Pigeon Feed
A lesson in marketing...
Working with technology is easier than it looks. The blinking lights, humming fans, and flashy screens just make it seem intimidating. But all that hardware just does what you tell it to. The more you know how to instruct the machines, the more they're capable of doing.
People, on the other hand, are quite the opposite. They don't need more data or more instruction. In fact, it's easy to overwhelm them with too much of either of these things. Give them too much and they start shutting down. The challenge becomes knowing just how little of the necessary amount of data and instruction to deliver so they can move in a direction you want them to. The circumstances where you may need to do this are limitless. Parents do this all the time. Same for teachers and business leaders at all levels in an organization. The good ones, that is. Its more about persuasion and influence than it is about data and instruction.
Much of my most recent work on the Phoenix Project has focused on marketing. (I'll just interject that progress is on a bit of hold for a month or two for reasons I'll undoubtedly be writing about closer toward the end of the year.) I've been avoiding this effort for a long time. For decades my image of what it meant to market and sell involved ugly plaid suits and loud urgent language. Whereas I wanted it to be like feeding pigeons. I work to make some lovely birdseed and all I'd have to do is toss it out into the world and the adoring customers would swarm all over it with delight and enthusiasm.
Turns out, it doesn't work like that. It's more about persuasion and influence than it is about feeding the hungry masses.
The old school Madison Avenue approach - which is alive and well in places like Facebook, Twitter, and Google - is to push the persuasion elements as hard as possible against the line of unethical manipulation. But that's a fat fuzzy line and many people aren't opposed to scooting over the line for extended tours, even if they know they've done so.
Today, leveraged by high tech and advances in neuroscience and psychology, it seems setting up offices on the other side of the line is an acceptable, even expected business model.
But there's another school. One I first became aware of after reading Robert Cialdini's "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion." Subsequent books, like Seth Godin's "All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World" and Daniel Pink's "To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others," sent me down the path of reframing what it means to market and sell - particularly when what I'm trying to promote and sell is an idea or a better way to work.
The idea of Agile as an approach to organizing people around work is over twenty year old. That's a long time in technology years. Even so, it has yet to shake loose the flavor-of-the-month aura that so many other management tricks have helped create. In my view, the prospects for Agile's reputation aren't improving. In fact, they may be getting worse.
This isn't the fault of Agile principles or practices. I still very much believe in them as a useful mindset. But they're getting lost in the morass of identity politics that permeate the modern workplace. I attended a meet-up a while back on creating safe spaces, for example. Safe spaces are important. They always have been, even before they were called "safe spaces." But the presenter, seemingly lacking a sense of irony, had a fascinating command-and-control approach for "mandating" how "resistant" teams should follow her framework. All the right words were masking the same old same old.
Influence, persuasion, negotiation, sales, marketing - none of these things are taught as part of any Agile 101 training that I'm aware of. The tests for certification as a scrum master and product owner for the Agile Alliance were ridiculously simple. They covered the the most basic understanding of Scrum, the kind of information available in abundance on the intertubes. SAFe certification was much more challenging, but still was focused on the mechanics of implementing and following the Scaled Agile Framework. Maintaining any of these certifications required nothing more than feeding the income stream for the certifying organizations. (In this regard, Scrum.org stands out. From their website: "Unlike Scrum Alliance certifications, Scrum.org certificates are lifelong and do not require any additional payments or renewals." Their scrum master certifications are also much more rigorous than any other certifying organization.)
So newly minted scrum masters and product owners are left to their own devices for figuring out the human dynamics. Most don't. They fall back on and increasingly wide array of tricks and trinkets to coddle and cajole their teams along. More commonly, they're simply ineffective. Since they're the face to any Agile implementation, Agile gets the ding for being ineffective. It doesn't help that scrum masters are often left to fend for themselves.
Questions scrum masters and business leaders need to ask themselves before they start down the path of implementing Agile include...
How will you position Agile in relation to current business AND project practices? What's your story?
Who (departments, groups, teams, and individuals) are you asking to change and in what way?
Do you have an empathy map for each of the groups or individuals you're asking to change?
What promises are you making?
What expectations are you going to set
How will you measure change?
These are also good questions to ask if your implementation looks like it's stalled or going sideways.