Can Agile Help Overcome the Crisis?

Agile is about swift adaptation to change and dealing with complexity. But is it also the best choice in a crisis? Some controversial ideas

Agile firefighters

Writing this in Q1 of 2024 the world is in a state of tension. After four years of disruptions, first due to the pandemic, followed by war, inflation, political uncertainty, there is an anxious mood to be felt.

And it is not just a feeling. Everyone is affected in some way or another from personal life plans to business. At least where I am now, in the center of Europe, it can be said that we are in a state of crisis: Economic, political, moral.

Sustainable pace or firefighting?

Agile methodologies promote openness to change and continuous adaptation. They also claim to be the best fit for “VUCA” i.e. situations of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. So one may think that they are a perfect fit for overcoming crises. Let’s take a closer look.

To name just the two most prominent examples of agile methodologies: Scrum is built around “working in Sprints at a sustainable pace”,1 Kanban focuses on establishing a continuous flow of work and pursuing evolutionary change.2

Agile frameworks improve the human factor of work (see my assessment of the Agile Manifesto). They aim at establishing regularity to make work environments more human-friendly by way of evolution. This means they are not designed for quickly fixing things in times of disruption and revolution. And let’s face it: they are not good at it.

From marathon to actual sprinting

As a friend of mine keeps saying: “Becoming agile is a marathon, not a sprint”.

But when the roof is on fire, there is no time for a marathon. There is also no time to establish structured systems, aligned rules, buy-in of everyone. You need quick solutions, rapid adaptation. In a crisis you must first of all survive. Everything else comes second. Established rules can become more harmful than useful when what you need is a hyper-awareness of danger, fast decisions and action.

Agile’s virtues – its focus on getting everyone on board as an empowered team, its emphasis on rules -, become vulnerabilities.

Still, there is something to agile that can be a powerful tool also in a state of crisis.

My thesis is that what is needed in times of crisis is not agile as such but something that underlies the notion of agile

Five practical ideas

Things that are needed in a state of crisis:

  1. Not “Agile” – agility!
  2. Dictatorial power
  3. Behavior patterns over processes
  4. Breaking the rules
  5. Task forces, not teams

Not “Agile” – agility!

While Agile (with a capital A) is the method of choice when it comes to continuously evolving and adapting, what we need in a crisis is not so much agile but agility. The difference:

  • Agile is the big deal: the whole range of methodologies, principles, practices from management to engineering
  • Agility is a capability: the one you need to have in order to be agile

In a crisis:

  • Agile is slow to ramp up and takes continuous effort to keep going. This may seem counter-intuitive since often people equate using agile with being fast and lightweight. It isn’t. At least not lightweight enough for a state of crisis.
  • Agility on the other hand is an ability that underlies the core intuition of agile – but the two are not the same.

Let’s take a dictionary definition as an example:

Definition of ’agility‘
(əˈdʒɪlɪti)
NOUN

  1. the power of moving quickly and easily; nimbleness
  2. the ability to think and draw conclusions quickly; intellectual acuity
Source: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/agility

For definitions of agile see: How to be Agile

Moving forward quickly and with ease, unrestrained by any kind of rule or structured process is the mode of operation needed in a crisis.

Without agility of course being agile is kind of pointless. Agile needs agility. But in the cases we are talking about the priorities are reversed: direct, acute action over any kind of defined process that may slow down problem solving.

Dictatorial power

Rapid is the keyword here. In a crisis, the transition from problem identification to solution cannot be direct and short enough.

The modus operandi in a state of crisis is centralized and dictatorial. This goes completely against all ideas of democratic, or even sociocratic decision making as embodied in agile and associated with an agile mindset.

Think e.g. of the institution of ancient Roman dictators. They were given temporary dictatorial power in times of war and political crisis to make decisions without consulting any of the republican institutions with their slow processes of deliberation and decision-making.3

In a business context this means: a crisis calls for centralization of power and an undisputed chain of command (“lead, follow – or get out of the way”). Resolving disagreements is kept for later. If and how to involve people in the decision-making process is up to the “dictator”.

Sounds horrible? Only in the context of normal operations, not in a state of crisis.

Behavior patterns over processes

Crises demand an ability to act reliably under high levels of stress.

Think of a crew of firefighters being alerted to a fire. Once the alarm sounds, they jump into action without much though about the how, what and why: down the hatch, into the firetruck and with blowing sirens to the scene of disaster.

Every action must come automatically, activities must fall into place without need for discussion. Once the firefighters arrive at the scene, the same story: a quick analysis of the situation followed by every team member taking over their role and activity with minimal planning and communication. No time to discuss feelings or different perspectives. The goal is clear and self-explanatory: the fire must be extinguished, people saved, further damage prevented.

In a crisis things must happen almost automatically. In the case of firefighters this is made possible by extensive drill and training, similar to soldiers whose seemingly dull and repetitive drill allows them to function reliably and keep a cool head under fire.

Breaking the rules

Those working at resolving the crisis need a far-reaching mandate, sometimes crossing the line to what would normally be outrageous or illegal.

Again thinking of firefighters: under normal circumstances breaking down your neighbor’s beautiful front door or flooding their living room with water would get you into jail. When you do it in the context of firefighting, it may not only legal but necessary.

Agile methodologies as such, being methodologies, revolve around defined but usually simple rules. In crisis mode, there are also rules, but they are even more simplified and boiled down to the absolute minimum.

A Scrum team that has aligned on rules through many workshops, retrospectives and team discussions will be hard challenged to accept that an extreme situation demands all these rules to be thrown overboard.

Task forces, not teams

Agile is a team game and revolves around self-managing (or self-organized)4 teams. Being self-managing and autonomous as a unit is also crucial when it comes to a crisis.

But the idea of a longer-lived team that goes through phases of team building (e.g. described in the “Tuckman model”)5 establishes team dynamics, gets into a regular mode of operation and gradual increase of performance may not be enough to overcome a crisis.

The organizational model that is more fit for this kind of situation is that of a task force: a group of people that quickly forms around a concrete problem to be solved, self-organizes to get the job done and then dissolves again.

Crises may demand a flexible re-configuration of an organization – getting the right people to finish the task without regard to aspects of team stability or identity.

Getting back to normal

Crises come and go for those who survive them.

When you are inside the burning house, the main goal is to stay alive and put out the fire.

Once this is accomplished, the question is how to get back to normality. In history, there are examples where this did not work. Most famous example: The Roman republic after Julius Caesar failed to shift back to democratic rule. The institutionalization of dictatorial power made a state of emergency permanent and led to the creation of an empire with all its glory – and eventual downfall.

In everyday terms: Long term thinking should go beyond a state of crisis. Once things get back to normal, agile will become a toolset of choice once again.

  1. https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#scrum-team ↩︎
  2. https://kanban.university/kanban-guide/ ↩︎
  3. Of course we know from history that there were famous cases of abuse of dictatorial power – but this is a topic for a separate discussion, see https://www.britannica.com/topic/Roman-dictator ↩︎
  4. I will not go into the scholastics of “self-managing” vs “self-organized” here. A topic for a separate discussion. ↩︎
  5. https://infed.org/mobi/bruce-w-tuckman-forming-storming-norming-and-performing-in-groups/ ↩︎