Agile 2 Training Report - 2022-01-09

Drawing created by one of the attendees after the first session

The first cohort to go through Agile 2 training had its eighth session last Thursday evening.

“The class is excellent.”

The class has been progressing through the leadership-related modules, and having discussions along the way. The core material is drawn from established leadership theory, as well as popular leadership paradigms. It is not the “standard Agile” view: it reflects Agile 2’s approach that leadership is complex, there are many kinds, and each kind is useful in different situations.

“This is a great class that brings a fresh perspective on agile. Cliff Berg and the folks at Agile 2 Academy are so knowledgeable and deal w real world complex issues head on.”

One of the attendees said,

“So true that scaling frameworks leave off leadership. They just assume the leaders are correct and in the right place. A terrible assumption.”

Leadership is a large focus of the training, but it is only a portion. There is a lot to cover: we still have 

“This is very different than normal Agile training that people receive. This is really focused on the concepts and ideas that make Agile work vs. the "recipe". I have really enjoyed the conversations and interactions this class brings.”

• Collaboration

• People

• Culture

• Transformation

• Flow

Again, these are based on established ideas in the relevant domains: cognitive science, behavioral science, organizational culture theory, organizational change management, and operations research. Unlike the many “Agile frameworks” in the industry, these are not someone’s cooked up process.

One attendee said,

“Agile has become a word that basically means "good"—it's consuming everything (and the Agile practitioners don't know nearly enough about these things to play with them).”

Indeed, the Agile community has gradually been discovering the various disciplines mentioned above. During the 2000s the community realized that organizational culture was important, and the mantra “Don’t do Agile, be Agile” emerged. But few could tell you what it actually meant to “be Agile”, and fewer could tell you what it means beyond a team—that is, for an organization as a whole.

Interestingly, companies that are actually agile in the true sense of the word and are very successful do not generally rely on Agile frameworks. One of the course’s attendees said,

“My experience with Silicon Valley companies is different—not Agile at all, nor interested in it.”

In fact, if one looks at companies like Apple, Google, Netflix, Amazon, and so on, those companies do not use Agile scaling frameworks, and they don’t rely on Scrum either: they do what makes sense for them. They define their own approaches. Spotify famously ditched Scrum early in its history and came up with what is often called the “Spotify framework,” except that Spotify does not use that!—it was just what they were doing at the time when they wrote about it. Their approach is always in flux, and is always home-grown.

“It has been very gratifying for me to be in this Agile 2 training. It broadened my vision of Agile and gave me learnings on elements that I consider are key to taking Agile to the next level: People, Leadership, Culture and Communication. I highly recommend this training.”

Home-grown but informed by core ideas. It is important to have core ideas. Consider what would happen if you had a team of people trained in Project Management Institute “PMP” methods, and you challenged them to “figure out how to go faster”. Most likely, they would apply the tools they know: the recommendations would be to hire more people and plan things better. But if you challenged someone who knows the ideas provided by Agile 2, their recommendations would be quite different: they would likely recommend more parallelism, more versatility and cross-training, more just-in-time decision-making (and the need for the right kinds of leadership in the right places), more visibility about the state of the work, and so on.

So training matters—but not training in the wrong things.

Agile 2 training provides a foundation that enables someone to figure out what approaches will work for them. It empowers them. They don’t come out of the training with steps to follow: they come out of it with a deeper understanding. That makes them much more valuable: it means that what they end up doing for your organization will actually work.

Drawing created by one of the attendees after the second session