Change That Does Not Change Anything
Thanks for the pic, DALL-E3
This is a joint blog post by Celine Schillinger and Sacha Storz, as a follow up of Agile Scale Camp 2023.
In November 2023, the Agile Scale Camp (ASC) celebrated its fifth annual gathering. This unique online unconference brings together professionals and enthusiasts who are passionate about implementing agile methodologies at scale within organizations.
Upholding its tradition, the event commenced with an inspiring keynote address. Over the years, the ASC has featured prominent speakers such as Jutta Eckstein, Dave Snowden, Yves Morieux, and Joe Justice, each offering their unique perspectives to kick off the barcamp.
This year Celine gave a short keynote on "Change that does not change anything", a thoughtful provocation that contributed to a rich exchange. We thought it would be interesting to follow up with a joint article, taking up the key points of the keynote and considering their implications for agile practitioners in organizations.
While agile is about changing and improving the way we work, how much of it really changes the nature and conditions of work in organizations?
Is our change really making a difference?
Consolidating the Status Quo
To illustrate what “change without change” might mean, let us look at an example - an industry-agnostic example, inspired by some of the work events we (and maybe you) have attended recently. Imagine you are the organizer of a major industry conference, with ample resources and the best intentions in the world: to shape and improve your industry by bringing together experts and professionals, promoting innovative practices, and celebrating the best thinking in your field.
From there, you have a multitude of choices: the type of venue you choose, the ticket prices you set, the nature of the conversations you facilitate, the type of activities you showcase, your own role in the event, and so on. Each of these choices opens or closes an opportunity to depart from the status quo and create change.
If you choose to…
Celebrate individual achievement;
Allow conventional archetypes to flourish (e.g. “assertiveness = leadership”);
Glorify celebrities;
Favor form (e.g. an elaborate venue) over substance; Promote shallow ideas (think ‘simplistic how-to’s found in self-help books’)
Promote a bandwagon effect (everyone in your industry follows the same trend at the same time);
Create internal competition, therefore winners and losers, through prizes and rewards;
Contradict your stated goal by your actions (e.g. advocating for “letting go” while being a control freak about all aspects of your event - think ‘jokes written on the prompter’;
Favor friends and familiar faces over new voices;
Cloaking your revenue-first objective behind moral justification (e.g. inviting a charity or two to make your guests feel good about spending so much money to be here);
and put yourself at the center of the event,
… then expect nothing to change in your industry, whatever it is; in the work experience, in the power relationships in the workplace.
Participants may be satisfied with your conference, with the experience of it, but hardly anything will change as a result.
What do you call that? A missed opportunity, a waste of human energy.
Work today is a health hazard
People at work are increasingly experiencing burn-out. The World Health Organization (WHO) puts the cost of depression and anxiety to the global economy at $1 trillion a year in lost productivity. It now officially recognizes burnout, or “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed,” as an occupational phenomenon.
Burnout is even affecting junior professionals, which was unheard of when I (Celine) started my career in the 1990s. Occupational health has deteriorated significantly in recent years. In France for example, the number of sick days reached a record high in 2022, with the highest increase among those under 30. Absenteeism in the private sector (which includes sick leave and accidents at work) has risen by 32% in 4 years, with a sharp increase among executives. In the 18 to 34 age group, sick leave related to burnout has increased from 9% in 2016 to 19% in 2022.
What causes this burnout?
The intensification of work.
The fragmentation of work collectives.
Poor leadership.
More generally, it is the widening gap – which is getting wider by the day – between our expectations of our work (what we aim to achieve, like self-realization or making a difference, or both) and the conditions of doing that work (lack of time, lack of support, lack of opportunity to come up with truly creative solutions) that make these high goals just impossible. Far too often, people even end up doing the opposite of why they joined a particular role or company.
Is that any good for organizations and their business?
No, not even close! All this stress is a huge drain on productivity, on attracting and retaining talent, it increases the cost of creating value, and it creates a vicious cycle that pushes organizations to intensify work even further, along outdated mental models.
One of these outdated models states that “we need strong leaders” and that “real leaders are hard to find”, as if leadership were a trait of an elite.
Leaders to the rescue?!
Let’s be clear: this is not true – but not in the cheesy sense that “we can all be leaders” and “you can be a leader too if you read my book and buy my survey or framework or services”. No. What we need to understand is that leadership is a capacity that emerges from the collective. Leadership is a collective capacity, not an individual skill set.
In Dare to Un-Lead, Celine argues that a new leadership practice, respectful of today’s individuals and adapted to modern organizations, can be developed from three universal principles: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.
In other words, leadership should seek to emancipate, connect, and mobilize.
1. Emancipate
Liberty is about emancipation. We need to practice “emancipatory leadership”: leadership that instills greater agency in the system, starting with self emancipation.
Agency refers to a person's ability to act (skills, ideas), capacity to act (resources, support network), and willingness to act.
Too often, in the workplace, we shrink this agency to the minimum instead of creating more conditions for it. At best, organizations focus on capacity building, but this is far from enough: all three elements must be present together in any act of agency.
2. Connect
The second principle, equality, is about connection: “network leadership”.
In current systems, where patterns of domination and submission abound, information does not flow easily and rapidly where it needs to go. Inequalities in status and access to information, domination relationships, and obedience have become obstacles to the performance of organizations.
The big opportunity here is in networks, both as a technology and as an organizing principle. With networks, we can relentlessly connect the system to its own diversity, to increase its capacity to evolve. By enabling equality in diversity, networks make it possible to inspire agility and innovation.
3. Mobilize
The last principle that a better leadership should foster is a principle of fraternity, or chosen togetherness. You could call it “intent & impact community leadership”, if it weren’t that long. How do we get people to want to work together? That is one of the big questions that many organizations haven't been able to solve.
A powerful enabler of the work collective, fraternity cannot be engineered from the top down. It emerges from common action in the service of a shared purpose. There, an activist mindset, or lessons from social activism, offer powerful inspiration; and today’s leadership must focus on developing communities of intent and impact.
A path to real change
What does it take to make progress toward such change in leadership?
First of all, we need to understand that living systems tend to transform anything new that they encounter into what they already are. For example, if Agile comes into a bureaucracy, that bureaucracy will turn Agile into more bureaucracy. Same with other sources of change: sustainability, gender diversity, etc. The system turns it into more of itself. So the challenge is not to develop learning organizations, it is for organizations to learn something new.
We also need to reflect on our own contribution to the system, as Barry Oshry invites us to do. Books like Seeing Systems are really useful reads.
With this, we can put an end to outdated, unhelpful practices; such as those that perpetuate leadership as an individual skill based on confidence and assertiveness, which puts some people above others - change that doesn’t change anything.
Instead, we can initiate really new ways of working that create the conditions for collective capacity to emerge from a dense, rich and well-connected network of people. This is the leadership (or ‘un-leadership’) that will take us and our organizations in the future.
How does our agile work contribute to this collective, liberating, networked leadership?
Does it merely create a new power structure, or does it actually reorder power dynamics and suppress their most unhealthy manifestations?
Do the people around us understand Agile as a fad and a way to gain power over others, or as a collectively empowering philosophy that is truly good for all of us in the workplace?
Is it change that doesn't change anything, or the possibility of real and positive transformation?