Are you "doing" agile or "being" agile?

One of the most colorful statements that I have heard lately says "A critical predictor of success in Agile transitions is how people define reality". When people transition into the scrum they tend to see a lot of bad mojo creep out of the woodwork. Value and technical debt, managers and teams wrestling with new roles and conflicts between teams. People now are no longer able to hide behind the fogs of the waterfall.

The whole idea behind scrum and agile methods in general is to make these impediments visible to the management so that requisite actions can be taken early and in time to make projects successful. You can think of the:

• The organizational reality as the Matrix (like the movie)
• Somebody in the management who is not satisfied with the status quo, who knows something is wrong as Neo, the transition sponsor
• The agile solution provider or coach as Morpheus

Neo is given a chance to choose either one of the two pills:

• The blue pill which will make him wake up the next morning in the current reality believing whatever he wants.
• The red pill which will make him learn the truth and see how deep the rabbit hole really is.

People who swallow the red pill are those who choose to confront the crimson problems head on. There is a fundamental shift in the mindset triggering a change in behavior as prescribed by agile methodologies. Scrum is used as a strategy to create a better and more sustainable organization. On the other hand people who swallow the blue pill are in a tactical agile situation. This might produce some local results in terms of team productivity and morale but eventually will lead to an organisational backlash which reverses the agile processes or a place where people will tell you "We are agile, but ..."; a condition referred to as Scrumbutt.  Of course there is no place for Morpheus in this situation!

Organizational reality is really about how things are done to succeed. I found this little graphic which puts organizational cultures into some perspective:

Agile methods talk about using a more people oriented culture to achieve competence by promoting collaboration between people and cultivating individuals and teams to fulfill a vision. This is the real shift in mindset that is needed to move to a strategically agile condition and here is where three out every five agile implementations fail. The graph below from a survey by VersionOne in 2010 comprehensively relays the story.

At the end of the day if you are trying to be the champion of agile methods to a "Neo", think about how he perceives reality and how he looks at the situation because the final choice of the Red or the Blue pill belongs to him!