Shall I tell you a story of a failed corporate transformation project?
A story of executives who enthusiastically embarked on a journey to greater employee involvement utilising new technology – embracing self-organisation in teams, or to use an older term sociotechnical systems.
A story of well intentioned, experienced, consultants who bit of more than they could chew. Consultants who would have followed organic, piecemeal growth, elsewhere but driven by executive desire to get the project done fast misled themselves. Consultants who adopted a cookie-cutter approach, expanded their team with less experienced consultants, while neglecting the very client employees they sought to enlighten.
Perhaps you are already bored, you’ve heard this story before. But what if I tell you it was PacBell in 1986? – 15 years before the agile manifesto.
This story, together with many others is in a book called Age of Heretics. By the end of the book I felt I had seen a glimpse of the future, and it wasn’t a happy future.
While I knew bits of the story – or stories – the booked filled in some pretty big gaps. It turns the “agile revolution” is a remake on a bigger scale, there is no happy ending but maybe there is reason to hope.
For most of the last 20 years me an others have been talking about a collection of ideas known as agile. It is well known that most of these ideas go back far further…
Eric Trist described “sociotechnical systems” which were the fore runner of self-organizing teams.
Edwards W. Deming and Philip Crosby began a quality movement which was the pre-cursor of technical excellence and things like pair programming, refactoring, automated testing, etc.
Toyota’s Lean system teaches the importance not just of quality but managing workflow, involving the workers, stockless production and just-in-time working.
But it turns out there are many more stories which are less well known. I knew a little of the Topeka Work System but was oblivious to similar experiments at Procter and Gamble.
Nor did I appreciate just how many of these ideas were interconnected already. That in the post war period the academics and practitioners who invented and experimented intermingled, shared ideas and built on one another.
It turns out that what were a few experiments in the 1950s grew in the 1960s. By the 1970s General Foods and P&G were building new factories on these principles and Shell was abandoning its Unified Planning Machinery.
While growth continued into the 1980s there were failures like PacBell. Despite great success General Foods was never able to capitalise on the Topeka success. In fact, in an eery future echo others in the company found it difficult to work with the self-organizing teams at the factory.
And thats why Age of Heretics also reads like back-to-the-future for agile practitioners. While many of the experiments were a great success many of them eventually succumbed to normality.
In some cases the guardian angel boss moved on and their successors failure to appreciate or protect the experiment.
Ideas failed to travel and experimental plants were seen as odd or difficult. When ideas did travel the transplanted seeds failed to grow. It turns out copying processes is only part of the change needed.
Just about all the case studies given in this book will resonate with those in the agile community. The PacBell case in particular could have been written about many large companies, particularly banks, on an agile transformation in the 2010s.
(There are some other pre-cursors of our current world in here too. Like the 1972 Limits to Growth report which pre-shadowed many of today’s environmental discussions.)
Its very easy to be depressed about agile transformation after reading these stories but I shouldn’t be. After all, now I understand things better maybe I can avoid them?
Perhaps more positively, despite all these failures these ideas keep coming back. Haighmoor coal mine may have been the first self-organizing team in 1950 but by 1960 there were more. Not all survived but more followed them.
Topeka may have been the largest example when it opened in the early 1970s. Despite facing challenges – the loss of key staff, neglect by the parent company, changes of ownership, expansion and down-sizing – it was still self-organizing until 2002.
Repackaged as agile these ideas have reached more teams than ever before. While there have been lots of failures and sacrifices in this time the ideas live on. Slowly, the superior performance of this way of working, the applicability to work in the digital age and the expectations of younger generations probably guarantees that this is the future.
However, that doesn’t guarantee success for any one company or team. There will continue to be failures. So, as we pause for breath I suggest you read the fascinating Age of Heretics – it may not contain the word agile but it is a both an agile history and prophecy.