So one of the challenges that we run into a lot, we’re talking about Agile, we’re talking about Scrum, Kanban, anything really within Agile, is that people talk about empiricism. Empiricism is just inspect and adapt and be transparent – inspection, adaptation, and transparency.
The problem is that while these make nice posters and t-shirt slogans, what do they actually mean in practice? Inspect and adapt makes intuitive sense to people. They think, “Oh, we should inspect where we are and then adapt if we find things that need improving,” and transparency supports that to some extent by allowing people to see what’s going on.
However, often people struggle to operationalize abstract principles and values. For example, take the idea of transparent business decisions. You almost have to look at the opposite to understand it.
People make business decisions all the time that shape how organizations run. A very common example is when leaders state priorities for the organization, but then allow teams and departments to work on other things that don’t align with those priorities. No one goes back and updates the priorities that were shared. So you end up with confusion around what the real priorities are.
I go into companies of all sizes and see that they’re trying to work on too many disjointed things rather than staying focused. It’s like they’ve made an implicit business decision that anyone can work on whatever they want, even if it doesn’t fit the stated priorities.
Imagine if a Fortune 50 CEO brought everyone together for a company-wide meeting and explicitly said, “We have these official priorities, but feel free to get your work done through any means necessary.” I don’t know a leader who would actually say that, yet that’s how many companies operate in practice.
So how do you handle this? Don’t get upset about it or be a jerk. But do start making the disconnect transparent between stated priorities and actual work. For example, explain why certain initiatives didn’t get done by referring to the other unplanned work that came up, which must have been a higher priority since that’s what people spent time on. Ask who requested that other work. It might have even been the CEO.
The point is to shed light on the processes that allow misalignment between priorities and execution. This can be done with compassion rather than confrontation. And if the company is fine operating that way after making it transparent, well that’s their prerogative. Your responsibility is simply to illuminate reality.
That’s the essence of promoting transparent business decisions – surfacing the disconnects between what leaders say are the priorities and how work actually gets done.
