Successful Agile teams are predominantly characterized by their culture and not their practices. This sentiment rings true to many (if not most) in the Agile field. Christopher Avery, who has made his name in the world of organizational transformations, has taken his work on Responsibility and focused it directly on Agile practices. Is Personal Agility the key to successful Agile adoption?
Mike Griffiths blogged about a conversation with Avery:
We were discussing motivation and how to motivate peers who you do not necessarily have positional power over. Bosses may try to create motivation via carrot and stick approaches, but these are weak and short lived. People grow tired of such manipulation and find ways to break the system.
Instead, Christopher talked about “Intrinsic Motivation”, a more powerful motivation that comes from within. People want to be on a winning team, but are not sure how to find or create them. The secret lies in understanding what “winning” means for others and then creating wins around you. In practical terms this means asking people “what is in it for them?” i.e. what is it they would like to learn, do, or gain (beyond a paycheck) from the project and then provide opportunities for these things to happen.
At first this sounded a little odd to me, a bit too touchy-feely. Asking people what they did over the weekend is one thing, but asking them what they want out of a project seems, well, invasive, too personal. However when you think about it, that is backwards, after all the project is something we all have in common. What they did with their spouse over the weekend, now that could be personal!
A. Singh has also blogged on Personal Agility, back in June 2007:
My hypothesis is that these gains often do not materialize due to a lack of personal agility, where personal agility is simply the “awareness” of things of value and adapting behaviors and mindset to use it.
Singh cites the work of Eli Goldratt of The Goal and Theory of Constraints, Peter Senge of the Fifth Discipline, and Christopher Avery's work on Responsibility.
In an article for the Agile Journal, Ashley Johnson of Gemba Systems and I co-authored Personal Agility for Agile Adoption (also citing the work of Avery, Covey, and others):
As Agile becomes better known, many troubled teams are deciding to adopt Agile practices to help fix their problems. Most clients seeking our help in Agile adoption want to start by pursuing process and tools. The more dysfunctional their teams, the less tolerance they have for focusing on individuals and their interactions. We have found that the most effective teams- those that show a tremendous improvement in productivity and value to their organizations - have individual team members who take ownership, act responsibly, and are disciplined in recognizing and responding to change at a personal level. These individuals adopt Agile practices because they have made a conscious decision to do so. They do what it takes to make things work.
So what does Avery say? In his blog, Avery talks about Agile Dynamics vs. Agile Mechanics and states that the dynamics beat out the mechanics every single time:
Consider arranging results in a classic two-by-two matrix that measures agile tools quotient (i.e., mechanics) on one axis and personal agility quotient (i.e., dynamics) on the other. The scaling trend I've seen has been that most agile adoption efforts today attempt to move from quadrant 1 (low agile tools quotient, low personal agility quotient) to quadrant 2 (high agile tools quotient, low personal agility quotient) by teaching and installing agile tools and processes — i.e., the mechanics. The result is much pain. When enterprises instead focus on developing the leadership and people dynamics of agility, what I call personal agility, they move from quadrant 1 to quadrant 4 (low agile tools quotient, high personal agility quotient). From there, it is a much easier and more successful move to install the mechanics.
So, what Avery and others have found are that the touchy-feely skills (Agile dynamics) are much more important than the mechanics such as TDD, Stand-Ups, etc... Do you agree?