Jani’s Journal Issue 20: Agile Leadership
4/30/2024
Jazz and Agile Leadership
My favorite leadership coach, Brian Fraser, likens effective leadership conversations to jazz:
“You see, conversation is the most common form of jazz in human experience. You have structure – vocabulary and grammar – but every time you use them, you improvise around them. And in every one of those conversations, you have the opportunity to be an improvement artist for your organization.”
Jazz, characterized by its improvisation, flexibility, and collaboration among musicians, mirrors the foundational principles of Agile software development—an unlikely comparison, but hear me out! In jazz, musicians often play within a loose structure, adapting their rhythms and melodies in response to the ensemble's dynamic flow and the audience’s reactions. Similarly, Agile development emphasizes adaptability, team interaction, and iterative progress through continuous feedback loops. Both disciplines thrive on spontaneity and a responsive approach, allowing participants to innovate within a framework while reacting to changing conditions in real time. This parallel showcases how both jazz and Agile value creativity within constraints, encouraging a fluid and adaptive process that can lead to unexpected and innovative outcomes.
April 30 marks International Jazz Day! Started by the United Nations in 2011, as a celebration of jazz’s ability to unite people across the globe, International Jazz Day also provides the perfect backdrop for this edition of Jani’s Journal to explore the jazz-like leadership style fashioned after Agile Methodology.
Want to amplify your nonprofit's mission and impact more lives? You’re in the right place! Jani’s Journal is where nonprofit heart meets business savvy mind.
Agile Methodology
To understand Agile software development’s evolution into its own leadership approach, let’s start at the beginning. In 2001, several software developers driven for alternatives to the traditional development approach convened in the Utah mountains. The Agile Alliance’s “Agile Manifesto” emerged as a substantive agreement on four core values of the agile methodology. As you read through these values, it’s clear they apply well beyond software with clear benefits to leadership in both nonprofit and for-profit settings:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
These values resulted in 12 principles and several core practices of the Agile Methodology that focused on “seeking client satisfaction through the continuous delivery of value-adding software, by staying in constant communication with the client, and also by focusing on communication between team members.” While these practices were rigorously applied to software development, they hold true across multiple situations, including leadership. I’ve removed most references to software development to illustrate the point:
Scrum & Sprints: Sprints, or cycles of development that move the team closer to the larger end goal, are a hallmark of scrum. Sprints are managed through daily scrum meetings—15-minute synchronizing team meetings to review what was accomplished yesterday, what is planned for today, and identify any challenges or barriers to progress needing to be addressed outside the scrum meeting.
Kanban: A Japanese concept meaning “just in time,” Kanban shows the flow and status of the team’s activities. Focused on assessing the team’s capacity, Kanban requires communication and transparency within and across teams.
Extreme Programming (XP): Based on the idea of identifying “the simplest thing that will work” which can be delivered quickly and foregoes waiting to achieve the perfect long-term goal, XP emphasizes communication, simplicity, feedback, courage, respect, and customer satisfaction.
Lean Development: Borrowed from manufacturing, “lean development forces the team to ruthlessly remove any activity that does not bring ultimate value…” and focuses on creating the simplest solution (also called the minimum viable product, or MVP) and using customer feedback to inform incremental enhancements to the solution.
Crystal: Giving tremendous freedom to the team to develop their own processes, Crystal focuses on individuals and how they interact to foster symbiosis within the team.
Jani’s Jackpot!
If you only have time to read one article, Jani’s Jackpot promises the ultimate payout!
🔗 The Agile C-Suite 🔗
This Harvard Business Review (“HBR”) article explores the transformational shift toward agility in the executive suite and underscores its necessity to stay competitive against nimble market entrants that disrupt traditional business models with innovative approaches and customer-centric strategies. HBR articulates a clear blueprint for senior executives aiming to inject agility into their strategic roles, emphasizing that true agility goes beyond mere methodology—it requires a fundamental shift in how leaders think, collaborate, and drive their organizations forward. This graphic pulled from HBR’s article offers a great visual summary:
Some of the key practices of the Agile C-Suite described in the article are things most nonprofits are particularly poised to implement and benefit from:
Rapid feedback via daily stand-up meetings that identify and resolve impediments to progress as quickly as possible.
Shifting from “command and control” to coaching and facilitating using the tools teams were already using for their work (as opposed to asking for a special PowerPoint, Executive Summary, etc. to meet your needs alone) and asking for feedback on how your team wants to be led to bring out their best.
Shifting from meetings to work sessions focused on decision making, resolving issues, and removing barriers to progress.
