A focus on behaviors to enable Agile transformation success.
Once upon a time, the Agile manifesto was created, providing guidance on building highly adaptive organizations that can react quickly to ever-changing market conditions. Nowadays we find a lot of companies start off enthusiastically in their Agile Transformation journey, but are struggling to succeed. Strikingly, neither the client that wants its organization to become an Agile business nor the people involved in the transformation are paying attention to the most important part: the existing habits of the workforce. It seems that many organizations forget to answer a crucial question:
What are the actual new behaviors and habits needed from employees to work in accordance with the new “rules of the game”?
In this blog we will propose a solution: the creation of new habits that replace the old ones.
Getting more people to behave Agile.
Let’s suppose your Agile transformation program is well underway. You’ve done your homework and everyone is well informed and trained in the new way of working. How can you be sure that the people that you want working according to these processes and procedures demonstrate the behaviors needed to make it a successful transformation?
The challenge here is that the new behaviors that are needed to make the strategy work are not necessarily already part of the habits and routines of your workforce. Announcing and implementing new ways of working may be the shortest route to generating resistance from your employees. As management guru Peter Drucker allegedly once put it: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Before you know it, multi-million investments are written off because people don’t do it as prescribed, and the frustrated organization is left with a culture of fear and a ‘do it or else’ style of leadership. It’s not as if it’s the first time this happened, right?!
Why is that? And what can we do about it? Well, this is something that’s been challenging both business and scientific communities for decades. And it’s not something that is limited to Agile transformations or SAFe implementations.
According to research by e.g. McKinsey & Co. and Gartner, a mere 30% of change programs in businesses around the world seem to succeed. Interestingly, “behavior” is always found in the top three reasons for failure of the program, leaving management wondering: “Why don’t they DO what we asked them to do? Can’t they see the beauty and logic of the strategy?”
Well a lot of people can see the beauty and logic, but it doesn’t necessarily change their behaviors and turn them into new habits. You only have to look at the success rates of New Year resolutions to get the point we’re trying to make here. Habits are formed in a specific way and it turns out only limited people in business have discovered how that actually works (neurologically!). Even less have learned what’s required to get people to form new habits in favour of someone else’s strategy.
The short version to turning your strategy into a success: the right application of the dopamine-effect in business operations. We know from decades of scientific research that people do what they do because of what happens to them when they do it, or the consequences to the performer when desired behaviors are shown. If you make it worthwhile to the performer, you will increase the likelihood of the behavior returning and increasing, eventually turning into a habit. It is called positive reinforcement and its powers are poorly understood and often applied incorrectly.
Because of several pitfalls in influencing behavior, a mere 0.8% of time, effort and resources are spent on the dopamine-effect in business operations. In our OBM Foundation level training and in our accompanying book, we tell you all about these pitfalls and how to avoid them.
Dopamine does the trick
Just take a look at the huge successes of the gambling industry, the gaming industry, social media and the technologies coming out of Silicon Valley. These products and services are all creating the right dopamine-effect in consumers’ brains all over the globe, having changed the habits of billions of people in only a short period of time – turning them into players, authors & artists – doing totally different things than they did before.
There is even a “Habit Summit” being held in San Francisco every year, where scientists and representatives from Silicon Valley meet to present and discuss new and improved ways of influencing our habits as consumers of their products and services.
The key point here is that playing games or using social media are just as much behaviors as displaying the right actions at work. Organizations can use this power of habit forming to our advantage in creating new successful working habits, hugely increasing the probabilities of success of our Agile deployment strategy, or any business strategy for that matter. The trick is to accept that it is not a zero-sum game. You have to see things from the performer’s perspective and synergize. A point that the late Stephen Covey was trying to make all along in his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”.
Fortunately there is a part of management science that is putting the dopamine-effect to good use within organizations that is getting more and more attention these days. Scientists seem to have found the way to genuinely and measurably change behaviors, and create sustainable productive habits, by using it as part of an intervention protocol.
It’s called Organizational Behavior Management (or OBM for short) and it is our suggestion to integrate it in change programs targeting successful Agile transformations. Perhaps being the best-kept secret in change management, OBM is now rapidly becoming more popular, mostly because it is both very practical for leaders and consultants and has been scientifically validated in thousands of studies.
Whilst this blog does not address the details of the science, we do hope to have sparked your interest and would strongly suggest you check out this great piece of practical science before you venture into a new Agile transformation program, or any change program for that matter. Check out the links on the right-hand side to delve deeper into the “science of success”.
