How Agile 2 Supports the New AI
By “new AI”, we are referring to these systems that have been in the news, like ChatGPT and Bard. These are game changers because while they represent the current state of continuous progress in the quest for artificial intelligence, these new systems seem to be a step change in their capability. I wrote about how such step changes are normal for technology in my article How AI Will Affect Your Company.
The past few years have been so turbulent for business that companies are thinking about survival, and less about what has been called “Agile”. I refer to “Agile” in this way because “Agile”, which I choose to spell with a capital “A”, refers to the “Agile movement”, consisting of consulting companies selling “Agile transformations” and training vendors selling certification in “Agile frameworks”. The claimed benefits of these are that they make your company more agile, in the sense of being able to adapt, pivot, and move more quickly, which is an essential business trait today.
The problem is that these so-called Agile methods don’t work. Many have written extensively on that, and I am one. It’s not that Agile ideas are wrong per se, although some of them are, but the Agile community has distorted and oversimplified what is known about leadership and human behavior, and focused on the wrong things – microscopically obsessing over the individual product team instead of considering the ecosystem and the organization’s culture, knowledge, and leadership.
In fact, the Agile 2 project was launched as a reaction to the dysfunction of the Agile movement, and its ineffectiveness. Awareness of this dysfunction is not new: in 2012 the British Computer Society conducted a “Ten Year Retrospective” on the state of the Agile movement. Their analysis was complex, with a large set of positive and negative findings, but their concluding “threats” were very prescient:
Agile will become institutionalized and lose its power to challenge and adapt.
Become too focused on specific methods or products (sales pitches not practice).
Agile falls out of favor.
We have been in a hailstorm of change, and it might be the new normal.
This is in fact precisely what has happened. And the signs of number 3 happening are quite strong. A recent indicator is Capital One Bank’s elimination of all “Agile” roles, with the intention to “integrate agile delivery processes directly into our core engineering practices”. In other words, go back to a traditional set of roles, but hope that the people in those roles have learned to be more agile.
So companies have shifted their focus from Agile to the crises of the past few years: the pandemic, work-from-home issues, supply chain and economic turmoil, geopolitical instability, and now this new AI, which threatens to literally change everything. It seems like we have been in a hailstorm of change – and it is looking like it is not a period to get through but rather might be the new normal. Again, a step change, from which there is no going back.
This means that while agility is needed more than ever before, companies are too busy surviving to even think about it. If the house is on fire, you don’t worry about keeping it orderly.
We need to be strategic though. Companies will only survive if they are able to effectively tap the brains of their people. Right now we are seeing articles about how Apple might be losing its footing, having not paid enough attention to large language model generative AI. Are they suffering from the Innovator’s Dilemma? Is Apple in its sunset years? And is the same thing happening to your own company? The article talks about Apple’s culture and its alleged inability to tap its people’s abilities – in short, they are not agile, in a true sense. From the article,
“...several senior people within the company have abandoned ship for Google or startups out of frustrations with Apple's conservative mindset…AI developers want to work in an environment that is comparatively unshackled by bureaucracy and restrictions. The Information makes one particularly compelling argument: Apple's brain drain could ultimately be the company's undoing as it seeks to compete with Google, Microsoft, and others—even more than any difference in philosophy. And the explosive innovation in this particular space might be different than the markets where Apple has used its usual strategy.”
Okay so agility is still important, but there is no time to focus on it: so much else is going on.
We need to be strategic. Companies will only survive if they are able to effectively tap the brains of their people.
That thinking is a huge mistake. Once any bleeding has been stopped, the very next thing to think about is how to make your people more effective. It is your people who will conceptualize how to pivot your products. It is your people who will identify all of the things to worry about. The thing to focus on is how to make your people as alert, motivated, and effective as possible.
The other day someone in LinkedIn reached out to me for career advice. My advice was,
You have a technical background. I would recommend keeping that current. Perhaps expand it by taking some AI courses. And I would also recommend learning about leadership. That is always useful in any context.
My advice to businesses is not too different. My advice is to forget about so-called Agile. Instead, focus on agility and effectiveness. Improving those requires improving the organization’s culture and knowledge, in very targeted ways. We have identified the specific areas that lead to actual agility and effectiveness. Leadership is a key area, but it is such a broad domain, and there are very particular modes of leadership that are essential for fast-paced and effective product development.
It’s not hard: it amounts to a learning program for people – everyone, including senior leaders. Especially senior leaders. We also have assessments that will tell you what the gaps are. This is not a sales pitch: this is just a statement of what we have that can help. I stake my professional reputation on this.
We have been doing this for many kinds of organization, including a medical research foundation, a large digital product company, and several fintech companies. The outcomes have been dramatic. These organizations improve their level of internal ideation, collaboration, decision-making, and speed. They become stronger, better able to handle today’s rate of change. And then all of the other challenges seem less daunting.