Agile Organizations
🔗 Why Agility Pays 🔗
A hallmark of the Agile Methodology is the interplay between speed (responding to change with the simplest thing that will work) and stability through robust and rigorous communication and feedback practices. As the Agile Method of software development began to spread beyond the confines of the IT department, business and leadership researchers began taking notice. In 2015, McKinsey and Company described the vital interplay between speed and stability in fostering organizational health and boosting performance. Over time, researchers have expanded their focus to include the roles of speed and flexibility in management practices, enriching their longstanding analysis of organizational stability. This study, encompassing responses from over two million individuals across more than 1,000 companies, introduced a novel matrix categorizing companies based on their speed and stability metrics, revealing that agility—a blend of quick responsiveness and robust stability—is a key predictor of organizational health. Key insights include:
Agile Organizations Outperform: Companies characterized as agile, which balance swift action with firm stability, consistently show superior organizational health and are more likely to achieve top-quartile organizational health metrics that are relevant to both for-profit and nonprofit organizations.
Agility in Practice: Agile firms excel in innovation, learning, and motivation, thriving in environments that demand both quick adaptability and steadfast processes. This is especially important for nonprofits as they consider their adaptability and processes with respect to their mission, services, and donor base.
Management Practices that Drive Agility: The research identifies crucial management practices that distinguish the most agile companies including role clarity and operational discipline to balance rapid movement with structured growth and clear organizational directives. The table below identifies key agile management practices on which agile leaders should focus and the associated outcome.
🔗 In Search of Agility 🔗
In the decade since McKinsey’s research revealed the competitive advantages of organizations implementing Agile Methodology beyond the IT Department, many organizations struggle with doing just that. Gallup's research reveals a stark reality: only 18% of U.S. employees view their companies as agile, despite a widespread desire for quicker adaptation and delivery in today's fast-evolving market. The study outlines three primary obstacles to achieving organizational agility and strategies to combat them:
Aspiration versus Matrix Structure: Agile Methodology has moved organizational structures towards matrixed environments with multi-disciplinary teams reporting to multiple leaders. While this approach supports speed and stability by eliminating the need for a new team to form, storm, and norm prior to performing for every new initiative, this can also cause challenges balancing team goals and performance with individual aspirations. The drive to achieve individual goals is continually hindered by the need to collaborate across different teams with differing priorities. To combat this, leaders must clarify and synchronize individual and team priorities to ensure coherent efforts towards common organizational goals. Nonprofits are well positioned to do this by keeping their mission at the center of everything they do.
Proximity of Decision-Making to the Customer: In agile organizations, employees close to the customer (people benefitting from a nonprofit’s mission and the donors that support them) should have the authority to act on solutions without cumbersome approval chains. This proximity enables swift action and enhances responsiveness to customer needs. Leaders must delegate decision-making power down the line to enhance agility, accepting the risks that come with empowering employees to succeed or fail on their own terms.
Perfectionism Slows Progress: The quest for perfection often delays action as employees seek approvals and reassurance. Adopting a mindset of producing a "Minimum Lovable Product" can shift focus towards iterative development, where products evolve through direct customer interaction and feedback, fostering innovation and flexibility. Nonprofits can adopt a similar mindset towards the services and initiatives they undertake to support their mission.
Agile Individuals
🔗 How to Become and Agile Learner 🔗
In this era of agile methods, management, leadership, and organizations, learning agility (the ability to learn from experiences and apply those lessons to succeed in unfamiliar situations) has become a crucial skill for success. This Harvard Business Review article identifies three key components of learning agility and strategies to cultivate it in yourself:
Navigating Newness: Agile learners excel in environments that are complex and unfamiliar. They thrive by turning ambiguous situations into opportunities for success, demonstrating resilience where others might hesitate. Embracing new challenges by regularly stepping into unfamiliar roles or leading ambitious projects can accelerate the development of learning agility by forcing individuals to adapt and learn quickly.
Understanding Others: By empathizing with various perspectives, agile learners can anticipate potential conflicts and connect broader organizational dots, which enhances collaborative efforts and conflict resolution. Fostering empathy and understanding by engaging in deep, immersive experiences with other teams or departments can broaden understanding and enhance responsiveness to organizational needs.
Self-awareness: High self-awareness allows agile learners to recognize their strengths and limitations, actively seek feedback, and continuously adapt their approach to maximize effectiveness. Enhancing self-awareness by setting clear intentions for personal impact and seeking feedback can help align one’s self-perception with external perceptions, thereby improving interpersonal interactions and decision-making.
Here’s a little something extra for Star Wars Day! May 4, 2024, wouldn’t be complete without Star Wars’ leadership lessons linked here!
Know a colleague or friend that would like at least one of the articles in this edition of Jani’s Journal? Sharing IS Caring!