Constructive Agility With Streamline
Today’s business reality is that:
You need to go fast.
You need to innovate continuously.
You need to be able to pivot quickly.
When you pivot, you need to maintain alignment throughout your organization.
Superficially this sounds like we are talking about “Agile”. But we are not.
As I have written many times, purported “Agile” approaches failed to achieve what they had promised, and do not accurately reflect what is known from research in group behavior, leadership, and cognition. Agile approaches also are strongly focused on individual teams, but it was known from research (e.g. the work of Amy Edmondson of Harvard) that the behavior of teams is largely determined by organizational factors, and so team behavior is a symptom and is therefore the wrong place to focus when trying to achieve agility and effectiveness.
The behavior of teams is largely determined by organizational factors, and so team behavior is a symptom and is the wrong place to focus.
That’s why in 2020 I assembled a global team of 15 highly experienced people with diverse skills, with the goal of forming consensus on what actually generates agility in an organization. We published our findings at Agile2.net, and published the book Agile 2 (Wiley, 2021).
While that work informs us a great deal, it does not answer the practical question that business leaders have, which is, What should I do?
So I founded Agile 2 Academy to help companies to answer that question, because the answer is always dependent on an organization’s situation. However, there are shared behaviors and methods among highly agile companies. We know this, because we studied companies that are highly agile (including SpaceX, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and Google), and found a great deal of common behaviors among them.
We therefore realized that it was possible to define a kind of “meta” process that can be used. We call it Constructive Agility.
That process is question-based, to handle the contextuality of each organization. It is also highly oriented toward behavior: in the Agile 2 work (and in our analysis of highly agile companies) we found that agility mostly results from the behavior of leaders – not from any kind of workflow process. In fact – ironically – workflow processes such as the “Agile” frameworks Scrum and SAFe do little to generate true agility. What generates agility is the expectations of leaders, the behaviors they exhibit, and the incentives they create, and there are techniques that help a lot as well as long as the behaviors are there.
That’s why today’s strategies and plans need to account for behavioral factors such as rapid acquisition of knowledge, developing new capabilities, and quickly shifting attitudes, leader behaviors, and internal culture.
Why We Created Streamline™️
When we developed Constructive Agility, we realized that the popular tools in use for planning and execution are based on outdated approaches that defeat agility, and make it difficult to use the new approaches of Constructive Agility. This is true even of so-called “Agile” tools such as Jira, which really is an old-style tool with an “Agile” facade. So we built Streamline™️ to address that: to make it easy and natural to work in the new way – the way required by Constructive Agility, and the way that SpaceX works: an approach that is goal-oriented and issue-oriented rather than task-oriented.
Constructive Agility With Streamline
The combination of Constructive Agility and Streamline is powerful and changes behavior. Here’s how.
It encourages people to move fast:
Initiative leaders don’t stare at a complex grid of tasks. Instead, they look at a clean graph showing the capabilities being worked on and their interdependencies.
Streamline helps to change behavior: it helps to get leaders to focus on what actually generates speed and outcomes.
Streamline will project the critical path, which encourages leaders to focus on bottlenecks and ways to speed things up, rather than “Is task ABC done?” or “How done is it?”. The latter questions turn initiative leaders into clerks. Instead, Streamline encourages them to lead, by focusing on where work needs to go fast, which leads to questions about how it might be sped up.
And this brings up an important point: that Streamline helps to change behavior: it helps to get leaders to focus on what actually generates speed and outcomes. In short, it trains people to lead, instead of being task checkers.
It encourages people to innovate continuously:
In the Constructive Agility approach, people are given problems to solve instead of tasks to do.
They are also encouraged to “try an idea rather than perfect an idea”. That results from expectations set by leaders: an organizational value that is central to Constructive Agility.
The book, “The Seven Sins of Innovation”, by Dave Richards (a partner of Agile 2 Academy and co-founder of the MIT Innovation Lab) explains how these separate behaviors are all linked.
Constructive Agility strongly emphasizes creating a leadership culture that embeds these values and behaviors. This also produces true “psychological safety”, because if people test out an idea before perfecting it, then safe failure of ideas will occur often, normalizing the process of “try, analyze through dialectic discussion, refine, and try again”. That is more effective at creating psychological safety than the popular contemporary approach of “celebrating failure”, which we feel misses the point. The point is not to view failure as good: it is to test new ideas early and often.
