Originally published on LinkedIn on 13-Dec-2015 (Agile: Is Mindset Shift Really Required?)

The story goes like this.

Someone higher in the organization’s ladder decides to adopt agile in some teams. This manager has earlier worked in an agile environment and has seen the benefits. Usually, when one starts off with something new, there’s a lot of buzz and enthusiasm. And new agile teams are nothing different. So what happens after a few months? The enthusiasm of doing something new slowly starts disappearing, giving rise to discontent and weariness. Teams start to experience a lot of anxiety over aspects which they can’t influence, but still impact them. The sponsor of this adoption tries a lot to salvage the situation by engaging with other functions/departments. Most of the times, this doesn’t work. And then the agile adoption either remains on paper or dies its own death.

This story repeats itself in different places, different teams, different projects and different organizations. When organizations are trying to re-invent themselves to be more effective and relevant to the current business environment, such stories surely won’t help.

What goes wrong with such adoption initiatives? Do we really think that adoption of agile in a few teams would succeed and be sustained forever? Or we need something else, something more inclusive than adoption? Will transformation work out better than adoption? But isn’t adoption synonymous with transformation?

A not-so-recent post by Mike Cottmeyer aptly describes what these terminologies should mean and why we should treat adoption as different from transformation. In Mike’s own words, adoption seems to be “focused on choosing the practices we plan to put in place”. Whereas, he refers to transformation as “alignment of business objectives, management structures, and practices to support agility”.

Am I saying that such initiatives don’t ever succeed? Even when teams are trained and experienced in agile, have full support from their managers and are following the right practices specific to their context, they still need something else to truly succeed in their agile journey. I believe this “something else” is nothing but the mindset to support such a journey. When such a mindset exists in the organization, the likelihood of transformation success should drastically increase. Such a mindset would definitely lead to changes to the organization structure, changes to the processes and tools, changes in roles and responsibilities, changes to the support functions, changes to the HR policies and finally changes to the organization’s culture. In a nutshell, agile transformation is nothing short of an Organizational Change Management exercise, where changing to the agile mindset is the key piece.

As rightly pointed out by Vineet Patni in his recent Meetup on The Agile Mindset with Pune Agile Professionals, to get into an agile mindset, one first needs to understand the agile philosophy. Once this hurdle is crossed, comes the harder part of marrying this philosophy with the business objectives, which will eventually lead to the pathway for transformation.

But how does one get into an agile mindset, or for that matter how does one change one’s mindset? Are there any tools, techniques, frameworks, methodologies or it just comes by practice? Also, if changing one person’s mindset seems to be such a daunting task, how do we change the whole organization’s mindset? What help is available to us to undertake such a transformation? These and some other questions definitely need some concrete answers. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this post are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s current or previous employers.