(2019-08-13) Denning Understanding The Agile Mindset

Steve Denning: Understanding The Agile Mindset. Practitioners are thus said to have an Agile mindset when they are preoccupied—and sometimes obsessed—with innovating and delivering steadily more customer value, with getting work done in small self-organizing teams, and with collaborating together in an interactive network. Such organizations have been shown to have the capacity to adapt rapidly to a quickly shifting marketplace.

By contrast, managers in traditionally run organizations are often said to have a bureaucratic mindset when they are primarily preoccupied with making money for the company and its shareholders, when they are organizing work according to rules, roles and criteria that they determine, and when they are operating the organization as a top-down hierarchy with multiple layers and divisions.

It’s not that those with a bureaucratic mindset don’t care about the customer: it’s just that they generally focus more on making money for the company and its shareholders. Nor do they never use teams; it’s that in a bureaucracy, self-organizing teams are the exception, not the rule.

The profoundly pragmatic Agile Manifesto of 2001 makes no mention of any “Agile mindset.” My 2010 book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management, talked about attitudes, approaches, points of view and philosophies but it didn’t mention “mindset” either.

I first came across the term “mindset” in 2015 when the member firms of the Learning Consortium were trying to describe what they had learned in a series of site visits to firms like Microsoft, Ericsson, and Menlo Innovations who all said they implementing varieties of “Agile management.”

What did these firms have in common? We were struck by one thing: managers in successful firms seem to speak and act differently from those in the less successful firms. When managers spoke and acted in this way, benefits seemed to flow even if there were shortfalls in processes, practices or systems.

The Agile mindset is also often associated with the work of MIT management professor Douglas McGregor. His Theory Y, in which managers are encouraged to trust and support their people to do the right thing

While the Agile mindset is congruent with the Theory Y mindset, it goes considerably beyond it.

Gil Broza in his interesting book entitled The Agile Mindset (3P Vantage Media: 2015) wrote that a leader may have multiple mindsets – Agile, Waterfall and Lean – and may choose the appropriate mindset according to the task at hand as if choosing which pair of clothes to wear on a particular day.

The elements of the Agile mindset, however—the prioritization of customers over shareholders, of self-organizing teams over boss-driven individuals, and of networks over top-down hierarchies—are not the kind of viewpoints that are likely to change on a daily basis

The Agile mindset is an attribute of practitioners more than theorists. It is pragmatic and action-oriented more than a theoretical philosophy. It goes beyond a set of beliefs and becomes a tool for diagnosis and the basis for action. It tends to be built on the hard-won knowledge of experience and crafted from the lessons of trying to cope with massive change in the face of incomprehensible complexity.

The Agile mindset might also be called a framework, a paradigm, or a common model. Yet “mindset” seems a better choice of word, reflecting a coherent tradition of exploration, paths of analysis and patterns of reasoning.