Innovation requires a range of behaviors. The book, “The Seven Sins of Innovation”, by Dave Richards (a partner of Agile 2 Academy and co-founder of the MIT Innovation Lab) explains how these separate behaviors are all linked. Thus, innovation is mostly behavioral. While structure can help, structural approaches alone will not generate innovation.
It enables you to pivot effectively:
With Streamline you will not experience “task gridlock” when change is needed. When plans need to change significantly, complex project plans – be they SAFe product increment plans or traditional work breakdowns – are too complex and interlocking to be able to rapidly shift. Even worse, if planning occurs on a schedule, one has to wait until the next scheduled planning event.
Constructive Agility is event-oriented, not schedule- or cadence-oriented.
Constructive Agility is event-oriented, not schedule- or cadence-oriented. When new information arrives – whether it is results from a product launch, results of a product test, or new external information about the market – leaders immediately assess the new information for its impact on current strategies. If there might be an impact, leaders meet immediately to revise strategies.
Constructive Agility is question-based, not process-based.
When revising strategies, leaders consider both short-term actions and long-term strategies. Strategic change should be thoughtful, not erratic; but if change is needed, waiting is costly.
Since Streamline execution plans are in terms of capabilities, with outcomes defined as goals rather than tasks, adjusting those is much easier than trying to adjust complex interlocking work breakdowns or product increment plans.
You might be wondering, But isn’t the complexity still there, but hidden? No, it is not, because it turns out that the vast majority of project activities are easily adjusted by the teams that are doing the work if you simply adjust their objectives. There are usually only a few key dependencies, and they are easy to identify. In fact, in Streamline, they are explicitly identified as integration risks. That makes it much easier to adjust plans. This is where Constructive Agility really helps, by providing the right questions to ask, to get teams to adjust their own plans based on new objectives.
It encourages people to stay aligned:
Since Streamline enables you to see at a glance what every team’s objectives and strategies are, and easily drill into their current plans for creating capabilities and their associated goals, executives are able to assess what needs to change in order to strategically pivot. They can immediately focus discussions on areas that might have special challenges.
People leading initiatives or business areas can also see in real time how they align with others, because they can simply look at the objectives and strategies of those areas that they support.
Instead of pulling everyone into a superficially productive “Product Increment Planning” every three months, you can rapidly challenge product leaders to adjust their objectives, strategies, and the capabilities they are building into the product.
So instead of pulling everyone in an initiative together, at great cost, to run a superficially productive “Product Increment Planning” every three months, you can rapidly challenge product leaders to adjust their objectives, strategies, and the capabilities they are building into the product. They can see at a glance how spend rate will be affected. They can zero in on dependencies and the integration strategies for those.
Constructive Agility encourages you to have these exchanges in both a top-down and bottom-up way, iterating once or twice, to ensure that you have input from all areas. Rapidly. People will be deeply invested because they defined their own strategies.
Measurement
Behavioral change is often crucial, but it can be challenging to measure. A very powerful way to measure behavioral change is to use occasional short surveys. The results of the survey represent statistics that tell us a lot about people’s beliefs about the behavior of others and their own attitudes – making it measurable. Changes over time show us the trends, and whether our behavior-related strategies are working.
Culture Window
We created a system for doing this, called Culture Window™️.
As a very simple example, suppose that people tend to be late to meetings, and you want to change that. So you try a strategy of advocating for being on time for meetings. You might feel that is better than a punishment-based approach of forcing every meeting owner to take attendance and recording who is late.
If every few months a different sample of people take a survey, asking them if they perceive that others tend to be on time or late for meetings, the trend will show if the behavior change strategy is working.
This works for more complex behaviors, such as people being supportive of others, whether people tend to experiment or try to perfect an idea before trying it out, and so on. This type of measurement system is not burdensome and yet it provides an extremely powerful behavior change dashboard.
Teaching People How to Do This
All this is great in theory, but people need to actually do these things and learn how to behave in these ways.
Fortunately, we have a training program to teach them.
It is a hands-on step-by-step program that shows them how to work in the way that Constructive Agility advises, using Streamline and Culture Window. We call it our Management Curriculum.
(For those who merely need to administer Streamline, or provide usage support, there is a course just about Streamline that covers its administration and all of its functions.)
Conclusion
This is the real deal. It’s not some guy’s framework or preferred way of working. Constructive Agility is supported by research. Streamline is what people have been asking for – a truly agile tool.
It’s here.
True agility and effectiveness are within reach.
