Overview of Constructive Agility®

Enirely non-prescriptive

Event-based—no recurring meetings required! (clear your calendar!)

Constructive Agility is not a target state: it is a process for moving your culture, behaviors, and processes to your own agile target state. Its focus is at the initiative level, but we have some things to say about organizational strategy as well.

To help you to get there, we have some models. They look like target states, but they are not. They are only there to provide a vocabulary.

Every step is an experiment—refinement is continuous

One thing you will notice is that there is not a lot of “Agile process” in the Constructive Agility models. There are no roles or rituals. That does not mean that you do not need processes or roles: you do. But if you follow our steps, we will help you to derive your own roles and processes!

 Steps for getting there

To achieve agility, follow these steps. These will guide your and your organization or initiative through the learning journey required, and help you to define your own agile processes.

1. Define the high level business+tech concept; if it might be viable, proceed. If you have an initiative underway, this is already done.

2. Identify key leadership. If you already have a leadership team for your initiative, this is already done too.

3. Refine business+tech vision with clear success goals.

4. If the visions are feasible, build the runway. This is where you start considering things like organizational culture, leadership style, value stream, team structures, and how information is shared.

5. Identify the optimal sequence of capabilities to demonstrate or release. There is where you start to systematize patterns for capability definition and prioritization.

6. Identify key intersection points, critical paths, and integration strategies. This is where you develop patterns and practices for integrating concerns for priority, time, dependencies, and spending.

7. Decompose each capability into a set of features to be concurrently developed. This is where you state to develop repeatable approaches for dividing up the work while staying focused on capabilities.

8. Allow teams to start pulling features to create. This is where you start exercising and evolving the end-to-end “walking skeleton” that you have created.

9. As internal releases are produced, start evaluating them, and feed results back. This is where you start to systematically incorporate user feedback.

10. As MVPs are produced, start test marketing them, and feed results back to adjust visions. This is where you develop patterns for closing the loop with respect to your goals.

Constructive Agility!

The ten steps of Constructive Agility result in the creation of steady state activities. (These are processes, but we prefer to call them activities, to avoid the notion of handoffs from one process to another.)

Thus, after performing the ten Constructive Agility steps as shown at the left in the diagram below, you end up with a set of ongoing activities as shown at the right in the diagram. The activities on the right are not sequential: they are ongoing. These ongoing activities are your working ecosystem. In the course of creating these, we will guide you through decisions about how to perform these activities, because context matters. And you will always be refining these activities, adjusting and pivoting based on outcomes.

Conceptual models

We have various models that we refer to, but these are not what you “implement”. They are not templates. They exist to help us to help you to think through various choices, so that you can decide what is best for your situation.

The model below is a high level view of how an organization’s culture, behavior, and collective knowledge influence outcomes. Agility is rooted in these three things.

Culture, Behavior, and Knowledge

Notice the bubble at the bottom: Knowledge. To operate with agility, people working in an organization need to know the ways to approach things that will lead to agility at scale. These “ways” are patterns for how to organize work. If people only know old hierarchical control-oriented patterns, that is what they will use. They need to know the patterns of Lean, Flow, and DevOps. In the model below, we list areas of knowledge that are critical for agility.

Learning That Must Occur to Achieve Agility

The model below is provided for those who want to see how “feedback loops” occur. Feedback loops are a cornerstone of Constructive Agility, but Constructive Agility is event-oriented, rather than process flow oriented, and so the feedback loops are there as shown, but we don’t design for them per se. You will understand this better after we have explained our event-oriented approach.

Feedback Loop Pattern

Thus we see that an organization operates according to behaviors and patterns. Behaviors become embedded in the organization’s culture, as expected behavior — “how we do things”. Patterns also become embedded in culture. The difference is that behaviors are about how people respond to situations, whereas patterns are how people organize the work.

The Transformation Leader Role

An executive, manager, or team lead who has operational responsibility and who is deeply engaged in helping people to learn and define their ways of working. A transformation leader oversees the evolution of the initiative. This applies to any initiative—not just agile transformation—because every initiative is a learning journey and is transformational.

Read more about the Transformational Leader Role.

The Change Agent Role

An initiative is a learning journey: as the initiative progresses, people learn what is working, and scale it, adjusting along the way.

It is extremely helpful to have assistance from people who have key types of knowledge and experience, in leadership, organizational culture, behavioral and organizational psychology, and also the subject domains that are important for the initiative.

Read more about the Change Agent Role.

The ten steps result in continuous activities (processes) that you continuously refine

 

By following the steps on the left, you end up with ongoing activities, as shown at the right.

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In the course of performing the ten steps, you will define a set of baseline strategies. These are a starting point, and you will forever be refining them through the activities on the right above.

Having clear and always evolving strategies for every important set of issues is critical for a successful and healthy organization

When learning these ten steps, you will notice that some of them entail much more effort than others. This is merely the natural lifecycle of starting and evolving an initiative. There is always a low level of effort at the beginning, which ramps up when planning and early experiments get serious, and then ramps up much more when development gets underway. The typical lifecycle of activity is shown in the graph below.

Notice that for step 4 we say “Begin to build the runway”, rather than “Build the runway”. That is because one never finishes: the product development process is ever-evolving and ever-improving. It is only in step 4 that we begin creating it, as an end-to-end skeleton of sorts. Some people call that a “walking skeleton”.

 

In the following ten steps, we explain each step for getting to a state of constructive agility.

—> Step 1