Post-Agile: What Organizations Actually Need Now - Michael Mahlberg

The the really irritating thing for some people is there actually is no agile manifesto. It's not expensive because of the consultants because the consultants most of the time don't do much. Yeah. But it takes a lot of time.

After you have defended a point often enough, you start to believe the defense. We help companies or organizations to be able to work again after an agile transformation. Welcome to Software Testing Unleashed, the podcast for testers, test automation engineers, software developers, and all other people who want to create stunning great software. My guest today is Michael Mahlberg.

I met him. At the OOP conference in Munich this year, and we talked about post-agility. Is agility really dead? And if so, what can we do now?

This and more we explore in this episode. And now enjoy! Hi Michael, great to have you on the show here. Yeah, glad to be back.

Yeah, back. It's now in an English episode. We did a German one I think two years ago. Two years ago, yeah.

Plausible And now we met again here at the OP in Munich again. And yesterday we we we stand together and said okay we should do an episode two today. And now we're here. Great.

And um yeah, you uh uh I I I read your abstract in the uh in the in the conference program and there comes one claim to my mind Agile is dead. Yeah well Agile is dead was uh was the go-to slogan uh like in 2024. So it it's been dead for a while obviously. And it depends from where you look at it.

Um if I see huge companies of course obviously it's not dead for everyone but if you look at the whole consultancy business and so on It seems to be rather dead because a lot, especially of the big consultancies, well let's say they um give their agile employees a lot of space to develop their career outside the company. So there was this huge wave of uh people being let go by the um telecom and uh I think Accenture two years ago in the in the States. So And it's it's in Europe now, obviously.

Yeah, yeah. But uh but but what what what's was what was wrong with that uh stuff? Why didn't it work or why why do we don't don't we like this uh this term agile anymore? Well For me it what Martin Fowler said a couple of years ago already is um the agile industrial complex has uh tried to to I don't want to say or soup, but to to take over the idea not not necessarily willingly like oh this is nice and now we're gonna subvert it and make something completely different out of it but it just happened Driven by market forces and so on.

And these days, um, that's why in my talk I also talk about post-agile. Yeah. It's we're in an area where the the word doesn't have any real meaning anymore. It's like modern.

There was a time when modern meant a specific painter or a couple of specific painters, a couple of specific architects. But these days everything is that's modern is just new. Like if I tell you I got a modern house, you'll probably ask me which kind kind of home automation I have and you won't ask me whether it was designed by Mies van der Ruhe. Yeah, yeah.

So modern had the same thing. And agile these days isn't helpful anymore to differentiate anymore. And especially with my bigger clients, like uh corporate multi-thousand people companies, it's really um A word not to be used because it's it puts strain on people, makes people people unhappy and so on. Um And yeah, that's why I think it's good that Agile is dead.

Yeah. Yeah. But what's what's what what uh I think when we uh a lot of companies went to Agile the last years and and said okay we want to do it and do everything pack in everything like okay and design thinking and doing retrospectives and sprinting and planning and all this stuff and the people are overwhelmed and frustrated. Uh so but what what's now you say you mentioned post agile Yeah.

It's well one thing to to start it off is um the the really irritating thing for some people is There actually is no agile manifesto. What they have is only an manifesto for agile software development. It's not the manifesto for agile management. It's not the manifesto for agile ways of running a company.

It's not the manifesto for whatever. And they try to put everything like you said, for example, okay ours under that umbrella. And so There's no real grip on it anymore and post-agile actually these days um it's been uh the the term has been coined by two people or two people have used it prominently, that was uh David J. Anderson from the Kenman method uh back in 2010 already, where he said You know, the people from the manifesto they said it's um it's a point in time and now this is what's right, this is what's true, and that these are our observations.

Um Everything that comes after the manifesto by definition has to be post-agile because it didn't influence the manifesto anymore. That's true, yeah. And um the other one who really used that term is Alistair Coburn, one of the signatories and the guy who actually invited to the uh conference where the manifesto was written. And uh he's very much on that uh journey with the like in modern post-modern post-agile because it doesn't have any meaning anymore.

And what we need these days is um more stuff like what what what we do actually, uh organizational development and finding fitting solutions for companies. It's There's um a theory on development stages of companies where you have uh um what's it called uh pioneer stage at the first stage then you have a differentiation phase and then you have an integration phase from uh I think German or Swiss guy, um Fritz Glasel, who is also known for the conflict uh stages. And um But the problem is you can't skip any of these stages.

