It’s up to you!

Last week, we had a strategy workshop at Software Center, the public-private digital transformation acceleration partnership that I lead. During one of the breakout sessions, we had a fun discussion around business agility that illustrated a very recognizable pattern. In a discussion around how to realize business agility, the focus was on who could be considered to be responsible for it. And then more examples of various people and roles abdicating responsibility were shared than you can shake a stick at.

In many ways, it has been the journey of Software Center. We started to work with software engineers around Agile practices, but soon the engineers mentioned that the architects should be involved as agility affects architecture as well. Once we had the architects involved, soon the requests came to involve development managers in the discussion as those are line managers to both engineers and architects. The development managers of course soon asked to involve product managers because they were just telling their teams to build what product management requests. It didn’t take long after we got product managers involved until they started to complain that we needed to involve the salespeople as whatever we were doing on the product development side had to be sold by them. The salespeople immediately remarked that if we wanted to change what we were selling, we had to get the C-suite involved as it would have a material impact on the bottom line. And the C-suite, obviously, responded with the argument that our customers weren’t asking for it and that our suppliers and partners weren’t willing to work with us on realizing these changes.

What’s going on here? Well, it relates to a column that I shared some months ago: to change anything, you have to change everything! And it aligns perfectly with our instinctive desire to keep things as they were and to control our environment to the maximum extent possible.