People change how they work when they change their belief structures

I saw a pole on Linked In recently that asked what were the most important changes that needed to be made in an organization, with values and behaviors, and though behaviors are the thing we tend to focus on we really want to influence is changing a person’s beliefs, specifically about how they and the organization should work.

Once you start working, you begin to form beliefs about what works and what doesn’t based on your own empirical evidence. As you gain more experience your beliefs harden, and you become entrenched in working in a specific way. This is part of what we call Belief Perseverance. In agile when we face belief perseverance, we call it resistance and often frame them as adversaries of agile, we aren’t successful because they resist the new ways of working that agile brings. Leaders are often the ones who suffer most from belief perseverance because they have obtained a high level of success in their career, and it wasn’t through agile.

Now consider that if you do just a bit of research you will find information that tells people who don’t want to change the way they are working that agile mostly fails. If agile mostly fails, then why would I want to change? And the sad truth is that a large majority of agile coaches don’t have real-world working experience with agile, so they can’t put themselves in the shoes of the people they are coaching. All they can do is tell them what the framework says they should do.

For agile to be successful we must change the beliefs of everyone in the organization, starting with our leaders because they are the most visible and able to influence change. If people don’t see leadership changing, then nothing changes. And how do we change the beliefs of leaders? With small incremental experiments that show a linear change across the organization, not just how development will change. Think of your MVP as changing how a new initiative might flow through the organization in an agile manner, from starting with a new initiative and making changes in how ideate and prototype, how we fund initiatives to focusing on value outcomes all the way to the delivery of a quality product.

You change beliefs when you can provide empirical evidence that change will have a positive outcome. Once we have changed beliefs then only can we change behaviors.

Agile as we know it doesn’t have enough evidence of positive outcomes. Truthfully, the most successful agile organizations I’ve worked for never employed an Agile coach, we figured out to be more agile through experimentation. We changed our beliefs on how we should work by showing new ways of working and then collectively adopting them. Changes in behavior are a lagging indicator with an agile transformation.

If you want to hire an agile coach who can influence change in people’s beliefs, you need someone who has at least 10 years of experience that spans both business and technology. Ideally, like they have been in diverse roles such as my experience as VP of Finance, Director of Development, National Sales Director, and Manager of Test Engineering.

With this background, combined with having worked on Agile teams as a Product Owner, Scrum Master, and tester, I can literally provide context to everyone across the organization when coaching and can help them change their belief structure which will lead the organization down the path of business agility. Coaches who have primarily come from the agile certification factory won’t have the necessary experience and context to know that frameworks cannot be implemented as is, an organization is much too complex to have a simple adoption of a framework. If the frameworks were that easily adopted and changed people’s belief perseverance, we wouldn’t have so many stories about failed transformations.

If you would like to engage me to work with your organization, please contact me at michael@soundagile.com or go to www.soundagile.com