You have to have each of these stages to be informed. Like you can't differentiate if you didn't have uh any pioneer phase before that and so on. And most big companies are in this um differentiation phase And differentiation phase means that uh the company is very strict on um Who does what and why you have manuals for everything and it's very clear defined what your role is. Yeah.

Doesn't fit too well with agile, right? Yeah And if you go to a company like that with several thousand people and you show them something like uh safe or any other big poster. It perfectly fits into their world because it just brings them back even deeper into the differentiation phase where everything is exactly specified and so on. But that means you just uh kind of try to copy and paste blueprints for organizations and that doesn't work.

And so we need ways to really uh apply OrcDev organizational development methods and maybe some of the things we learned in the last 25 years fits into that new picture, but it's not This is where we start, uh where we want to be. That is your company? Take it. But that's what uh many people try to do over the last couple of years.

And that's how it got its bad name. Yeah, yeah. So it's uh w w what I what I hear is that that we need much more and and more organization individual process environment for for working and there there could be things from the agile stuff or something like that we put in there but it has to fit on the organization. Exactly.

Yeah the the Agile manifesto it's called that on the second page but the manifesto for um Agile software development has one sentence about how to improve the process. It's the twelfth principle. At regular intervals uh people check their efficiency and adopt I don't know the words exactly, but that's more or less the one. And um that's all they say about how to improve a company.

That works well for a five people team or a seven people team or whatever. But there are organizations who have actually done that for Many many many years we have things like uh Peter Sensch's fifth fifth discipline about learning organizations, but we also have things like lean in the original TPS way, not in the Romagan Jones translation, but what um Taichi Ono originally proposed. And that's a very, very um full-blown description on how you can improve iteratively and on the road and so on.

So yeah why why go with one sentence from The manifesto when you can go with a whole body of knowledge from there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So um w w w what what what would would you for you be the ideal build uh ma image for uh for a organization who is now stuck in the agile death and to to to to get out of this to to improve there. Um take a big step back.

And um there's one one model of um how to look at companies and they talk about the uh seven base processes that happen. It's like uh Oh, in German ist es Bewusstseinsbildungsprozess. It's one process that forms opinions. And another one is a process that designing the future.

Um there's seven of them. And um the crux is that with uh uh a very hierarchical company All those processes are distributed very unevenly about the hierarchies. And what we need would be a way to step back and especially for this um for this process that cares about how are we, what are we, what's our opinion on ourselves. It's really necessary even though top management must initiate it, that it's not only top management who takes back that uh to takes that step back.

But they take everyone with them. And that there are orc dev ways to do that. But it's expensive, it takes time. It's not expensive because of the consultants, because The consultants most of the time don't do much, but it takes a lot of time.

People need to really have the room in both time and physical space. to really talk about what the situation is to reorient. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a that's a a also a problem in the organizations uh who go there the last ten or twenty years into agile And now we need uh the they have to to say to themselves, okay, that was not the right way.

We have to just to step back and to do something different and uh it's it's not not very easy to to to say to the organization uh because they are all tired of change and all this stuff and now they have to switch again something yeah yes yeah But uh there's this whole um you know the cotter uh change model probably. That's uh um eight-step model how change is is done or can be done or happens Whatever, it's it's hard. Everything I say about it is probably wrong from one way or the other.

But um the the idea is that the first thing you need to have is a sense of urgency. And that really means you also have not only the need to have the sense of urgency. I mean I can create the sense of urgency. with someone in the uh in the ocean if I duck them underwater they have the sense of urgency I want to be up there but it's not real urgency because we're just playing around and whatever.

If there or I am five miles out and started run then there's a real urgency. So it it's the this whole create a sense of urgency often is uh uh is understood as meaning yeah we have to really Tell them that it's dangerous even though it isn't. But it doesn't work like that. It has to be a real reason and then there has to be the knowledge about that reason.

That's the sense of urgency. And many companies don't have that. They're still too rich, works too well. Like uh number of people who have a burnout every year is normal.

We've been there. We don't need to change anything and so on. So They they won't change. No no need to change.

And um so the first thing really is there has to be the real need for the change And what we one of the things we say what we as a company do right now is we help companies or organizations To be able to work again after an agile transformation. Yeah. That's a great claim. Yeah, thank you.

But of course Out of all the companies out there, it's only like ten percent who really feel that need. There's probably another I don't have any numbers I can just make them up. But there's probably a third of the companies out there where people suffer, but it's not yet in the in the system. The system doesn't know that people individuals suffer so for them it will take a while and there are many companies where this Agile in name only um actually works.

So why not? It's fine. Um but those companies who really struggle with what happened under the name of agile. They also don't want agile anymore, of course.

