Are we Agilists or Fragilists?

The last few weeks of life as my company's Agile Manager (yes, that's actually my title; don't bother looking for it among our Job Descriptions, though, cuz I'm the only one!) have really driven home how much easier it is to say the words, "Expect early failures" than it is to live by them. Recently it seems like I spend most of my time having conversations or meetings with people who believe something's not working (generally, they're right) and their reaction is to start making significant changes, in a decidedly top-down, command-and-control manner and with minimal reflection. At the same time, I'm involved with a Feature Team that's making lots of mistakes, doing Retrospectives every month and identifying (some of) those mistakes, and developing plans for how to do better. It's interesting to me that many of the people who are reacting so strongly right now are those who are furthest removed from the action, leading me to wonder if maybe, because they're not in a position to see the small improvements that're occuring, they think they have to get in there and fix it!

It's more due to circumstance than wise planning on my part, that I'm wearing these 2 different hats right now: as Agile Manager, I'm trying to keep an eye on the BIG PICTURE of the Agile transition (and helping it along); and my role as Feature Lead of a Feature Team, embedded with one instance of an Agile team, has landed me squarely in the middle of it all on at least one front. From those vantage points it's obvious to me that, yes, some things aren't working yet. But it's also apparent that some of the adaptation we read about in all those Agile books way back when is happening! I probably need to work harder to bring those improvements to the attention of the people who aren't seeing them, and at the same time figure out a way to see if enough adaptation is happening, since I mostly see what my team's up to but don't know if that's typical. I've got some ideas along those lines but nothing implementable yet.

On the bright side, though, my wife schooled me last night on how to do custom animations in PowerPoint and I ended up with a great Agile Overview prezo to use with an important set of customers coming to visit next week! Love adding new tools to the ol' tool belt!