One of my go-to definitions of Agile is working in a way of safely making progress and moving forward with imperfect information. In the journey to becoming Agile, organizations face many obstacles. Whatever their goals, there are a lot of organizational, cultural and technical challenges and constraints that teams and organizations face.

When faced with these challenges, organizations and teams can be lured into the trap of trying to implement “fixes” to correct the things they think are wrong or broken. When Agile coaches or consultants talk about fixes, it often sounds like, “Here’s what’s wrong in your organization, and here’s how we’re going fix it.”

The issue is that fixes are poorly suited to make positive organizational change and have significant drawbacks and risks. There are some reasons why fixes are so common and the problems with them, but better alternatives exist.

Why Fixes Happen

When something’s not working in organizations, there can be a strong desire to identify a clear reason so that we can do something about it. The thinking is that if we can find the right problem and implement the right solution, we’ll successfully fix the problem, things will return to a desired state, and we’ll be back in control.

In the Agile context, coaches and consultants have lots of different types of solutions for whatever challenges organizations face:

• Agile frameworks
• Roles and responsibilities
• Organizational and team structures
• Technical practices
• Metrics
• Values and principles
• Ceremonies & artifacts

We can also find case studies where these different solutions have been used in other organizations to solve similar issues.

When trying to get buy-in and make things happen in organizations, presenting a clear and compelling picture can be attractive to executives. These solutions and case studies are attractive to executives because they:

• Define a clear and straightforward challenge
• Offer a direct and conclusive intervention
• Put executives in control
• Provide the safety of a well-known and proven solution

These things create a sense of comfort and safety for executives. They also generate a lot of activity. Seeing people busy booking meetings, running training, giving updates and implementing new practices can create a sense of progress.

The Problem With Fixing Things

However, even though a fix resonates with executives, that doesn’t mean it’s the best course of action for the organization. Fixes are risky because instead of making progress and moving forward safely with imperfect information, they propose a particular problem and solution.

Fixes like “If you do this, then that will happen” promote an ideal end-state and sound too good to be true because they ignore the characteristics of complex systems. In complex systems, behaviours and patterns emerge; they can’t be designed.

Fixes break the causality rule of complex systems:

Complex adaptive systems are dispositional, not causal. That is the basic lesson of complex adaptive systems. You haven’t got a system with linear cause. You can’t say, “If I do this, then that will happen.”

Dave Snowden

Because complex systems are not linear, it’s impossible to say what will happen if you make a fix. Some good things could happen, some bad things could happen. There are also unintended consequences that are impossible to predict. And the bigger the fix, the bigger the risk and the more unintended consequences.

Finally, when coaches or consultants propose fixes that apply to front-line teams, they take ownership and remove the opportunity for people in the organization to come up with their own answers for what possible actions they can take in their context.

What To Do Instead of Fixing Things

If you’re trying to create a more agile organization and are facing real challenges, what should you do instead? Here are some suggestions:

• Slow down. When presented with a challenge, the first response should not be to propose a solution.
• Help teams better appreciate and express how things are working right now, both the good and the bad.
• Instead of proposing solutions for how others should address challenges, empower teams to experiment, learn and make changes in their local context. You want teams that can sense and be alert for new challenges and opportunities rather than wait for executives to give direction.
• Help people discover the constraints in their system. Behaviours emerge from those constraints, so how can they adjust or manage them differently?
• Instead of trying to solve the challenges outright, focus on making incremental progress. Don’t try to fix everything, and don’t try to fix it all at once. Try to figure out: What can people do today to make things a bit better tomorrow?

In summary, when challenges appear, don’t try to fix things. Instead, help teams get a better sense of what’s happening, generate discussion and engage with their problems with small, fast and safe-to-fail experiments.