bureaucracy allows for remarkable speed, innovation, and creativity. Speed, innovation, and creativity: It’s exactly these things most corporations are desperately lacking. In turn, it’s only logical for big companies to want to take a leaf out of the startups’ book. Where the clumsy imitation of a start-up mentality fails or maybe isn’t even an option, the magic word agile soon echoes through the aisles. Because you know, the competition is already successfully agile, every consultant can deliver ready-made, highly scaled agile wonders on demand in no time at all, and even the house and farm service provider has had experience with it for a long time, but simply wasn’t asked about it until now. So «agile» gets written on the banner, swarms of self-proclaimed evangelists get unleashed onto the staff and off they go on a journey into a brighter future. But the road to agile success is lined with failed projects, frustrated employees, resistance, trench warfare, burned money and wasted time. Why do large companies have such a hard time with the self-indoctrinated start-up mentality? From painful personal experience, I believe there are two reasons for this, which always occur in the same context: Large companies are large because they have perfected the ability to streamline themselves for efficiency. Everything has to function with as little effort (cost) as possible and therefore has to be unified and standardized, deprived of any individuality and, of course, scalable. Growth is the only premise, scaling is the mother of paradigms. In fact, however, efficiency as the foundation for growth nowadays is no longer an advantage: It’n no longer just a matter of solving the same problem as efficiently as possible, but rather of identifying the most important problem out of emerging problems (effectiveness) and then solving it efficiently. What it means is that effectiveness has to be valued over efficiency. Moreover, efficiency is no longer achieved by standardizing stuff, but rather by thinking outside of the box when trying to leverage the existing knowledge in the company to solve a new problem. (Ari Byland, translated from German) Scaling — the second bedrock paradigm of large companies — has side effects that are barely beneficial to the agile mindset. Scaling (and growth) require roles and processes, regulations, hierarchies, salary levels, performance targets and annual reviews, growth planning and learning paths. As a matter of fact any company will, beyond a certain size, will end up in an organization with several overlapping types of silos — regardless of how it earns its money: Fig.1: Classic silos: The matrix organization © Thomas Klein / redbots GmbH The problem with these silos is that they kill even the most tiny trace of emerging agility. Silos are installed to establish responsibility and accountability, both in terms of personnel and expertise. They are limited by budgets and serve to map performance, regulate staff training and further education and are the cornerstone of everything that moves in the haze of the term «scaling». But even just the topic of budgeting alone is nothing but the death of agile: Budgeting is built on two fundamental assumptions: The future is predictable and, that people can’t be trusted. It doesn’t get more un-agile. ( Bjarte Bogsnes) Budgeting and its accomplice, the «estimates», are therefore based on the assumption that the future is predictable or at least estimable. Agile methodologies, on the other hand, were born out of the fact that the whole «estimating and planning» thing apparently didn’t work out quite well frequently — and instead, people wanted to be able to quickly react to change. The trunkload of items a silo carries (or results from?) features a certain tough item: Management. In some way, agile organizations also sport a kind of «management» — however, there’s a crucial difference: While a classic matrix organization has managers, each with their own competence and responsibility, the agile organization holds the term leadership. And leadership isn’t tied to a spot in an organizational chart but anchored guts and minds of the people who are lead by someone because they trust them. Someone who, instead of managing a project, supports the people behind it to make them become their own best, who motivates and encourages peers instead of telling them what to do and taking decisions for them.
