The document discusses the role of agile leaders in organizations adopting agile practices. Agile leaders focus on setting audacious goals to motivate teams, shaping a culture that embraces agile values, and organizing the team in a way that supports agility. They model behaviors that encourage collaboration, continuous learning, and accountability. As traditional organizations can become dependent on false predictability, agile leaders play a key role in enabling cultural shift and freeing teams from impediments by removing waste and unnecessary waiting. Their leadership is essential for an organization to fully embrace change and benefit from agile ways of working.

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Kurt Bittner
1
December 22, 2018
AgileMe Taiwan 2018
What Do Agile Leaders Do?
If Agile Teams Self-Manage, What’s Left?

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When do organizations need agility?
Hint: It’s not to go faster

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When do organizations need agility?
Cynefin framework

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When do organizations need agility?
Current
State
Target
State
Inspect
Adapt

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So what’s the role of agile leadership?
Hint: Self-managing teams can’t do everything

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Goals
Agile Leadership’s Focus
CultureOrganization

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Agile Leadership’s Focus
Goals
- Strategic
- Generally customer
or market focused
- Bold, audacious
- Uncertain path to
reach
- Uncertain outcome
- Motivating, inspiring
- “Over the horizon”

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Achieving audacious goals can take many small steps, and even mis-steps
Leaders play the critical role in
setting goals
Source: Toyota Kata by Mike Rother

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The biggest unknown: what customers need/want
Source: http://www.exp-platform.com/Documents/2015%20Online%20Controlled%20Experiments_EncyclopediaOfMLDM.pdf
Improves
outcome
Does
nothing
Makes
things
worse

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Agile Leadership’s Focus
Culture
- The attitudes and
values that shape
behaviors and
decisions
- The “DNA” of the
company
- The things that make
your company unlike
anyone else

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Culture is at the heart of agility
Leaders help their organizations embrace
these values
•They model and reinforce behavior
•They reward and recognize positive
behaviors
•They discourage negative behaviors

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Agile Leadership’s Focus
Organization
- The roles,
responsibilities and
accountabilities,
processes, and
relationships that
define how people work
- Control over the
organization’s
resources and assets

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Step one: start with “who”, not “what”
“Start by getting the right people on the
bus, the wrong people off the bus, and
the right people in the right seats.”
– Jim Collins, Good to Great

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But who are the “right people”?
• Most importantly, volunteers
• … who want to grow to higher levels of agile maturity
• … people who are committed to the “greater goal”
• People comfortable with ambiguity, uncertainty
• ”Doers” – people who like getting things done on teams
• People who are strongly committed toward agile values

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Leaders are not just managers
• But also project managers, program managers, Product Owners,
Product Managers, Scrum Masters, …

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Everyone is on a journey

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Everyone is on a journey

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Clearing the path
• No matter how great the team, they can’t do it alone;
organization impediments block the path
• Most of these are caused by waiting
• For decisions
• For resources
• For people
• The traditional organization is often blind to waiting, so they don’t
see the problem
• They work on other things, keep themselves busy; high utilization
masks WIP and waste
• Leaders help teams by eliminating waste and waiting
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Goals
Conclusion
CultureOrganization
Effective agile leadership
is the key factor in agile’s
success or failure in an
organization.
By setting audacious
goals and supporting
new ways of working,
they signal cultural
shift.
They are the only ones
who can free an
organization that has
become blinded by
dependence on false
predictability.
By leading with new
values, they help the
organization to
embrace change
and growth.

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Questions?