Highsmith - Adaptive leadership : accelerating enterprise agility

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Accelerating Enterprise Agility

Jim Highsmith

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ISBN-13: 978-0-13-359844-5
ISBN-10: 0-13-359844-6

First published, November 2013

Jim Highsmith, one of the key founders of the agile movement, has done us a great favor by packaging up some of his key blog posts over the last decade into an easily digestible electronic book. While a lot of the agile movement over time has focused on the details of Scrum, Jim reminds us all that agile, at its core, is about much more. It is about embracing uncertainty and developing an organization that responds quickly. It is about creating processes and approaches that are designed to teach and adjust.

The agile movement is about being able to quickly respond to the ever-evolving business environment and being able to deliver ongoing value. Jim reminds us of those facts through several different perspectives in his different blog posts. He highlights the magnitude of uncertainty facing current business leaders and provides frameworks for addressing these challenges. He shows the importance of delivering value early and often with technical approaches like continuous delivery. He also points out that the biggest challenges are not technical, but rather relate to leadership and the organization change-management process.

One of my favorite sections of this book is on organizational agility, which I found representative of what we found during my time at HP. We started with a focus of improving the productivity of our firmware development. What we found was that the changes we implemented in the firmware development process had a much bigger impact across larger parts of the organization. It changed the value proposition we were able to provide our customers and how we managed the delivery of all the components required to deliver LaserJet printers.

Throughout these blogs, Jim challenges us all as leaders of change to remember that the agile movement is about so much more than Scrum, and we should all take a broader perspective. Please join me as we look back on his perspectives and think about how we can get better at leading our organizations through uncertainty.

Gary Gruver
vice president of release,
quality engineering &
operations, Macys.com
San Francisco, CA

I had been a follower of Jim Highsmiths writings in the blogosphere for several years when I first had the opportunity to meet Jim in person during the Agile Australia conference held in Melbourne in the second half of 2010.

During Jims keynote address on adaptive leadership at that conference, I recall feeling particularly inspired and challengedin the most positive senseby his observations on leadership in dynamic and turbulent environments. For while much of Jims thinking had derived from his experience with agile software development, I realized as I listened to the presentation that the impact was far more wide-reachingto every level of organizational leadership.

Indeed, Jims observations got me thinking. Change is accelerating. Why is that the case, and what is the role that technology, and technologists, are playing in that change? What does it take to not merely survive, but to actually thrive in an environment where change is the norm, rather than the exception? As Jim vividly demonstrates in this book, this turbulence creates enormous opportunity for those who are willing to embrace it rather than fight it. But this opportunity doesnt come automatically; on the contrary, it often requires fundamental change in leadership assumptions, models, and structures that are counterintuitive to traditional hierarchical structures and management disciplines developed during, and inherited from, the last 300 years.

It is pertinent that as I write this, I am sitting in a cottage in Derbyshire, England, in the midst of a family vacation touring the historical remains of great industries that spawned the Industrial Revolutionthe significant mills, factories, canals, and mines of Northeast England. The trip has reinforced in me something that many of us implicitly know: that just as the rapid advances in 18th-century industrialization required fundamental changes in management and leadership, so do the similarly rapid technological changes of the current era. In contrast to the past, which was focused on the marshaling at scale of a largely uneducated, manual workforce, our focus now is the motivation and unleashing of the talent of highly educated, creative knowledge workers. For that, we must shed the legacies of the past and equip ourselves with a new set of leadership assumptions and models that are appropriate to the