It’s been clear for a good while that the boundary zone between an agile project and a less than agile host organisation is often rife with friction, incomprehension and frustration. The value of reducing the friction is obvious; the nature of the best lubricant rather less so.
There are various more or less mechanical ways of approaching this – treating it essentially as the alignment of two models of governance. This post comes at it at a rather different angle, with a strong emphasis on finding approaches which deliver psychological safety for those involved and which recognise the different (and ideally complementary) value of different perspectives. Agile projects should carry on being agile, but the right way of thinking about systems is systems thinking. That sounds ludicrously trite, but is both less obvious and much harder than it sounds. As ever, Catherine Howe provides thoughtful guidance through the complexity.
This resonates with some of the research on creating multidisciplinary teams to deliver services to citizens with complex and multiple needs. Suggesting the environment may differ but the need to create bounded creativity and autonomy, safe space, and scope for adaptation through uncertainty, remain constant. Making uncertain conditions more manageable – without straying into illusory and therefore unhelpful certainty, is one of the major aims and challenges of strategy