Can Big Consultancies Deliver Agile Transformations?
Two years ago, an agile “tube map” published by Chris Webb from Deloitte caused a bit of a stir. There was a lot of criticism in the agile community about the inclusion, naming, and placement of various agile practices on this map. (I was also somewhat amused about the depiction of Management 3.0 practices.) To a lesser extent, similar critical feedback was hurled at Gartner’s annual Market Guide of Enterprise Agile Frameworks and other similar publications offered by the big consultancy companies. And I recently wondered if people trapped in formal dress codes should handle the modernization of businesses.
Do the large advisory firms really understand what Agile is?
I’m sure that Lean-Agile transformations are big business for large consultancy companies. 93% of CEOs say that organizational agility is a top priority. They all want their companies to change faster and innovate faster. They don’t want to end up like Borders, Nokia, Blackberry and Kodak.
The consultancy firms publish fancy insights, diagrams, and reports about Lean and Agile methods and frameworks because top consultants sell their services to senior executives. They are asked by a company’s executive team to “roll out” a top-down agile transformation. The big consultancies have plenty of models and templates ready for that, I’m sure. But we don’t hear many success stories of true agile transformations. You don’t create Agile mindsets with roadmaps in PDFs and PowerPoint.
Something better is needed.
What I often hear from coaches and consultants is that the most successful transformations happen bottom-up, with top-down support. Pushing change onto people in a top-down manner rarely works. Bottom-up change is more effective, but it stops at the team level when there is no support from above. That’s why the most successful coaches and consultants work directly with teams while developing buy-in at the executive level.
I trust that most advisors at large consultancies do their work with best intentions. But I don’t believe that any meaningful change will happen when they mostly work with the top of the organization, rather than the bottom. Colorful diagrams of the Lean-Agile space look very nice and might be an excellent way to get top management interested. But real change probably starts at the bottom of the organization, and then should work its way up without obstructions.
The opportunity that we are faced with is that nearly all organizations want more business agility, but top-down change rarely works, and Lean-Agile transformations cannot be delivered in PDFs.
When I look around me in cities, at airports, and on public transport, I can see with my own eyes that rapid behavioral change is possible. But it mostly happens as a voluntary, bottom-up shift in habits, powered with new technologies. I notice people using countless apps, devices, and platforms all around me. But nobody is reading about agile methods and frameworks in PowerPoint decks.
The world needs something else.
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