Where agile wishing still helped

Imagine you are in the process of making your company more agile. While you are strategizing how to become more responsive and agile, a fairy godmother suddenly appears. You have three wishes. What do you wish for? Should the fairy give all employees the much-vaunted agile mindset? Or would it be better to focus on agile management? Or do you use the magic wand to implement a comprehensive framework like SAFe, LeSS or Holacracy?

Personally, I would take a far more modest approach and merely wish for the following:

1.) Regular retrospectives in all areas of the company to know what is working and what is not. For this I would beat out at the fee that these retrospectives are professionally moderated - that means

• there is a clear structure,

• all are actively involved,

• you get to the bottom of the most important problems,

• develops concrete improvement measures,

• prioritizes, limits and monitors these measures in order to ensure their realization.

And while I'm at it, I would insist on an intelligent dovetailing of these retrospectives, so that the individual results of teams, departments, business units always provide a view of the bigger picture.

2.) Discipline, so that commitment does not remain just a nice term, but that each individual feels committed to the consistent implementation of the agreed measures. In other words:

• Everyone involved is willing to take themselves by the nose and each other at their word.

• People ask questions when promises are not kept and offer each other support when help is needed.

• It's about keeping at it, even where unexpected difficulties arise and further adjustments are required.

• Continuous improvement cannot be achieved without staying power - which requires appropriate conditioning training and therefore disciplined practice, feedback and learning.

3.) A control system that turns away from departmental thinking and towards value streams. In other words, a system that:

• does not primarily attempt to make the existing organizational structure more agile (agile teams, agile roles, agile managers, etc.), but instead focuses on the processes;

• designed a company so that as many people as possible have a clear view of the customer;

• ensures that its needs and requirements are accurately perceived;

• is able to translate these perceptions into attractive products and services and to deliver them quickly and reliably;

• to regularly put one's own perception and translation work to the test and to further improve it -- which would, in the twinkling of an eye so to speak, close the circle to the retrospectives and ensure continuous improvement.

And the moral of the story? For the fulfillment of these wishes we do not need fairies!