Many of the agile terms are burned. Yeah. But that's actually n a great opportunity because now they can find things that they really need. Um so Actually, for from my personal perspective, it's a good it's a it's a really a chance.

Yeah, yeah. Is there any chance for um A guy who's sitting now in their team as a tester or developer or architect and uh hearing this episode and saying okay I see we have We have a problem here. Is there any chance to get this information into the management or into the organization for them? Um the primary approach is to make them experience what you experience.

So it's it Arguing doesn't help. It's the moment you know you start to talk to your manager and say, this is really bad and that doesn't work for us you know there's an automatic reflex to go into defense. And after you have defended a point often enough you start to believe the defense. So then it gets harder and harder.

But if you pull them into your situation and tell them help us with whatever the things that don't work Um then they start feeling it and then you can start um uh to to put in little pebbles of information about well you know task loading, well you know uh task switching and you know actually this is the process that's defined this is what we do They don't match. Yeah. Maybe we should take some time to reflect. And so from there on and then of course there's um Once you start looking not into books on or web resources on agile but more on organizational development, especially systemic and system theory stuff.

Oh you find a lot of pointers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's uh so sounds good a good way for if I if I mean i i catched in this uh in this organization to make it visible to make it feelable for the other people to to that that they understand my problem.

Do you uh when you look at all this agile Stuff we did the last 25 years. Is there anything you would say this method or this pattern works really really well in nearly every organization? Because that's exactly the talk. Uh there are some things like fast iterations that really works well.

Um get real feedback, which most organizations who claim to run agile these days don't do anymore because they don't get real feedback Because it's not rolled out to the customer. They just build iteration over iteration and then roll it out after Some time. And some time is usually not the smallest possible amount of time. So real feedback is still something that's extremely helpful.

And other things from the original manifesto are also quite helpful for teams There are not necessarily any pointers how to run an organization. So there are things that are really really helpful for organizations, like for example, know how to come to decisions. But then I would lot rather look into uh sociocrity. Don't pull it out and do sociocrity.

Just pick out the decision-making parts. But that's not from the agile realm. That's from somewhere else. Actually started more than a century ago, but That's something that that's another story.

Yeah, yeah. And there there is for organizations, uh a lot of organization, big organizations, they're trying to save uh stuff so they have their release trains and are there anything would you say okay that are uh good things or Well, um funny story. Uh you know the the conference where the Agile Manifesto was written wasn't called Agile Manifesto Writing Conference. It was called Conference on Lightweight Methods.

One of the goals was write a manifesto for lightweight methods. Another of the goals was well uh let's find compelling reasons for uh Rub enthusiasts. RUP is the rational unified process to switch to our way of working. Well One of the promoters who also wrote parts of the book on the rational unified process was a guy called Dean Leffingwell.

If you look into who's behind safe, you find that's Dean Leffingwell. So we've come Full circle and what's branded as um as agile these days actually is the brain child or not maybe not the brain child but It's um it's very much influenced by the guy who was promoting the original um anti-pattern the the rational unified process but he's really good at picking stuff everything from safe is good but it doesn't give you a solution yeah So it's a good idea to have release trains if you develop software and if you have a certain kind of environment.

Yeah, good idea. It's also a good idea to have portfolio Kanban. I'm an AKT myself, so um no not an AKT, an AKC um accredited Kanban consultant Used to do that back in the day. And Portfolio Kanban is one of the things how you really get the workload in huge companies.

um under under control. So yeah, it's a good idea to do Kanban on the portfolio level. But maybe it's a smarter idea not to take it from safe but to look into the flight le uh into the flight levels model from Klaus Leopold because he might have more appropriate solutions for that. Yeah yeah.

So yeah they are good things But the the problem is this whole we have this company who's in this differentiation phase where they have every box and then you take the whole the big Uh I don't know how big the poster is, how many items has these days, but it's really big. And then you say okay this is the the solution. Every little thing might be very, very nice. But um the way it's implemented most of the time isn't So that's always a very individual way for the organization to deal with that.

And especially with the whole fixed role thing in in safe It's I have yet to see a company where it's really helpful. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think I think such such a poster or a product uh which we can put on in our organization. It sounds like a very Easy and fast solution.

I pay some money for that and then I have the solution but it doesn't work this way and I think this is we see now the results of that. Exactly. Great Michael. Thank you very much for for being here at the podcast and for uh sharing your knowledge in this part.

I really appreciate that. Uh yeah, I wish you all the best for your talk uh here at the lovely rest of the conference here. And I hope we can make another episode in the future soon. Sure.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me and um enjoy.

Bye.