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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Etymology isn’t identity. Where words come from is a matter of historical interest, not proper usage.

So I hope you enjoyed your Memorial Day, even though it’s become little more than a day off and an opportunity for retailers to offer sale prices.

Not that Memorial Day is something to be cynical about. I think about the sacrifices men and women in uniform have made for us and I’m reminded of the Passover tradition, where parents explain to their children that God brought them out of slavery — them personally, not just their ancestors.

Most of those who made the ultimate sacrifice probably weren’t thinking of us at the time. More likely they were thinking of getting the job done, of their buddies, and of their families. And yet, they sacrificed themselves for each of us, personally, and we shouldn’t forget it.

Which has what to do with running an IT department?

Just this: Too often, business leaders cast the need to get the job done in moral terms. There’s a project with milestones and deadlines — employees who don’t meet them are letting the company down, aren’t taking responsibility, won’t “give 200%” (and can we please start respecting the field of mathematics by jettisoning this tired cliché?).

They’re bad people, even though the milestones, and deadlines, and staffing to accomplish them, were adjusted to the point of absurdity through optimism bias and political necessity.

Please remember — the success of a business project lacks the moral imperative of liberating Dachau’s prisoners, not to mention France.

What’s hard is that this isn’t binary. You have more alternatives than just death marches and clock-watching.

In business, a sense of urgency is a valuable dimension of the corporate culture. It’s just that more isn’t better. Even more urgent is equal to frantic — an unproductive state in which employees divert their energy and attention from getting things done to worrying about how they’ll ever manage to get things done, while managers divert their time and energy from making sure things get done to making sure employees look busy every minute of every hour of every day.

There’s a dimension of oddity to this, too. The best executive leaders project an air of relaxed confidence. They’re able to act with urgency without ever looking rushed and harried.

But many of these same leaders interpret an aura of relaxed confidence in their employees as apathy and lack of commitment.

Go figure.

Getting back to deadlines and making them, you want this to matter to everyone. You want this to be a matter of professional pride. You want to make sure “This deadline was never realistic” isn’t the team’s default conclusion when the deadline becomes challenging, even as you conclude it’s time to change the deadline because it was never realistic.

Which brings us to a broader topic.

In some situations, the point of stability is where you want to be. That’s when leadership is easy. None come to mind at the moment, but I’m sure there are situations like this.

Leadership is hard when the stable places are the extremes, because that’s where staying in the healthy middle takes constant attention, a great deal of energy, and constant vigilance.

Maintaining a balance in the healthy middle that bisects the line that has apathy on one end and frantic flailing on the other is just one example. Maintaining a healthy balance between the stable cultural characteristics of chaos and bureaucracy is another.

If you’re a metrics-oriented sort, ask yourself how you’ll measure this sort of thing. Take CMMI (Capability Maturity Model integration), which in many respects is an admirable approach to process maturity. CMMI doesn’t, of course, advocate bureaucracy as it promotes increasing sophistication in process management.

The problem: It doesn’t recognize the near-inevitability of an encroaching culture of bureaucracy as organizations become more process-mature, and incorporate strong management practices to prevent it.

For that matter, and it’s a related matter, CMMI, like most maturity models, has a strong focus on metrics, but tends to hand-wave over the difficulty of making sure the metrics used to measure a process are the right metrics.

Here’s what I’ve never seen: A multidimensional maturity model that makes too much just as immature as too little.

But this is exactly what mature business leaders have to do.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Clichés are the rotting corpses of insights.

“Agile,” sadly, has become one. It has joined the long parade of business concepts that, like “entrepreneurial,” “professional,” and “proactive,” once meant something, but now just mean “good.”

Let’s resurrect the corpse.

Last week’s column focused on Agile development. This week we’re going to talk about the business as a whole. The questions: What does it mean for an organization to be agile, and what does it take?

What it means isn’t especially complicated. While Wikipedia’s entry on the subject is less than stellar, its definition is as good as any: “Business agility is the ability of a business to adapt rapidly and cost efficiently in response to changes in the business environment.”

There is, inevitably, a complication. As pointed out in KJR from time to time, delayed feedback is destabilizing when delay approaches the speed with which system inputs change.

Call it Agile characteristic #1: Feedback loops need to be much quicker than the speed with which the business environment changes.

Agile characteristic #2 is a superset of AC#1: Fast decision-making.

Yes, this is a cliché. But quick decision-making is by no means automatic.

Look at what slows down decisions in most companies and you’ll find two factors are what pour most of the sand into the gears of progress: Lack of trust, and controls.

Lack of trust leads to overreliance on consensus, as people don’t trust decisions they weren’t involved in making. And as consensus is the slowest way to make decisions, and also isn’t how to make the highest quality decisions, Q.E.D.

Then there are controls — requiring, for example, six signatures to approve a $1,000 expenditure. Why all the signatures? The organization’s trust in an employee’s judgment is pegged to their altitude in the organizational hierarchy.

Not that all controls are a bad idea. You might recall the London Whale — JPMorgan Chase’s trader who lost the company more than $6 billion, violating securities laws as he did so. Requiring a second, and even a third pair of eyes on decisions is just fine. It’s the fourth, fifth, and sixth pairs that slow things to an unnecessary crawl.

Agile businesses prize speed, but speed has the same consequences when it comes to decisions it has when driving a car: The faster you go, the more skillful you have to be so you don’t cause a flaming crash — see “London Whale,” above. So Agile Characteristic #3 is an enormous emphasis on making sure everyone who makes important decisions — which in an agile business is, in the context of their responsibilities, pretty much everyone — is in a position to make them well.

So agile businesses invest heavily in education to make employees experts in their areas of responsibility. They invest heavily in defining and promoting, as Jim Collins put it in Good to Great, a culture of discipline. And, they invest heavily in both a “culture of honest inquiry” and the practices and tools required to support evidence-based decision-making without the desire for evidence slowing decisions down to the point they become destabilizing.

Next … this is Agile Characteristic #4 … agile businesses promote another cultural characteristic: Utter contempt for the organizational chart.

Okay, not really the org chart, but close — for the organizational siloes most org charts turn into. In an agile enterprise, everyone collaborates with anyone who (1) will be useful in pursuing an interesting idea; and (2) is interested in pursuing the idea. And not just individuals. Workgroups and departments show the same behavior.

Which gets us to Agile Characteristic #5. People. Very good people. People who have the expertise, judgment, and attitude required to get things done. Because (drumroll …) …

Agile makes software development a practice rather than a process. In a process, it’s all about following the recipe to deliver repeatable, predictable results. In a process, intelligence resides in the recipe.

In a practice, it’s all about the practitioners. Because by the time a competitor has perfected the processes it needs to compete, the agile business has innovated to the next generation of whatever it is.

Processes and the assembly lines they depend on, physical or virtual, take too long to figure out and perfect.

Skilled employees know how to reach the exalted state of good enough, and how to get there fast enough to stay ahead.

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