The Challenge

When I ask people if agile principles and methods have helped their teams with delivery and execution, most of them are quick to acknowledge that they have. These same people, however, often go on to describe the challenges they’ve faced in scaling agile or in their enterprise transformation. They share various organizational impediments that slow teams down and stand in the way of true, lasting change. In response, I ask the following question, “Do you have a team across the organization that is focused on addressing these challenges?” Most of the time the answer is ‘No’ — in fact, most people seem surprised by the very concept. Yet enablement teams could be the most important component for sustained success and true organizational agility.

The Flywheel Effect

In one of my favorite business books, Good to Great¹, author Jim Collins talks about the slow, steady nature of lasting change by comparing it to an egg. He says that when chicken hatches, it appears to happen instantaneously. Yet in reality it is the culminating event of a long-term effort:

While the outside world was ignoring this seemingly dormant egg, the chicken within was evolving, growing, developing&emdash;changing. From the chicken’s point of view, the moment of breakthrough, of cracking the egg, was simply one more step in a long chain of steps that had led to that moment. Granted, it was a big step—but it was hardly the radical transformation that it looked like from the outside.

Collins goes on to say that creating this kind of breakthrough within the confines of a large company is akin to moving an enormous flywheel, “a massive, metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle. It’s about 100 feet in diameter, 10 feet thick, and it weighs about 25 tons.”

Image: Flywheel from an old factory by Rajesh Dhawan on wikimedia commons.

Your job, Collins writes, is to generate enough momentum to get that flywheel moving as fast possible. To move something that huge, however, will require tremendous effort. And even as you push as hard as you can, you are unlikely to see a great deal of movement at first. But if you keep pushing steadily, little by little, the wheel will begin to turn, faster and faster, until “at some point, you can’t say exactly when—you break through. The momentum of the heavy wheel kicks in your favor. It spins faster and faster, with its own weight propelling it. You aren’t pushing any harder, but the flywheel is accelerating, its momentum building, its speed increasing. This is the Flywheel Effect. It’s what it feels like when you’re inside a company that makes the transition from good to great.”

Establishing a Guiding Coalition

So how can you get the flywheel that is your company to really start moving and gaining momentum? [Read more...]