Addressing Organizational Dysfunction
There’s a common refrain in agile circles when discussing the dysfunction that keep successful development from occurring at organizations: “The biggest obstacles are always cultural.” That is, there’s no organization that can’t adopt agile or reap the benefits of the process improvements it realizes, there are only those organizations whose people are unwilling to do so. Certainly, dysfunction can refer to any number of behaviors and attitudes which prevent an organization from moving forward and ensure that it maintains a status quo approach to development. In that sense, dysfunction is simply any organizational practice that strands a team in stasis, incapable of the kind of ongoing change and improvement that has made agile so popular in recent years.
There have some suggestions made for how to resolve this issue, including leveraging the Human Resources Department (http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/125-human-resources-and-scrum), but it still remains a pervasive impediment within the field—even among agile teams. In an article on Agile Journal (http://www.agilejournal.com/articles/columns/column-articles/889-how-agile-practices-address-the-five-dysfunctions-of-a-team), Tathagat Varma discusses this problem by first invoking Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, which identifies the five dysfunctions that damage an organization’s bid for highly performing teams:
• “Absence of Trust: Team members who are not genuinely open with one another about their mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation for trust.
• “Fear of Conflict: Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate of ideas.
• “Lack of Commitment: Without having aired their opinions in the course of passionate and open debate, team members rarely, if ever, buy in and commit to decision.
• “Avoidance of Accountability: Without committing to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviors that seem counterproductive to the good of the team.
• “Inattention to Results: Inattention to results occurs when team members put their individual needs (such as ego career development, or recognition) or even the needs of their divisions above the collective goals of the team.”
Insofar as agile practices are designed to create transparency—in its emphasis on communication, collaboration, and self-organization—they directly address many of these issues. Of course, if an individual is unwilling to participate, the benefits agile promises are negated. How do you deal with individuals who remain stubbornly averse to change, even when it means realizing drastic improvements at your organization?
