Title: Transforming Agile Management -- A Brief Introduction

1. Developed for The Collective Edge, LLC by Michael Hamman & Michael K Spayd
©2020 The Collective Edge, LLC – All Rights Reserved
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2. Evolvagility: Growing an Agile Leadership Culture from the Inside Out – by Michael
Hamman, available now on Amazon and from Agile India Network
Agile Transformation: Using the Integral Agile Transformation Framework™ to Think
and Lead Differently – by Michael K. Spayd & Michele Madore, available July 2020
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3. Why do we do Agile in the first place?
What are the problems it is supposed to help us solve?
We live in a VUCA world.
VUCA is a term developed by the US military to address the extreme conditions on
the battlefield.
Agile is designed to adapt to a VUCA world.
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4. Predict & Plan is appropriate for a Complicated world.
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5. The primary distinction between two forms of management thinking for the basis of
the course. If we are to successfully manage in a way that supports Agile teams, we
must move from Predict & Plan thinking to Sense & Respond thinking.
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6. Sense & Respond is appropriate for a Complex world.
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7. Really understanding the Sense & Respond paradigm requires taking a step back,
relaxing our ego need to control the world, and allow what is.
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8. Excerpted from Agile Transformation: Using the Integral Agile Transformation Framework™ to Think
and Lead Differently. ©2020 Pearson Publishing
The Five Integral Disciplines
Conscious Change -- The complexity and speed of change in today’s world requires organizations to
get really good at change. To do this requires leaders to take a proactive (conscious), disciplined and
sustainable approach to organizational change; holding the system as the client and working at all
holon levels. The capacity for change in any organization is an important factor in the success of
transformations. Agile Transformations have largely been approached in a siloed fashion, driven by IT,
and lacking in co-creative partnerships with other key parts of the organization, such as HR, Change
Management etc. The Conscious Change discipline moves us away from an auto-pilot prescriptive
change process and toward a process that uses conscious thinking and planning that incorporates
factors from all 4 quadrants using an intentional, structured, disciplined approach.
Evolving Consciousness -- Most organizations have predominantly focused on ‘training’ leaders and
employees to work with the outer game, optimizing how people function, communicating in a way
that produces results. We do not generally question our inner game, our assumptions and beliefs, how
we got here, what’s contributed to it, or how we change as human adults. But whether or not we ever
question them, they are guiding our everyday actions, and they are limiting us, keeping us stuck at
status-quo. To move from status-quo to change, we have to work with evolving the consciousness of
individuals in the organization. As Transformational Leaders,we can go about this in a conscious,
strategic, disciplined way, by utilizing vertical leadership developmental approaches, such as The
Leadership Circle™ model, Bill Joiner’s Leadership Agility, or similar work, to raise the average
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9. individual’s order of consciousness across the organization.
Evolving Product Innovation - When an organization moves to using Agile practices, the shift requires
them to move from goal-centric practices (such as waterfall) to customer-centric ones; this shift is
more or less built naturally into Agile thinking and practices. If the goal is not just doing Agile, but
organizational agility, then an organization must go beyond a customer-centric focus to an
organization-centric approach in creating their products (as a way of transcending and including). In an
organization-centric approach, all voices of the system need to be represented in service of product
creation. A brand-driven organization is an example of organization-centric. With a brand-driven
approach, you include all stakeholders, such as marketing, product development, the customer, and
the organization’s purpose/original brand, etc. When the organization believes in their brand-- and
joins together in a co-creative process, using solid lean and design thinking methods and agile
practices-- dramatic improvements in business results, customer satisfaction and innovative designs
become possible.
Evolving Systemic Complexity - Designing, shifting and shaping the organization’s collective set of
beliefs, mores, mental models, etc. in the direction of -- and to create a hospitable environment for --
organizational agility -- will require growing systemic complexity, for instance evolving from
Achievement-Orange to Pluralistic-Green thinking and acting. Shifting the overall organizational vision,
business goals, and way of being is essential to this evolution. For us specifically, as we examine our
own mental models and the effectiveness of our relationship systems, we are pushed into more
Integral ways of relating: taking the perspective of others, seeing our own meaning-making,
confronting our group shadow, seeing the systemic effects of the group conscience. As we help evolve
the culture, we naturally come up against the inside of our meaning making, forced to confront our
assumptions and cherished beliefs, and our jointly held mental models about the world and what our
system needs to do culturally in order to exist. We have the opportunity to create a deliberately
developmental culture, where evolving consciousness -- on an individual and a collective level -- is
valued in the organization alongside achieving business results.
Evolving Adaptive Architectures -- A company unable to organize around value streams will have a
significant and permanent impediment towards realizing efficient flow. Designing and implementing
organizational structures, governance, and policies that optimize flow, value creation, and human well-
being is the focus of this discipline. As far as our own development, this Discipline stretches our design
thinking skills, our understanding and recognition of systemic effects in bottlenecks and governance
logjams, and our flexibility in allowing for changing structures that can create uncertainty or
discomfort in us if we are easily ego-triggered: the stable hierarchical structures of Traditional-Amber
are in part designed to mollify the relatively fragile identity structure appropriate to that level.
Achievement-Orange makes organizational structure and “reorgs” into a political game of territory
acquisition, rather than a rational, structural design activity to enable legitimate business goals, like
flow. If we can grow ourselves and others beyond this Reactive level, we will enable greater
adaptability in our policies and structures.
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